“Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

Chris Lakin

This is a linkpost for https://chrislakin.blog/feelings

Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that?”
Me: “Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have feelings in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I couldn’t feel emotions in my body. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I didn’t notice things like “a feeling of expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, I was living at 360p. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Feelings in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this:^[1]

Illustrated: Where I DIDN’T feel emotional sensations in my body lol. ( Maps of subjective feelings )

This information flows freely, unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance to feelings, updates fail to permeate the entire system.^[2] And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

a human body with a graph network inside, network in the head is stronger than network in the body because it's cut off

The resistance: The unawareness was locally optimal, helping mitigate pain and other risks. Feeling my feelings then made my life worse (locally).

Was the unawareness globally optimal? No. Life was in 360p when it could’ve been in 4k.

I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood on the sink, not the pain.
Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.
I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what they were soaking in.
Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.
I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”
I couldn’t experience deep pleasure.

At the same time, the numbness numbed awareness of itself. I went like this for many years until others pointed at it.

After I regained the ability to feel in high resolution, I journaled:

Wow.
There’s so much intricacy to the emotional ripples in my stomach alone. I found strange happinesses in the tip of my fingers (???). And self-loathing there, too! Love in the “cave of the heart” on the right side of my chest…

Soon I realized that feelings are better described as tuples (sensation, location) rather than emotion words:

Not ‘anxious’ but (tension, lower chest)
Not ‘happy’ but (pleasure, arm skin)
Not ‘confident’ but (expansiveness, chest and shoulders)

My growth continued to unfold: Decision-making became so easy it feels like there isn’t even a “me” making the choice. I’m more empathetic and see others’ emotions without hesitation. I can tell people to fuck off without wavering. Insecurities can be noticed and released. I’m much more intuitive. I see more. I hear more.

4k feeling enables 4k being.

^{^}
See also: Muscle tension as signal jamming
^{^}
See also: Emotions like loss signals

Chris, if you're open to some constructive criticism, I find whenever I read a post of yours I get the feeling of someone dangling a future in front of me I have no way of accessing. It is great to hear about how your life changed or the lives of your clients have changed, but without also providing any resources on how a reader could accomplish something similar, your posts have the effect of someone saying they found the cure for a disease, but refusing to tell anyone what it is.

Thank you. I started my blog because I was trying to make the post that anyone like me could read and self-cure—but then discovered that, even though readers liked recommendations, ~no one was actually getting better, and ~no one could pass my ITTs on my intended messages.

For as much as I believe in tracking results, I wasn't tracking the results of my attempts at online guidance. So I checked, it was bad. I discovered readers couldn't even self-diagnose (even after I'd spend a dozen hours trying to prevent that specific outcome), let-alone self-cure.

"Brain surgeon discovers patients not cured by reading blog posts about brain surgery."

If anything, sharing scalable recommendations seemed to make things worse by implying there was asynchronous guidance that could lead to total success. I know many people who have been stuck for years because they keep trying to do the self-help thing, and the world is worse-off because for lacking their contributions. I myself lost a few percentage points of my life to this blindspot.

So what has worked for people? Working backwards, every big success story I’ve seen or heard involved ≥1 of:

Stressors or incentives disappearing: Mitigating a health issue, moving away, achieving financial independence, etc.
Supportive, loving relationships for years
Successful 1:1 work
Getting lucky with psychedelics on one of their first trips (?)

Which is to say: I only very rarely hear of big success stories involving people who did not have Maslow’s safety, people who relied entirely on self-guided approaches, or people who exclusively followed advice from people who themselves are destabilized.

"Brain surgeon discovers patients not cured by reading blog posts about brain surgery."

So what has worked for people? Working backwards, every big success story I’ve seen or heard involved ≥1 of:

Stressors or incentives disappearing: Mitigating a health issue, moving away, achieving financial independence, etc.
Supportive, loving relationships for years
Successful 1:1 work
Getting lucky with psychedelics on one of their first trips (?)

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