Everyday Mindfulness

I recently wrote a Tweet that got a very mixed reception. This was it:

Your feelings tell you the truth about what's important.
#mindfulness

It got loads of retweets, but there were also some negative comments, including from a couple of mindfulness/meditation accounts. I'm wondering what your thoughts are (I'm considering deleting the Tweet).

Great idea to discuss the tweet then, Gareth.

Feelings might be too ambiguous a term. What is meant here, emotions, or bodily sensations?

Emotions, although bodily sensations are important too and the two are often closely linked.

If it is about emotions, then I don't think the tweet is right. I think one often has 'false' emotions, which of course also have a deeper cause, which might also be important to recognize, but I don't think they necessarily are a direct indicator of something important.

I don't know what kind of person could put that kind of trust in their feelings. Probably that person would be very whole. For a person with any kind of trauma (even small childhood trauma) feelings often miss shoot miserably.

See my recent answer to Palla as an example.

I'm very cautious about labeling any emotion as 'false'; I fear that this might lead to emotions being suppressed.

That said, I don't have any experience of working with trauma, so I don't know what I'm talking about in that regard. The Tweet has attracted enough criticism for me to delete it.

Gareth wrote:I'm very cautious about labeling any emotion as 'false'; I fear that this might lead to emotions being suppressed.

That said, I don't have any experience of working with trauma, so I don't know what I'm talking about in that regard. The Tweet has attracted enough criticism for me to delete it.

I didn't mean to say one should suppress emotions, on the contrary, explore them. In my experience, just like with thoughts, emotions aren't really true or false, they just are. I don't think they necessarily indicate a truth directly. For example, one can feel jealous, mad, insecure etc. from misinterpretation, self delusion, trauma, hunger even. Of course there's a deeper truth there (the real reason), that one could explore.