expression

Our face is hard wired to show emotions. Over time they shape our face and display our personality.

instinctive response
Emotional reactions are reflexive responses to memories triggered by internal or environmental changes. There is little conscious control.

The amygdala coordinates behavioral, immune and neuro-endocrine responses to events. It makes instantaneous decisions about threat levels. by comparing incoming signals with its own memories.

It triggers an emotional response by hijacking the brain, neural pathways and the endocrine system. Before the higher brain centers can make their own assessment, it has activated and deactivated particular parts of the body and mind by changing their innervation, blood supply and chemistry.

the language of emotions
Emotions are hard-wired and similar enough in all races and cultures to understand each others'. needs, values and intentions without speaking each others' language. We communicate emotions in facial expressions, tone of voice and posture and can communicate between species.

communication
We are hard-wired to interact with others. We can judge exactly the direction of their gaze. We experience in our bodies the feeling of what it is like to be them including their emotional state.

We start learning the language of emotions from birth as we learn to speak and communicate our thoughts and feelings in tandem. We learn to manipulate others by activating and hiding emotions. Each display of emotion forces a response as our carers detect our emotional state and then react to it.

We subconsciously detect emotions by pheromones and other smells. A few people and many other animals are consciously aware of the smell of each emotion.

We often try to change the emotional state of someone else to one we are more at home with. We talk to change each other - partly through the ideas in our words but mostly through the emotional changes we induce in each other by our face, posture and voice. Watching or imitating someone's emotions can be enough to enter a similar state as someone else or react to it.

Small involuntary shifts in facial expression, tone of voice, or posture are enough to affect someone else, often without being consciously aware.

Automatic emotional responses acquired in childhood are the basis for setting up households later. Parenting and management styles are largely different ways of communicating emotionally.

suppression
We modify our emotional states to some extent by thoughts and activities. We may try to induce familiar or comfortable emotions in ourselves to mask uncomfortable ones. For instance by working up a temper to override joy or grief if we don't want to feel or disclose those feelings. Or show joy instead of anxiety. These can become habits.

We learn to conceal, disguise or stifle some emotional reactions out of social courtesy or role obligations. And learn not to notice some emotions. In most culture some feelings are suppressed by extreme measures like ostracisation, imprisonment or forced medical treatment.

Suppressing feelings closes the feeling heart and there is a numbness or distance from reality. Which does not feel quite right. Faking or hiding emotions can be exhausting and may end in an unexpected and overwhelming flood of emotion.

In the long run repressing emotions or fearing being taken over by emotion is usually more distressing than the emotions themselves.

what is the tiniest detectable feeling?
There are countless combinations of feelings and emotions. Inside and on the surface of the body and on the face. Perhaps triggered by something like a sound, a smell, a sensation, walking into a room, seeing someone or making a small movement.

What is the tiniest almost imperceptible feeling you can detect?

•	be curious – like a baby
•	what do you feel?
•	What set it off?
•	where do you feel this?
•	Where does the feeling start?
•	Where does it move to?
•	How does it change?
•	accept and appreciate it
•	fully feel this
•	what does it say?
•	Are there words to describe this feeling? Is there a name for it?
•	can you make the feeling feel stronger or weaker? alternate between feeling and letting go of the feeling

What emotions are being held back? Is a fixed pleasant expression preventing the emergence of inexpressible negative feeling? Are drugs or meditations dampening an emotion? Do overwhelming emotions suddenly take over? What triggers them?

When we find spontaneous ways to be ourselves so we are aware of how we feel and who we are then more energy is available to realise our full potential.