Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

I was recently asked if Buddhists cry, which, ironically, made me laugh at first, but then I realized, do Buddhist cry is actually a pretty good question?

Well, yes, of course I cry, I rarely, if ever cry today about something that upset me yesterday. I cry about things that hurt

the moment I feel pain but never about something that already occurred in the past or hasn't

even happened yet. Now I've been trying to wrap my head around why that is and

I've concluded that it's related to the important distinction I often talk about

between feelings and emotions. Here's a refresher. A feeling lasts between 45 seconds and a minute and a half. That's it.

The feeling then moves on to make room for a new feeling. They move like clouds in the sky or traffic on a busy street.

One feeling comes, another feeling goes.

That's why we can fluctuate from feeling excited to annoyed, jealous, overjoyed, frustrated,

elated, all in an hour's time. All of our feelings are perfectly natural and healthy

human responses to stimuli, but emotions? Emotions are a completely different

ball of wax. Emotions start out as a feeling, but as time goes on they have less and less to do with our original

feeling and more to do with how we feel or think about what we are feeling, if that makes sense.

We then either consciously or habitually pick an emotion with which to express the feeling.

That's why I say the two are related, but they're not the same.

I mean, how often do we feel hurt but

remote anger for example or we feel vulnerable but

emote fear especially when a feeling is new to us and we don't know what to do with

it. Think of emotion as a verb, an action. It's what we do with a feeling,

whereas a feeling is well what we feel. We don't feel emotions, we feel feelings, we express emotions. I think that best illustrates the distinction and why even

though a feeling is brief we can emote anger long after something has upset us. It's why we continue

...