# You think you are happy (or tired, or angry): Are you sure?



## Daniel (Oct 22, 2010)

You think you are happy (or tired, or angry): Are you sure?
_Psychology Today_ blog: _Body Sense_
by Alan Fogel, PhD

*If you are thinking about feeling, you don't know how you feel      
* 
Liz: "How are you?"
Tom: "I'm fine."
L: "Really?"
T: "I'm OK."
L: "You don't sound OK."
T: "Really, I'm fine, just a little tired."
L: "OK, if you say so."

Liz  obviously detects something in Tom's demeanor suggesting that maybe  he's not so fine after all. Tom isn't really fine; he's got a lot on his  mind. But what does Tom feel? He may be acting evasive because he  doesn't want to talk about how he really feels. But maybe Tom doesn't  even know himself how he feels. He knows he's not fine, and Liz, he  thinks, is right about that much. He settles for saying he's OK (a tad  less well than "fine"), just a little tired.

Tom thinks he's a bit  off and he thinks he's tired. The problem is that he's thinking about  how he feels. He is thinking about how he feels because that's how Tom,  in his busy and demanding life, goes about solving most of his problems:  he thinks about them. He ponders, he considers, he evaluates, he plans,  he makes choices.

At the gym, Tom thinks about his body. He  thinks he's sexy and well-built (or soft, or too flabby). Tom thinks  about who might be watching him and indulges in imagining that others  are watching him, admiring his body or his prowess. Or maybe he thinks  that he does not want to be observed and he thinks about ways to fit  into an unobtrusive corner away from all the mirrors. He thinks: "I hate  the gym, the pressure, the attitude. Why the hell did I come here?" He  thinks about how much longer he needs to work out before he can go do  something else. He thinks about the meeting he had in the morning, the  people there, what he did say, or should have said or done. Tom thinks.

Tom also thinks about sex  a lot and thinks about Liz having sex with him even when he's with her  in the act of making love. He has thoughts like "she's so beautiful," or  "she doesn't look as good as she used to." Tom thinks it would be a  good idea to touch Liz here rather than there, and he think about her  response to his touch, like, "She likes that," or maybe, "Hmm, not sure,  try something else." Afterwards, Tom is still thinking -"Was I OK for  her?" or "I wonder what's up with her?" -- and most of his thinking is  in words that run through his head.         

 Somewhere along the way, Tom  forgot how to feel. He never lets himself melt into Liz's embrace, swept  away by the bittersweet pleasure of falling into the arms of love after  a stressful day out in the world. He watches the clock and thinks about  something else during a game of chess with his 8 year-old instead of  being pulled into the intensity of longing and desire that inhabits  every fiber of the child's engagement with his father: the  disappointment of losing and the terror and elation of beating his dad.  Win or lose, Tom misses the real stakes of the game and another  opportunity for human connection passes by him. What's more: he didn't  even notice. The clock and habit tell him when to eat, or watch TV, or  go to bed.

What  does Tom really feel? Not only doesn't Tom know what he feels, he also  doesn't know that he doesn't know what he feels. Liz and the kids don't  even bother anymore to bring Tom along on their emotional journeys,  unless it's an argument, in which case everyone is caught up in  strategic thought. People say what they don't really mean because they  are thinking too hard about scoring points to notice what they really  mean, what they really feel which would probably, if they let themselves  go there, sound something like: "Please, this is so draining and all I  really need is a hug because I feel so alone and helpless."

Conceptual  self-awareness (thinking about ourselves) certainly has its place in  the pantheon of human abilities. No other creature can do that (lucky  them?). It is also the human ability that is most removed from our  essential embodied self-awareness, the body sense  of our concrete feelings, sensations, and emotions. Without body sense,  we are adrift in an endless sea of questions, doubts, and maybes.

One of my great teachers, Marion Rosen,  said that "The body tells the truth." In the world of thought, there is  no truth. Everything is relative, contextual, subject to more and more  analysis. The body sense is . . . well, it just IS. It is pure being:  Direct, in the present moment, unmediated experiencing. It is true, not  in the sense of something that needs to be proven, but in the sense of  feeling right, as in, "Yes, that is what I really feel. I can't help it.  I can't explain it. I just feel this way." If you are asked to justify  your feelings, you might as well be composing fiction by trying to come  up with a reason.

After years of listening to people talking to  her while she touched them, Rosen found that when words expressed  something from deep within, uncensored, there was always a significant  and noticeable response in the body. Sometimes she saw the person take a  deeper and more natural breath. Sometimes there was a sigh. Sometimes a  tear filled the corner of the eye, or she noticed a flushing of the  skin as blood began to flow into previously tense parts of the body. The  truth of the body is primal and immediate, wet and warm: totally  different from the tenuous truth of a set of logical (or seemingly  logical) statements.

Closer to the home field of Psychology,  remind yourself of humanistic psychologists Eugene Gendlin (_Focusing_)  and Carl Rogers (_On Becoming a Person_). While less explicitly embodied  than me, they were following the same intuition about direct rather than thought-mediated experience. Here's a passage from Gendlin:

"If  you have trouble getting to work, for example, it is futile to ask  yourself, ‘Am I just lazy?' ‘Do I have a wish to fail?' . . . Such  questions, spoken as it were in mid-air, are ineffective . . . Only by  referring directly to his experiencing can the individual even find (and  later interpret) in himself that which . . . makes it difficult for him  to get to work. Directly, in his experiencing, he can refer to that  ‘draggy feeling' with which he ‘wrestles' when he tries to work. As he  attends directly to it, he may find (differentiate) an apprehension of  failure, a conviction that he will fail. . . It is this ‘heavy sureness'  (so it seems at this moment, now) that he has to ‘drag' to work, and  that makes it so hard."​
Asking, "Am I just lazy?" is making a  judgment by claiming ownership of a category - laziness - presumed to  typify the self. If I'm lazy, there is not much I can do about it. Not  only that, I can start to doubt or blame myself. In the process, I've  completely lost my embodied self-awareness. I might look to others for a  confirmation or a denial of my laziness, I might work more to prove  myself or I might throw in the towel and just accept my lazy,  good-for-nothing bag of flesh and bones. The category starts to become  who I am, at the expense of never finding what might be underneath it,  the feelings and sensations in my body that might have (erroneously)  created the impression in my conceptual mind that I am lazy.

People  who get lost in judgment and expectation can get worn out with the task  of trying to figure out how to behave, how to please, how to be better.  It is exhausting because the part of us that trades in concepts has to  exert neuromuscular over-control (tense muscles) to suppress the part of  us that can open to embodied self-awareness. Opening to the embodied  self can bring not only enlightenment but profound relief. Because this  opening typically occurs when someone or something resonates with our  inner self, our sense of relief - the sigh, the tear, the breath -- is  accompanied by an opening of the heart toward that which succeeded in  ‘reaching' us and ‘touching' us.

We all have a bit of Tom in us.  It is part of growing up in a technological society. It is what we  mostly learn in school. So, you think you know how you feel? You think  you know when you've gotten to the bottom of your feelings? Rosen also  said, "You don't know." You can never know, if knowing means a thought  process, what else the body has to say. There is always more to feel  than you ever know and it usually takes a sympathetic listener or a  supportive and listening touch to go deeper.

_Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is *The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense*. _


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## Daniel (Oct 26, 2010)

Your body knows best - Psychology Today


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## Daniel (Nov 3, 2010)

What is Body Sense? 
_Psychology Today_ blog: _Body Sense_
by Alan Fogel, PhD

Did you ever feel as if you lost touch with your body? Perhaps you  developed a pain in your lower back or neck but you could not remember  that you did anything that might have caused it. Maybe you started  feeling ill at ease in situations that before felt comfortable. Or you  gained weight without really noticing the increase until your clothes  didn't fit.

These and other physical and mental afflictions -  headaches, digestive troubles, depressive symptoms, lethargic feelings,  aching joints, frequent colds and flus - are particularly annoying  because they appear to creep up on us without prior warning. One day we  are just fine and the next day, or so it seems, we don't feel so good.

The  biological truth is that all of these things take a while, sometimes  months or years, to grow within our bodies. The cells of the immune,  digestive, muscular, metabolic, and nervous systems have to grow in ways  that lead to these symptoms and biological growth takes time. The  psychological truth is that we failed to notice these physiological  changes in our bodies until they reached a level of damage to our  systems that sent off the red flags of pain, distress, and discomfort.  By that time, it might be too late to avoid medical intervention or  other costly treatments. And the medical truth is that many of these  ailments can't be easily or readily treated.

Our bodies, however, have the capability to sense potentially harmful  physiological growth processes long before they reach these critical  and dangerous levels. Not only that, research shows that people who pick  up on and respond to these early warning signals from their bodies are  considerably less likely to develop the debilitating physical and mental  health conditions mentioned above. This research also shows that the  common underlying cause of many of these conditions is a lack of body  sense*.*

*Body sense* is the ability  to pay attention to ourselves, to feel our sensations, emotions, and  movements on-line, in the present moment, without the mediating  influence of judgmental thoughts. In fact, whenever those thoughts come  into our awareness - thoughts like: Am I sick or just lazy? How did I  get so fat? Does my life really matter to anyone? - we immediately go  off line from our body sense.

Both the body sense and thoughts  about ourselves are forms of self-awareness but they are fundamentally  different. The body sense is more technically called *embodied self-awareness*.  It is composed of sensations like warm, tingly, soft, nauseated, dizzy;  emotions such as happy, sad, threatened; and other body senses like  feeling the coordination (or lack of coordination) between the arms and  legs while swimming, or sensing our shape and size (fat or thin), and  sensing our location relative to objects and other people. Thoughts  about the self are called *conceptual self-awareness*. The table below gives a summary of the differences.



*Conceptual Self-Awareness *
| 
*Embodied Self-Awareness*

Based in language |                      Based in sensing, feeling, and acting
Rational, explanatory |                  Spontaneous, open to change
Abstract                                     | Concrete, in the moment
Notice  that embodied self-awareness occurs in the "present moment" while  conceptual self-awareness is abstract and distant from the present  moment. You can experience the difference by taking a few minutes right  now. First, think about how you feel and have been feeling today and the  past few days. What thoughts come to mind? You'll find it is fairly  easy to generate a long list of self-descriptions in conceptual  self-awareness.

Instead of trying to think about yourself,  accessing embodied self-awareness is a bit like meditating on yourself.   Sit or lie down in a comfortable place, remove any distractions that  might disturb you. This works best if there is relative silence. Close  your eyes. Here it starts to get more difficult. See if you can slow  your thoughts long enough to feel something concrete right in the  present moment. It doesn't really matter what you feel, so long as it  captures your attention long enough for you to feel it: the hardness or  softness of the surface on which you are lying  or sitting, the texture of your clothing, a smell, a sound, or even an  emotion that wants to surface. See how long you can stay with that  sensation and see if you can "go into" it to explore how it makes you  feel. Notice what else happens in your body. See how long you can follow  these sensations and feelings and where they lead you.

If what  comes up is something not in the immediate present, you know you've gone  back to conceptual awareness and you'll need to remind yourself to come  back to something very concrete. You may find that you can't do this  very well. Accessing embodied self-awareness takes practice and for some  people, it may require the help of another person or engaging in an  embodied self-awareness practice (like yoga, tai chi, some types of meditation, somatic psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, or awareness-based bodywork treatments like Rosen Method Bodywork and the Feldenkrais Method).  Just being willing to check in with your ability to access embodied  self-awareness is already a step in the right direction. Continued  practice has demonstrated positive benefits for physical and mental  health.

_Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is *The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense*. _


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## Daniel (Dec 10, 2010)

Body sense enhances enjoyment in love and everything else 

...The study found that presence, not pleasure, brings happiness. Let's  take a closer look. Researchers paged 2,250 adults between the ages of  18 and 88 (58% male, 74% in the US) at random times during the day using  an iPhone app they developed called trackyourhappiness. The  participants were asked to name the activity in which they were engaged,  rate how good they felt on a scale of 0 to 100, and say whether they  were distracted by thoughts or daydreams and if those thoughts were  positive, negative, or neutral. Not surprisingly, people who were paged  while having sex were the most likely to be happy (at least until they  were paged!), at 90% of respondents. About 75% of people said they were  happy while engaged in exercise, conversation, eating, walking,  shopping, listening to music, or reading. The fewest number of people  reported being happy while working, grooming, and commuting.

The iPhone study found that working or commuting, the least  happiness-promoting activities, when done with one's full focus of  attention, actually make people happier than thinking positive thoughts  during any kind of activity. And negative thoughts at any time make you  feel worse. So, in general, you'll be far happier feeling, sensing, and  being in the moment with whatever you do than trying to think your way  to happiness...


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## Daniel (Mar 4, 2012)

An Excerpt from Dr. Wayne Dyer's 'Wishes Fulfilled' - Beliefnet.com

You choose the thought that you prefer, from the trillions of thoughts that continuously flow through your mind on that never-ending conveyer belt. You can pick one that suits you, put it back, and take another at any time. Your imagination is the repository of thoughts that you opt to keep. Your feelings, on the other hand, are experienced in your body—the place where you do all of your living in this corporeal material world. Your feelings play more of a role in your life than you realize...

Years ago, while teaching at several major universities, I’d ask graduate students this question: “What do you respond to first—what you know, or how you feel?” I wanted them to determine which domain captured their primary attention. For instance, on the cognitive level—their analyzing ability, mathematical prowess, mastery of the rhyming scheme of an Elizabethan sonnet, or ability to memorize scientific formulas. On the feeling level—loneliness, sadness, fear, heartbreak, anxiety, love, ecstasy, joy, and so on. All reported that the feeling level was primary...


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