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

by Chris Lakin
12th Nov 2025
2 min read
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This is a linkpost for https://chrislakin.blog/feelings
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“Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”
9Alicorn
4Kaj_Sotala
4mako yass
5Jonas Hallgren
2mako yass
2Jonas Hallgren
2mako yass
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[-]Alicorn1d9-1

I normally do not feel emotions in my body, but I have gone through periods wherein, for mysterious reasons, I do.

I hate it.  They don't belong there.  It feels like I have a new and exciting disease every time anything happens, and I have enough annoying subclinical things wrong with me already.

I am glad you are enjoying your embodied emotional range but I prefer that mine stay in my mind where they belong.

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[-]Kaj_Sotala20h40

I also liked this on feelings being on the body:

If it doesn’t seem plausible that your emotions, which exist in your head, are experienced as bodily sensations, consider this: When someone is experiencing and acting on a strong emotion, they look different, right? An angry person holds themselves differently than a non-angry person - more aggressively, you can see they’ve tensed up, they may have a different facial expression, etc.

That way that they look different? It feels different from the inside. If you’ve tensed up, you are literally tense and you can feel that in the pattern of muscular activation. That’s your body preparing for a fight.

There is a lot going on in your brain that isn’t easily directly consciously activated. This isn’t mysterious and mystical, it’s just obvious and mundane. Consider again catching a ball - you don’t consciously think through the process of catching the ball, you just catch it. Similarly walking, or riding a bike, or brushing your teeth. Most actions even where you consciously intend them you’re at least partially handing over to some unconscious part of your brain.

Among those unconscious processes are things responsible for a lot of your emotional responses, and one of the things they do is get your body ready for the action. If part of you decides you need to gear up for a fight (getting angry) it gets your body ready to gear up for a fight.

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[-]mako yass1d40

My position is that if you're only listening to somatic echoes of emotions you're still not really listening particularly well yet, or, if the somatic echoes are richer and more informative to you than the flashes and dialogues of tacit meaning or intent that you can get from probing them in the mind then you may still have a lot of barriers in your mind.

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[-]Jonas Hallgren20h50

Could you elaborate here? 

Is there a specific example of the difference between just somatic sensing and having it being intuitively reflected through your thoughts? I feel like you're saying something important but I'm not fully sure how it manifests more concretely and I might want to work on this skill. 

I do feel like there's something to be said for a more integrated emotion system not being as somatic but being more implicit in the system, like your thoughts and feelings are more one-pointed which is kind of where my experience has shifted to over time, I don't know if this is what you mean?

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[-]mako yass10h*20

just somatic sensing

I don't think I've experienced only having somatic attribution, I got interested in introspection really young and I remember it being more prominent then, but of course I wasn't doing it particularly well. I never got interested in it in the same way as lots of you are getting interested now (might later, dunno), so I can't say much about those practices or how they compare to mine with confidence. My current vague impression is that somatic attribution maximalists seem to be a lot less consciously involved in the integration/self-alignment process than I am. It seems like they're less occupied with the meaning of art and so on, but causality could run in both directions there (impulse to seek meaning leads to getting good at that leads to using it in introspection). For them integration seems to be more of a process of submission than of active dialog or induction/articulation. They don't reason with their parts, their bulk has less trust in their reason. It ends up valuing it less. Where my process would stop and say to consciousness "hey there seems to be a contradiction here, resolve it, find out who's wrong, or find a synthesis, that's your job", theirs will either try to live with the contradiction or avoid it in life without really caring why.

It's hard to tell whether I'm more or less integrated on the whole, or to what extent my practice is causative of that (in either direction), due to other life factors.

The approach that I'd advocate, which I've never seen anyone advocate, and thus haven't been able to practice seriously myself for a lack of support, is for the conceived sense of self to extent beyond the bodymap and to be deliberately shaped to maximise meaningful self-communication. For instance, instead of just feeling social threat in your back, also feel it in your social network, that too just as much is part of you, feel the way it wears down the connections and the way it responds to that.

I've seen advocacy for identifying with nothing (purity, relentless criticism and criticism of criticism, tends to end in a place of weakness and stagnation), and for for universal identification (which I'm increasingly sympathetic to and I think is in some sense just correct, but which I think in naive form has obvious issues with bad habit formation or memetic parasites), but I have not seen advocacy for controlled/discerning identification. Except maybe in the IFS scene. But I get the sense they're not using all of their degrees of freedom. (I think parallel subagents aren't really a thing in humans so it ends up not being an accurate self-concept.)

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[-]Jonas Hallgren8h20

Okay, this is quite interesting. I'll try to parse this by mentioning a potential instantiation of this and maybe you could let me know if I got it wrong or right/somewhere in between?

The scenario is that I'm trying to figure out what I should do when I wake up in the morning and I'm on a walk. What do I is that I then listen to the world in some way, I try to figure out some good way to take actions. One way to do this is somato sensory experiencing, I listen into my sub-parts. Yet a problem with this is that there's a egree o fpassivity here. Yes my stomach is saying go away and hide and my shoulders are saying that I'm carrying weight whilst maybe my face is smiling and is curious. This listening has some sort of lack of integration within it? I now know this but that doesn't mean that my sub-parts have had a good conversation. 

We can extend this even further for why is the best basis something like emotions? Why can't we sense things like a degree of extended cognition within our social circles and with different things that we do? 

The practice is then somehow figure out how to listen and do good bargaining and to come up with good solutions for the combined agency that you have, whatever that might be? And the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is? 

Yet, you shouldn't fully identify with your social network or the world, neither should you identify with nothing, you should identify with something in between (non-duality from buddhism?). You should try to find the most (causally?) relevant actor to identify with and this is situation dependent and an art? 

So that is the process to engage in and the answer is different for each person? (Let me know if I'm off the mark or if this is kind of what you mean)

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[-]mako yass7h*20

(non-duality from buddhism?)

I'm not sure, are there any practices nonduality doesn't touch? I haven't thought about it. For me nonduality seems to coimply embedded agency or the need to budget one's cognition in any way, which I guess would be related with extended cognition (the reliance on other peoples' cognitive products), well, I guess it depends what we mean by dualism. Dualism as far as I ever had it was, conceiving the mind as an idealised decision theory agent, a type of thing which wouldn't work at all without infinite compute, though I never believed literally that, so idk. Oh no. Is believing in pi in FDT (the policy metaphysically shared by all FDT agents) dualistic. Well. If so maybe there's a kind of dualism I'd stand for! :<. And the dualism of spiritualists often seems to presume some form of hypercomputation.

Generally I couldn't say I disagree with any of that. So maybe yes.

the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is? 

I didn't mean to make it about that specifically. But maybe you're onto something, maybe it really is about that. We should be doing more extended cognition given than we used to, given the existence of the internet. I get the sense that my type tends to care more about discourse health, perhaps because we identify more with broader discursive systems, we enjoy believing things that we read online, so we are bothered when the online has production issues.

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Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that?”

Old 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 was numb. 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 numb. So what?

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

centralized vs distributed graphs

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

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.[1] 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: My own numbness was locally optimal, helping mitigate pain, distraction, and other risks. Put another way, given the state of my life and nervous system at the time, feeling my feelings locally made my life worse.

Now, was numbness 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.
  • I had great trouble unlearning my insecurity.

Unfortunately, my numbness numbed itself. I went like this for many years until others pointed it out.

On the other hand, after increasing the stability of my life and unlearning my numbness, 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.

  1. ^

    See also: Emotions like loss signals.