Fuzzy Feelings: Getting Closer to Our Real Feelings

The peripheral nerves of felt experience that connect a particular body region to the spinal cord, as well as the spinal conduction fibers to the parts of the brain that interpret the felt experiences coming from inside our bodies (especially the insula), are not myelinated. They lack the protective coating called myelin that keeps electrical and chemical neurotransmitters flowing in a direct path.

As a consequence, the neural pathways for feeling into our own bodies are more “leaky” and conduct more slowly than motor control pathways. The felt experiences that coalesce in the insula (the part of the brain that creates our awareness of pain, warmth, itchiness, or emotion), therefore, are not as high fidelity as the conduction of motor nerve movement information into the sensorimotor cortex.

The slow conduction speeds and the resulting “fuzziness” of the information that reaches the brain explain why the act of discerning our felt experience is often slow and it takes a while for us to find and feel its source within the body. This also explains why, to fully feel an ache or pulsation or temperature or pressure in a way that brings restorative relief, we have to stop all doing and thinking and settle into a place of quiet listening using a free-floating or diffuse kind of attention.

To come closer to the felt experiences inside your body, settle into a safe and quiet place and notice what aches or pains call to you. To better locate the source, it may help to apply touch pressure to the general area of your body that feels discomfort, either by yourself or with someone else helping you. Maybe the pain is in a superficial or deep muscle? Maybe it is coming from a joint or internal organ? Maybe you have an insect bite or a rash on the surface of your skin?

Because of the fuzziness of any single peripheral nerve and its spinal pathway, adding another source of felt experience like touch to whatever arrives in the insula from tissues around the area of the pain help to more clearly locate its origin. Compared to the hare-paced rapid and instantaneous generation of ideas and thoughts, or the execution of skilled motor movements, felt experience is a tortoise. It takes slowing down and support to find our feelings.

Instead of “trying” so hard to focus, see if you can just give yourself permission to let your attention to yourself wander from one to another of the feelings that arise in different locations in your body. Let the wandering be without any deliberate effort to take a particular route through your body.

Body scan meditations, for example, use focused attention, usually starting at the head and working the attention gradually down to the feet, or vice versa. That’s not what we want to do here. See if you can resist having a plan or purpose and just let your attention go wherever it finds something to feel.

By letting your attention be broad, you are more likely to allow your attention to be “called” to this broader complex of feelings. Perhaps you might suddenly remember that the ache began during an argument, or as the result of an accident or overuse injury, a prior trauma, or because of some latent health condition that had been dormant.

You might have memories (something or someone hit or hurt you or you smashed into something). You might have emotions that come up around the ache such as frustration or shame for letting this happen, or discouragement that your “old” condition may be returning.

Having a restorative experience of this ache means that you open up to and allow all of these feelings to emerge in your awareness. It means that you just let them happen and feel them instead of resisting the feelings (fight), ignoring what is coming up (flight), or using modulated thinking to explain the feeling, which may help you understand but thinking takes you away from experiencing the challenging feeling.

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At some point, if you give yourself enough time, there is likely going to be one or a few sensations or emotions that begin to stand out, that capture your attention and hold it in one place for a least a few minutes.

Letting your attention drift around and then get drawn or pulled into a particular feeling endows that feeling with a personal intrinsic motivation to explore it. You don’t have to expend mental effort to focus on it because you are just allowing the feeling to “call” you to it. You don’t have to think about it.

How is this “calling” different from focusing? Being “called” by a felt experience is similar to when you might be busy with something and a friend, child, or partner calls out to you and asks for your attention to something that they need to share with you.

If you choose to drop your focus on your goals, plans, and expectations, you can be more open to the other person. You can just listen and take in the other person, what they say to you, and the feelings they express. Sometimes that is enough, that the other person just needed to be heard or held.

This may surprise you but if you can stay in the present moment for a sufficiently long period of time and if you permit all of your felt experiences to arise spontaneously, you will almost certainly feel the ache begin to ease.

Allowing your body to “speak” to you in this unfocused way activates the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and you will begin to relax and settle. Parasympathetic rest will allow your body to begin its own process of restorative self-repair. This is because all the major organ systems that are connected to the ANS—including the cardiovascular, digestive-urinary, sexual-reproductive, respiratory, and immune system—can relax and do their healing work.