Tag Archives: embodiment

Emotional qualia are mediated by somatic responses

Unembodied emotions

I used to be confused when people talked about feeling their emotions in their bodies. My emotions didn’t feel like physical sensations - they just felt like emotions. Doesn’t sadness or happiness just feel like sadness or happiness? I had trouble with a lot of advice for how to better manage or get in touch with emotions for this reason.

I sometimes felt my emotions saliently, but I experienced nothing like the variety of qualia other people reported. I basically had a four-quadrant model of emotion: Continue reading

Review: Vipassana Center silent meditation retreat

On my pleasure practice nature walk, I formed the hypothesis that excessive attachment was preventing me from noticing my preferences, desires, and feelings, and that meditation might help with this. I signed up for a free 10-day Vipassana center meditation retreat.

When I decided to go on the retreat, I had two main benefits in mind:

  • Learn to perceive my desires, preferences, and emotions more reliably, by means of being more aware of bodily sensations.
  • Learn to be able to look at these and fully perceive them without feeling compelled to act on them.

I got these, and more. Continue reading

Nature and Nature's Bod: Attachment, Desire, Empathy Overload, and Embodiment

I’ve been working on increasing my sensitivity to my own desires and preferences. As part of this, I’ve been working through the exercises in a book my friend Sarah recommended, called Pleasurable Weight Loss

One recent exercise was to go somewhere with great natural beauty and connect with nature. I have never in my life felt connected with growing things - cities feel vibrant, alive, and purposeful to me, plants just feel like passive items of scenery - but I had decided to try every exercise in the book, no matter how hard it seemed, and make a genuine effort to engage with the spirit of the exercise. At worst, I’d get a better sense of what made the exercise hard. So I went out to Tilden Park and attempted to find a nature trail. I almost failed, but eventually found the botanical garden, where I wandered around, and noticed a few things. Continue reading

Soma: my best friends have bodies

I recently attended the Integral Center’s Aletheia workshop, and one of the things we did was Holotropic breathwork. Basically you breathe very deeply, very fast, over an extended period of time. We were told that at some point it would become uncomfortable, but that if we breathed through it, we’d likely have some interesting experiences. Continue reading