We need to see emotions as bodily
It's an important part of getting a handle on them.
The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn't external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.
But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.
Lately, I've been noticing one solution that has slowly been working better for me. That solution is a key element in modern mindfulness meditation: to recognize the bodily nature of one's emotions, and treat them as such. This is a significant teaching in Goenka vipassanā and in the Headspace app. But where I think the point comes out most explicitly is in a wonderful short meditation recording by Bodhipaksa, entitled Four Steps to Self-Compassion.The first of the steps in question are to call to mind an emotionally fraught situation, drop any stories one might be telling about the situation, and observe the physical feelings that have arisen in one's body at the thought – examining the feelings' shape, their intensity, their location in the body.
What I have come to notice is how this kind of bodily practice is able to enact, in a more particular, embodied and effective way, the basic Buddhist and Stoic insight that one should focus on one's own reactive emotions more than on external conditions. When we are afraid or angry, our natural instinct is to turn our attention to their object, to the thing we are afraid of or angry about – which is itself usually external to our minds, an external bad.
And I have noticed in many cases how deceptive that focus on the external object can be. We often have a preexisting fear and anger that looks for external objects. This is particularly noticeable for anxiety sufferers: anxiety sometimes looks like just plain fear, a fear where you don't even know what the object is, enough that maybe it doesn't actually have one. But I saw this pattern with anger too. My anger at George W. Bush slowly faded once he was out of the presidency – but that didn't mean I got less angry overall, just that the anger found other targets, from the censoriousness of the Catholic League to the prevalence of car alarms.
When we focus our attention on the object of negative feelings, we make those feelings – which can be helpful on their first arising but usually aren't helpful after that – look justified. Keeping our minds on the object of our fear or anger is a way that we indulge the fear and the anger, giving it more trust than it deserves. We keep valuing the external object (positively or negatively), and effectively – wrongly! – take the object as the source of the negative emotion.
But something very different happens when, as Bodhipaksa advises, we turn inward and look at the emotion as embodied: when we see the anxiety as a hot patch in the front of our stomach, the anger as a clenching in our chest. At that point, we might be motivated to notice: "well, I had four cups of espresso today, of course I'm feeling anxious!" (Bryce Huebner in The Moral Psychology of Anger relatedly notices how he's more likely to get angry "at" people after he's consumed gluten.) We move our focus from the external object to the internal feeling. We are less likely to indulge the feeling and view it as justified or righteous.
The way we conceive the external/internal distinction can matter here. According to Martha Nussbaum, the Greeks use “externality” as “a metaphorical way of referring to the fact that these elements are not securely controlled by the person’s own will”, so that bodily health counts as an “external good” even though it is in a literal sense internal to us. (Upheavals of Thought 4n2) Whether that's an accurate representation of Stoic and other Greek thinkers I don't know, but I do think that the idea of control by will is not the best distinction to work with here – because, as Buddhists see, often our own mind is itself not fully under our control. Rather, the important distinction is between what's internal and external to the mind – with the mind considered in an embodied sense, where those feelings in our gut and our chest are still part of the mind. A broken toe is not internal to the mind, but a feeling of fear or anger in the gut – even if it is caused by caffeine or gluten – is. And the latter, at least as much as any external situation, is a likely source of our suffering.