Tonight's talk is going to be on

tonight's talk is going to be on feelings. Nothing more than feelings.

Hopefully I'll cover what feelings are and why they're important, what creates feelings,

and when to trust our feelings, when not to,

and finally, how to slowly go about changing the way we relate to our feelings. So most of us if we're asked to

point to where we believe our consciousness or our thoughts are situated we would point to our heads.

Actually the reason why we would do that is because we're all told from a very early age that our consciousness is largely created by our brains.

In ancient times actually people believe that consciousness and thoughts were located here and that's where they would

in proprio perception where they experienced they'd actually say oh I'm thinking here and

in fact the ancient Egyptians believed the brain had so little

import personality they would routinely removed brains from the dead, but they keep other organs, which they believe hosted personality and would allow for some form of rebirth. So we tend to be very aware of our thoughts are the visuals of the world and the sounds. We don't tend to be very

aware of what most of us call feelings, gut feelings. We're only aware

of them when they become very disruptive when we start having panic attacks or when we start feeling very anxious, nervous, when we start to have heartache, which can feel like a contraction in the chest.

Much of our lives though we walk around fixated by thoughts and

in external sensations, which is interesting because feelings

feelings play an enormous role in all of the decisions that we made. And in fact even though we're not conscious of how much we rely on our feelings, they're actually very much at the core of most of the decisions that we make throughout our lives.

The Buddha called Feeling's Weedena, V-E-D-A-N-A, you can pronounce it V-D-A-N-A, you can pronounce it Weedena,

Weedena, and much like contemporary neuroscientists he somehow knew that feelings arose

actually before thoughts we have contact with an experience, a person, a thing.

We see a bear, or what we think is a snake. We start to react. We have a gut feeling, and then we start to narrate our experience.

Much like today's understanding of feelings, the Buddha proposed that feelings only have three basic messages.

I like this, I don't like this and I don't care about this.

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