WHY DO WE HAVE FEELINGS?

The Soma does not live in isolation. Like all living things it has to respond to its environment in order to survive and function. How it takes in data from the environment is thought to be through its 5 senses (sight, smell, sound, touch and taste.) However, there is one other more complex way that evolution has developed that is crucial to us navigating the world: feelings.

Feelings are essentially (as their name indicates) feelers, collecting data about our environment.

Feelings are often treated as non-physical things like thoughts that come in and out of our minds and bodies. We chase after the ones that feel good and run away from or ignore the ones that feel bad. Or worse, we treat them all the same and just watch them pass us by. But feelings aren't random, they have a function. Distinguishing between ones that feel good and ones that feel bad is an important step not because we can choose to chase or ignore them or even control them but because they say something about the environment in which they arose.

Many have long talked about the importance of observing our feelings but not many have looked at what to actually do with the information that they give us. Notice here we are saying what to do with the information feelings give us and not what to do with the feeling itself.

This information can tell us wether something is safe or dangerous, helping or harming us, or creates function or disfunction. It helps us navigate the world around us, situations, relationships, and our internal environment. The key is in the ability to interpret the information collected from our feelings. This interpretation is what we call emotional literacy - the ability to read and understand what our feelings are communicating about our environment. Note here that we do not call it emotional intelligence but rather literacy because this ability is not something we are born with, it is something we must learn. Elemental Happiness, as a branch of Soma-tosophy, is a tool we created to help learn how to identifying and interpreting the information gathered from our feelings. It is a framework with which we can gather data to better experience ourselves, recognize the function and disfunction within our environment and understand how it impacts our own functioning.