Читать книгу Trust Your Gut - Gregory Plotnikoff - Страница 43

Machines have no feelings, but people do. We can be happy, sad, frustrated, joyful, and more. We can experience emotional pain and emotional pleasure. Because we are geared toward pleasure, we developed psychological defenses against emotional pain. This is a normal way to cope with the difficulties of daily life. As children, we learn these natural ways of forgetting, avoiding, denying, or minimizing painful or difficult feelings. Nevertheless, we actually do experience our emotions in our body: tightening in the forehead, tensing the jaw, heaviness in the chest, rumbling in the stomach. So when we avoid feeling something emotionally uncomfortable, we also have to fight the sensations in our body—wherever we feel emotions. That's why the word feeling refers to emotions as well as to physical sensations. An ignored emotion that manifests as physical discomfort is like a secret kept from the mind but not from the body.

As it turns out, ignoring our feelings is not easy and definitely not helpful!

For hundreds of years now, Western science has separated mental activity—thoughts, emotions, and reasoning—from the physical body. Over the centuries, we as individuals have learned to downplay feelings and emotions as we have played up reason. The same is true for the culture of medicine, which focuses on controlling symptoms. Emotional responses were dismissed as too subjective—or at least irrelevant. If we can't find it in your body, then it must be in your head, they thought. If it's in your head, then it becomes an issue of irrational emotions and feelings—something to be treated by a psychologist.