immanence

In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In part 2, I relate each of these to recent social-scientific writing on “affective” or “emotional practices” and to a few key sources of my own efforts to articulate a “philosophy as a way of life,” that is, a contemporary askēsis: specifically, to Spinoza (briefly), Gurdjieff (at greater length), and Shinzen Young (whose mindfulness system I used as a basis for my own, presented in part 2 of Shadowing the Anthropocene). I end with an extended practical exercise that brings these strands of thinking together.

Starting definitions

Affective and emotional practices are studied by social scientists, so it might be useful to begin with a few of their definitions.

Monique Scheer’s definition of emotional practices is rooted in a Bourdieauian understanding of social practices. Scheer defines emotional practices as “habits, rituals, and everyday gestures that aid us in achieving a certain emotional state.” They are “manipulations of body and mind to evoke feelings where there are none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them an intelligible shape, or to change or remove emotions already there.” Emotional practices can be individual or collective, but it may be more fruitful to think of them as “distributed,” which means that they are “carried out together with other people, artifacts, aesthetic arrangements, and technologies” (Scheer, “Are emotions a kind of practice”).

Margaret Wetherell defines “affective practice” in her impressive volume Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, as follows:

In affective practice, bits of the body (e.g. facial muscles, thalamic-amygdala pathways in the brain, heart rate, regions of the prefrontal cortex, sweat glands, etc.) get patterned together with feelings and thoughts, interaction patterns and relationships, narratives and interpretative repertoires, social relations, personal histories, and ways of life. These components and modalities, each with their own logic and trajectories, are assembled together in interacting and recursive, or back and forth, practical methods. (13-14)

Just as social scientists can study affective and emotional practices as they are found in society, so can individuals make a study of their own practices, witnessing their connections with affective “flows” that permeate, percolate, pulsate, and run through their bodies, connecting them to other bodies (people, things) and to routinized and habituated movements, rhythms, and relational complexes.

Wetherell follows Ian Burkitt in seeing that “an emotion, like anger or fear, is not an object inside the self, as basic emotions research assumes, but is a relation to others, a response to a situation and to the world,” a “relational pattern” that is “automatically distributed and located across the psychosocial field” (24). Burkitt argues that “feelings,” which may be “pre-conceptual” and “ineffable,” “are not expressed in discourse so much as completed in discourse.” “What may start out as inchoate can sometimes be turned into an articulation, mentally organised and publicly communicated, in ways that engage with and reproduce regimes and power relations.” (24)

Wetherell writes that

during a burst of sharp emotion, the body pumps out a wide range of somatic signals. Many of these are initiated in the brain stem and driven by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), such as changes in blood flow resulting in blushing or blanching, changes in heart rate and in breathing rate. There are changes in the muscles as expressions drift across the face: smiles, frowns, various forms of wrinkling and twisting. Other muscles work on posture and stance, modulating relaxation and tension, and producing the visceral clenching or calming of the guts. Within the brain and central nervous system (CNS), chemical transmitters make connections across neural synapses and pathways. Neural circuits begin to fire, rapidly conveying information.

These physical changes are accompanied by qualia or subjective feelings, along with other cognitions, evaluations, images, memories and appraisals of the situation. Typically, sharp bursts of affects are also action-oriented. They constitute a strong push to do something — flee, remonstrate, appeal, move closer, etc. (29)

Affective processing, she continues, “is multiple and parallel.” “It is less like the unfolding of a prepared script and more like emerging forms of coalescence or partial and temporary settlings.” (29-30) “In affective activity,” she goes on, “body landscapes” or “bodyscapes” are “constituted and reconstituted, assembled and put together, moment to moment.” (30)

All of this can be taken to be the activity of the emotional “body,” which while it interpenetrates with the sensory-moving and mental-cognitive “bodies,” is also its own partially autonomous thing (and consists of further, semi-autonomous mixtures of things). The question for me at least, following up on Part 1 of this article, is whether to see physicality, affectivity, and cognition as making up one blurred, dynamic, and interactive unity — as suggested by the constructivist view — or if they are better conceived as thickly interwoven but semi-autonomous force-fields or centers. Is anything lost if we take away the distinctiveness of each of the three from the totality of all of them? Let’s examine this question a little more directly.

The triune brain as explanation and as evocation

I mentioned in Part 1 that Paul MacLean’s general idea of the “triune brain” is these days considered to be scientifically flawed or at least misleading. Brain evolution has not been linear and additive, with some species evolving further or “higher” up a “ladder of evolution” while others have stopped at an “earlier” or more “primitive” level. All organisms evolve; they do this as they adapt to their surroundings and conserve their adaptations through differential reproduction.

What MacLean arguably got right, however, was the homologies between broad classes of organisms. In this sense, I believe it is more accurate to speak not of “three brains” or even a “triune brain,” but of primary, secondary, and tertiary “mental functions” or “registers.” There is a logical ordering to these in that the primary ones are more or less shared across a much wider span of species (practically all vertebrates), the secondary across a distinctly more limited span (primarily mammals), and the tertiary across a very specific subclass of the latter (mainly humans). By “mental functions,” I mean functions that are part of the cognitive-affective apparatus or nervous system by which humans experience the world around them.

None of this should imply that “secondary” or “tertiary” functions are not found in very different species, including non-mammals. The distinction between the three registers is not meant to be objective or universal; rather, it takes the human brain and nervous system as its baseline and works from there. Thinking of these three sets of mental functions as “inheritances”—respectively, vertebral, mammalian, and hominid inheritances—can help us recognize that they are historically shaped and shared. As inheritances, they don’t so much determine our behavior as enable it.

Let’s recap these in a little more detail than I presented earlier.

• Primary functions simulate an image of the world from sensory receptors that model relevant features of the immediate external world so as to facilitate the physical survival, growth, and self-maintenance of an organism. The focus with these functions is on sensory perception of that which impinges on one’s body as that body moves through the world—the perception of light and movement (visual sensation), micromolecular vibration (auditory sensation), relevant macromolecular features of the world (taste, smell, etc.), and so on—in the process of self-maintenance through locating and consuming food, escaping from predators, finding a mate, and so on. If the goal here is survival, the fear (or the failure) that’s being worked against is that of death and dissolution. These functions correspond to what MacLean identified as the “reptilian” inheritance, but which is more accurately considered the vertebral inheritance.

• Secondary functions enable a dramatic increase in the capacity to image the world both externally with respect to others whose actions are relevant vis-à-vis mutually dependent forms of sociality, and internally through “interoception” of states modeling those external relationships. These functions enable the build-up of a “sense of self-and-other” that is rooted (for mammals) in processes of gestation, nursing and maternal-offspring contact, play and rivalry, intergroup acceptance and recognition, and the like. The focus here is on the negotiation of sociality through the monitoring of internal states, external self-presentation, expression and interpretation of social cues, and other forms of modulation of relations with others. As Keith Buzzell puts it in a book on the “three brains,” “Mammalian life-forms explore the possibilities of self-other relationships in an almost infinite number of ways” (48). If the goal with these functions is social acceptance and flourishing, the fear is that of social rejection or, effectively, of “social death.”

• Tertiary functions add the capabilities of abstract and synthetic reasoning, comparison and generalization, logic, planning and foresight, and experimentation. In humans, the evolution of these functions accompanied bipedalism, toolmaking, and the emergence of speech and language. If the goal with these functions is meaningful representation of possibilities and potentialities, the fear and failure are represented by madness and absurdity.

In The Emotional Mind, Asma and Barrett get much more specific than all this, and in that I don’t necessarily follow them, though their suggestions are intriguing. In their later chapters, they discuss human social evolution, different kinds of societies, and the role of art, religion, and culture in providing structures for the “emotional management” of human sociality. Among other things, they generalize about the “stages” of human sociality, which move from small-scale subsistence economies to agrarian economies to global, urban “political economy”:

The shift from hunter-gatherer bands to agrarian states in the Holocene influenced a “release from proximity”—i.e., a loss of immediacy—which transformed enforced sharing and led to empathy taking on new forms in non-kin social groups and social norms. These forms of social organization included (1) the creation of fictive kin (making “family” from non-blood conspecifics), which we argue is mediated by the CARE system; (2) awe / sanctity / reverence emotional relations to the chief / god / group, as mediated by the FEAR system; and (3) directed aggression in warfare, as mediated by the RAGE system.

Recall that the “care,” “fear,” and “rage” “systems”— capitalized to indicate their technical, Pankseppian usage—are the three main emotional systems developed at the social-mammalian evolutionary “level.”

The authors later generalize about shamanism, animism, and the “spiritual emotions” of “awe, wonder, and transcendence in art and religion” (264), which ostensibly draw upon, “organize,” and “manage” prosocial emotions. There are political implications as well in their analyses. On the tension between nepotistic practices and principles of equal rights, they write:

The emotional brain, the limbic system, is a natural nepotist. The rational neocortex, however, is much more principled. The idea that everyone deserves equal treatment, or the idea that everyone has equal claim upon resources, or the idea that everyone has equal value as my kin, are all foreign to the intrinsically hierarchical emotional brain. This is because our experience-based values (whether of an object, person, or idea) are originally encoded in the course of psychological development by feelings (e.g., chemically grounded oxytocin, or opioid, or dopamine patterns). (250)

And in a turn of phrase that would account for the rise of today’s illiberal politicians:

Large numbers of resource-poor citizens will submit to inequality if cultural-emotional mechanisms can convince them that they are all fictive kin, that their leader is alpha, and that some invading competitor group is at the gate. (217)

While I’m not sure how explanatorily convincing some of their interpretations are, there’s a theoretical and philosophical sophistication to Asma and Barrett’s work that I find evocative. In any case, my own interest is not in finding the “truth” about the human brain and nervous system than it is in finding tools that help us live better. In that sense, I’m a philosophical pragmatist, and I believe that process-relational theory, whatever its ontological accuracy as a description of the universe, is pragmatically useful.

It may be helpful to recognize that taking the triune brain hypothesis as evocative, or as inspirationally helpful, need not require that we also take on board the Basic Emotions theorists’ assumption that there is a certain number of relatively fixed and innate emotional complexes. Here I tend to agree with Wetherell that

The effort to settle on emotional primes as the unit of analysis creates an idealised set of phenomena, like the figures in a bad novel, removed from the messiness and mix of actual affect. Basic emotions are cut out from the flow of everyday cultural life, and probably quite rare “big moments” emphasised at the expense of more banal and everyday experiences, some of which may well be fleeting, equivocal and muddled (43).

While the flow of affective life does instantiate in emotional “big moments,” the ongoing process of emotional life is dynamic and changeable, and it is the contours of its very dynamism, its capacity to be swayed in one direction or another, that is of interest for anyone whose goal is to understand and modify it. Labeling states of feeling is a useful practice — it is actually pretty automatic for most western adults, and so worth paying attention to in its own right — but it is not identical to the “bodyscape” of affectivity. That is precisely where it’s helpful to distinguish between the feeling itself and the cognition about that feeling (which the triune brain theory helps one to articulate).

The construction of emotions: Barrett and Spinoza

This brings us back to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work (examined in Part 1). Even if it feels sometimes overdrawn, Barrett’s constructivism is refreshing to me, in the same way that I find all constructivism to be refreshing: it points to the loci of agency, the spaces from which we can genuinely act, from within networks in which we find ourselves enmeshed. (In this, it converges with the literature on neuroplasticity, which demonstrates how what and how we think can change the physical structure of our brains.)

With respect to emotions, Barrett’s constructivism is most helpful in conveying how we often feel things without necessarily being sure what it is we are feeling. There is an affectivity, an arousal, with positive or negative valence, that hums within us and vibrates alongside us, but that doesn’t necessarily manifest with the specificity and obviousness of emotions like FEAR, ANGER, and the others assumed to be “basic.” Paying attention to that vague affectivity is no less useful than identifying the more coherent and clear emotional complexes if and when they arise.

This, for me, also connects with the neo-Spinozist stream of thinking about affects, and specifically that represented by thinkers like Moira Gatens and Michael Hampe. As with Barrett’s notion of affects, Spinoza takes positive and negative affects (joy and sadness, in his terms) as basic, and others as derivative, with affects being, in Aurelia Armstrong’s words, “the way in which we cognitively register the increasing and decreasing power of our bodies as they interact with ambient forces.”[2]

As Moira Gatens explains in “Affective transitions and Spinoza’s art of joyful deliberation,” Spinoza’s Ethics, in its parts III and IV, offers a form of “affective therapy” that “operates through an art of the imagination” (p. 30) whereby “passive affects” are transformed into “active understanding and deliberation” (p. 28). Affects, which are accompanied by images (since for Spinoza mind and body are never separate, but are simply two aspects of the same thing), leave behind a corporeal memory trace that clusters together according to experiential conjunctions brought about by habits and ways of life. Through work on understanding those affects, we can build up our “strength of character,” including such joyful affects as “tenacity,” related to “care of one’s self,” and “nobility,” related to the “care of others,” which in turn enables us to extend our power to transform our social and political worlds (p. 32). We’ll come back to those two positive affects in the exercise that follows below.

How, then, do we learn to better recognize the affective dynamics that shape us? And what do we do with them when we do that? For Spinoza, this is best done by paying attention to them and recognizing what they are in their nature (and how they are related to our nature). This involves a kind of therapeutic reframing of those affects into a sense of what our capabilities are (to affect and be affected), and finally to an action that expands that capability to bring joy to oneself and others. Michael Hampe outlines the series of steps Spinoza conceived in his therapeutics of self-liberation as follows:

1. understanding one’s own affective status (answer to the question “What am I feeling?”);
2. detaching one’s attention from the emotionally judged object and directing it instead towards one’s own body as the prime cause of the affect;
3. understanding the instability of the emotion that arises out of association and the stability and activity-enhancing character of those affects that come about by reasoned action;
4. insight into the multifarious causes of each affect, or the removal of belief in monocausality; and
5. insight into the fact that the plurality of causes can be penetrated by logical thought, and that one does not stand “helpless” before it.[3]

Hampe cautions that our “emotions, concepts and ways of reacting to the world are more or less deeply entrenched in our habits,” which makes “deconditioning” a lengthy and sustained process, akin to the Buddhist’s “continuous cleaning or polishing of one’s slate” (p. 45)  

This practice of paying attention to habitual reactions, learning to recognize the nature of those reactions (that is, “reframing” them within a rational understanding of the nature of things), and acting based on this reframed understanding, describes a way of approaching life that finds its analogues among many traditions of self-cultivation. Spinozan “affective therapeutics” shares much with ancient Stoic practices, which in turn resemble Buddhist practices in their broad contours (despite their much different tonality, depending on the cultural context of the Buddhism being compared). The general outline is well represented also among the practices found in Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way schools.

With all these threads in mind, the remainder of this article describes a multi-part exercise grounded within process-relational theory, the Peircian “triadics” presented in Shadowing the Anthropocene, and Gurdjieffian practice, and that works with both models of emotion — the constructivist (with its Spinozist resonances) and the “triune brain” model. It does not delve deeply into Spinozan affective therapeutics, which is a more analytical and deliberative process, but it provides a start for bodily sensing the three “bodies” — physical, emotional, and mental — and which, once internalized and “habituated,” can be applied to everyday life.  

Before getting to this practice, let me rearticulate what it is that Part Two of Shadowing the Anthropocene aimed to do with its “logo-ethico-aesthetic practices.”

Rethinking Shadowing’s triads

The practices I had proposed in Shadowing the Anthropocene were intended to make it possible to learn to experience the process-relational nature of reality, that is, to “feel” the ontology presented in Part One of the book. And in part they were about settling in to a more realistic — or “eco-realistic” — appreciation of the predicament faced by humans in the anticipatory (turbulent) future. To “settle into” that, it is helpful to know one’s capacities and to recognize and own up to one’s emotional responses to things. The underlying assumption, based in Whiteheadian as well as Peircian (and more broadly pragmatist) philosophy, was that feelings and the aesthetic dimension are primary in our response to the world, and that they enable (or disable) our capacity to engage ethically with others (ethics) so as to support and expand reasonable conditions (logic) for survival and flourishing.

The triadics of the “normative sciences” (aesthetics, ethics, logic) mirror the triadics of Peirce’s phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and of practice itself (noticing/witnessing, acting/intervening, and realizing). The book went into extensive depth explaining this “triadism.” But two of the triads on which I built the “practices” outlined in Part Two were triads that are not particularly rooted in the ontological starting points I described in Part One. These were Shinzen Young’s division of the senses into seeing, hearing, and feeling (the latter of which encompasses tactility, motility, taste, and smell), and Young’s distinction between internal perception, external perception, and the mixed and hybrid state he calls “flow.” I used those in part because Young’s system is so approachable (and so inspirational for me personally) as a way to begin paying attention to sensory experience, and because there is plenty of supplementary information on these in Young’s books, videos, and related materials. While I connected the first of these triads (the sensory triad), somewhat offhandedly, to Jacques Lacan’s three registers (Real, imaginary, and symbolic), in retrospect I did not do this in a satisfying way.

Here I wish to revisit this idea of a sensory starting point for attentive “bodymindfulness” practice not through Young’s categories but through the notion of the “triune brain.” While this idea is rooted in neuropsychologist Paul MacLean’s formulations between 1968 and the early 1990s and in more recent rearticulations by Asma/Gabriel and others, for me it is also inspired by the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, who first introduced the idea of humans as “three-brained beings” in 1915. Introducing Gurdjieff is not easy and I will not attempt it here. It’s perhaps easier to point to some of those upon whom he had a formative influence: they include the writers Margaret Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Toomer, theatre artists Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, musicians Keith Jarrett and Robert Fripp, and many others. One of Gurdjieff’s more recent interpreters, Keith Buzzell, has usefully contextualized Gurdjieff’s ideas within the “triune brain” neuroscience of MacLean, and I rely on his articulation as well as that of others.

Put that way, I hope that the three sets resonate both with the triadism of Peirce and with the three psychoanalytic registers of Jacques Lacan. With respect to Peirce, primary functions are oriented toward registering what is there in the environment; secondary functions, toward the self-other encounter, with its resistances (and therefore toward sociality as a dimension of existence); and tertiary functions, toward mediation and generalization, that is, toward sense-making in its mental and cognitive dimensions. With respect to Lacan, the primary register is that of the Real, which begins from direct, asocial and arational reality, and which threatens us with dissolution. The secondary is that of the Imaginary, with its negotiation of images and phantasms of self and other. And the tertiary is the Symbolic, the system of language within which we ultimately find our social place, in tension with the other, more primary registers.

Overlaying triads is little more than a parlour game unless it conveys useful insights, and my point here is that there are genuine insights to be found. There is some agreement among those who’ve looked at the matter (e.g., Muller, Younkins, Colapietro)[1] that Peirce’s three categories roughly correspond or map onto Lacan’s three registers, even if things get obviously more complicated once we look at them closely. But when they are placed alongside the “triune brain” concept, I believe the resonances become more evident.

Constructivist three-body emotional practice

According to process-relational theory, each moment presents us with prehensive affordances — that is, with things to notice, appreciatively synthesize into usable perceptions, and respond to aesthetically, ethically, and (eco)logically. (For more on this, see the section “Philosophy of the moment,” Shadowing, pp. 101-104).

The basic process-relational “movement” or “gesture” (see Shadowing, p. 146) begins with a recognition and appreciation of things that are present, which may include specific as well as vague and general affordances (i.e., both the kinds of things that we perceive “in the mode of presentational immediacy” and those that we perceive “in the mode of causal efficacy”), moves toward a “widening of contextual relevances and deepening of valuative feeling” surrounding them, and concludes with a “realization of valuative capacities” through some form of selective affirmation, extension, or other response to the affordances of that moment. This becomes a cycle that can be pictured this way:

This differs from what we might call “unreflective living” in that the latter follows a more basic stimulus-response cycle, while reflective practice expands and deepens the space within which we can recognize what is present in the moment and grasp its relevance, value, and contextual “reverberations.” When we turn this into a sustained practice of askesis — that is, the deliberate cultivation of practices by which we improve our capacities to inhabit and respond to the world of our experience — then our responses come to be guided by this desire to notice the “beauty” in what is there (aesthesis), the “good” in what we can do (ethos), and the “truth” in what these things mean (logos).

The contemplative exercise that follows presents a variation of steps 1 and 2 of this movement. When it is performed in the midst of action, it can become a complete “3-step” movement. As practice makes perfect, the practice of steps one and two is intended to facilitate their performance “in life.”

The exercise is based partly in “three-center” awareness exercises introduced by Gurdjieff, for whom humans literally have three primary brain centers: a physical (sensory-moving) brain, which is responsible for instinctual functions (those which the body generally does on its own), moving functions (which are learned), and sexual functions; an emotional (feeling) brain, which is responsible for social and relational feelings; and an intellectual or mental brain. Gurdjieff sometimes spoke of two other centers — the “higher emotional” and “higher intellectual” centers — and these are gestured to in the “affirmations” with which the exercise concludes.[4]

The exercise is also based in part on the constructivist idea that our emotions are constructed from out of a more fluid kind of affectivity. In acknowledging this capacity to construct emotions, I make use of a series of mental affirmations modeled after another (but related) Gurdjieff exercise. The Gurdjieffian affirmations, each connected to one of the centers, were “I am, I can, I wish,” and these are to be said, to the extent possible, with one’s full mental presence in coordination with one’s breathing: “I” on the in-breath, “am” on the out-breath, etc. The intent is to fully sense one’s own presence (with all the questions the phrases raise) when one says “I” and in the act being affirmed with the verb that follows. The “am” affirms one’s full sensory presence; the “can” affirms one’s capacity to know and do what is conceived as being necessary; and the “wish” affirms one’s capacity to fully engage one’s feelings and desires in that deed. The phrases themselves can change depending on the subjective resonance they evoke (for instance, the word “will” may work better than “wish,” with its connotations of wishful thinking).[5] To these three affirmations I add a series of three others below.

In relation to the Shinzenian terminology (drawn from Shinzen Young), which I outlined and built on in Shadowing the Anthropocene, the exercise below begins with active bodily sensing, or “active noting-out”; to that it adds passive emotional sensing (“feeling-in”); and it ends with active willing (mental “acting” and imaginative “realizing”) correlated with the affirmations of capacity or agency.

Each of the four sections of this exercise could take anywhere from a few minutes to up to half an hour (or even more). I recommend beginning with at least 10 minutes for the first part, and at least 5 minutes each for the remaining parts, though initially it is best to take longer as one learns the process and builds up a capacity for concentrated attention with it. The duration can be varied depending on available time, and the goal is to make it something one does almost automatically. It is, in this respect, the cultivation of a set of habits (of the kind beautifully outlined in Aaron Massecar’s Peircian book Ethical Habits; needless to say, it is also the sort of thing that gets called “magical practice” in the western esoteric traditions).

I refer, in the exercise, to the “chakras” for those who are familiar with them; the correspondence is not necessary and can be omitted. Note that the second section, on the “emotional body,” is the one that’s most relevant to the rest of this two-part article. It can be expanded upon, and parts of it (such as the sensing of “ambient sources of subtle arousal”) can be used as its own “micro-practice” throughout the day. But, as I will explain below, the entire exercise is an exercise in feeling.

The exercise

This is best done (initially at least) while seated in a comfortable position that allows for an alert but relaxed state of mind and body.

• Physical body: Begin with your physical body or “sensory-moving center.” This is the bodymind that is shared with all vertebrates that sense the world around them as they move. If you wish, you can imagine this center as having its “balance point” or “center of gravity” in the area of the root (base/ground) and sacrum (sexual) chakras and as extending up the spine toward the eyes and ears, the apertures by which sensory data is most directly allowed into one’s experiential field.
  
  Sense the physical body (“Feel-Out”), beginning from a specific point and spreading outward gradually to encompass the entire body. For instance, you might begin with the right big toe, then add the next toe and so on, then add the ball of the foot and heel, and on through the entire leg. Follow with the next leg, and up from the seat to the back to the neck, then adding each hand and arm, the belly and chest, and ending by adding awareness of the face and head in all its detail. When you have added your attention to top of the face and head, allow it to open up to include the entire visual and auditory fields, so that your body is now centered within the actual field of sensory experience in which it finds itself. You are thus including the auditory (“Hear-Out”) and visual (“See-Out”) senses.
  
  This entire process is additive. Once you have built up a global awareness of your body-in-the-world (“Global Sense-Feel-Hear-See-Out”), maintain this while feeling your breath at the center of it, the entire body expanding and contracting with the breath. Finally add the words “I am present” or “I sense,” with “I” or (“I am”) accompanying an in-breath and “sense” (or “present”) accompanying an out-breath. Do this for a several breaths. Close this section by forming a concept, imagined as a kind of “bubble” of bodily awareness, which can remain present and available to you in the background of your mental space. This is your feeling of being present in your physical body.

• Emotional body: Now direct your attention to your emotional body or “feeling center,” which is shared with all mammals (with an emphasis on social emotions). This can be imagined as having its center of gravity in the solar plexus (social self) and heart (love) chakras and opening to the world of others.
  
  Begin by allowing yourself to sense any feelings that are present and available to be sensed in any part of your bodily space. Feelings are always embodied, so take some time to allow them to emerge into your awareness as you scan your bodily field for signs of feeling, affect, or emotion. Feelings also represent connections or relationships between your sense of self and your memory-sense of others, including of interpersonal events in your immediate or distant past. They can be specific and distinctly identifiable, as for instance feelings such as “joy,” “anger,” “fear,” “shame,” or “sorrow” (with distinct bodily locations, sensations, or accompanying images); or they can be vague, diffuse, nebulous, or general — amorphous forms of arousal, connected with vague memories, phrases, images of people or encounters, and so on, with perhaps only a positive or negative valence. If there are obvious and specific feelings present, then “go into” them momentarily, noting where in your body they appear to be collected or expressed. If there are not, then simply note any ambient sources of subtle arousal — such as the presences (of people and objects), appearances of things, sounds, rhythms, memories, impulses, and so on, with whatever subtle sensations they give rise to for you.
  
  Allow some or all of these feelings to “gather” or “collect” together into a global awareness of feelings, a “global feel-in” (and “see-in”) in Shinzen Young’s terms. Maintain this sense of your “feeling body” for a few minutes, then add the words “I feel,” coordinating the “I” to an in-breath and “feel” to an out-breath. Do this for a several breaths. Close this section by forming a concept or “bubble” of emotional awareness, which can remain present and available to you in the background of your mental space. This is your feeling of being present in your emotional body.

• Mental body: Now direct your attention to your thoughts, concepts, and linguistic or representational constructs (repeated phrases, “mappings,” and so on) that may be circulating within your mind. Rather than dwelling on any thought or mental construct, allow these to settle into an ambient sense of mental presence, a spaciousness within which any specific thoughts are allowed to arise and pass while the space of thinking remains open. Feel that openness to those thoughts or mental constructs. Remain within this sense of mental spaciousness for several moments.
  
  Then add the words “I think” or “I know” (whichever resonates best for you), coordinating “I” to the in-breath and “think” or “know” to the out-breath. Do this for several breaths. (If you use “I know,” consider this to be a kind of open-ended question — “What do I know, here?” — and leave the answer to remain open. If you use “think,” this is best considered in the sense described by Martin Heidegger in his What is Called Thinking?, not as a form of “opining, representing, reasoning, or conceiving,” but, in translator J. Glenn Gray’s words, as “a gathering and focusing of our whole selves on what lies before us […] in order to discover in them their essential nature and truth” (p. x-xi). In other words, thinking is a recollection of what it is we are capable of in being capable of thinking.) Close this section by forming a concept or “bubble” of mental awareness, as you did with emotional awareness and physical awareness. This is your feeling of being present in your mind or mental body.

• Now collect together these three concepts or “bubbles” of awareness: the sense of being present in your body, in your emotions, and in your mind. You can do this by alternating one each per breath for a series of cycles (e.g., “I sense,” “I feel,” “I know,” etc.).
  
  When they are “all there” and feel readily available to you, add the phrase “I am” (or “I am here,” or “I am one”), coordinated with an in-breath and out-breath, as you feel the full force of your presence in your body, your emotions, and your mind. This can be considered a mental affirmation of physical presence and agency. Feel this for several breaths.
  
  Next, use the phrase “I can” as you feel the sense of your capacity to do, based on a knowledge of what is to be done. (“I can act. I understand what it means for me to act. I can act as a unity of multiples.”) This is an affirmation of mental presence and agency. Feel this for several breaths.
  
  Finally, use the phrase “I wish” (or “I will”) to affirm your emotional presence and agency. (“I wish for my actions to aid myself and others in working towards greater consciousness of our capacities.”) Feel this for several breaths. (Note that we conclude this part with the emotional because it helps concentrate the energy of the exercise.)

You have now completed a sequence that has taken you from “noting,” or the firstness of bodymindfulness, to “acting” (secondness) in the sense of a building up of a certain cognized awareness, and to an affirmation of hoped-for “realization” (thirdness) in the realms of physical, emotional, and mental being and self-maintenance.

This whole exercise is a way of engendering the habit of attending to, monitoring, and giving shape to one’s bodily, emotional, and mental experience. While the title of this article emphasizes the “emotional” part of such practice, the exercise outlined here is both more and less than that. It is more because of its focus on all three bodies (physical, emotional, mental). It is less in that its “emotional work” is very specific: it is not intended to gauge any and all emotional or affective sensations that may arise for you; rather, its intent is to gather or collect a more or less unified feeling of one’s body, one’s emotions (heart), and one’s mind in their distinctiveness and mutual interpenetration. Its goal is to learn to feel these as “wholes,” to gauge one’s overall feeling toward them, and to shape them in a concrete way — such that the three “bubbles of awareness” are brought together into a sense of unity (“I am”), of capacity (“I can”), and of emotional commitment (“I wish” or “I will”).

Each of the affirmative phrases should be taken as a kind of open questioning, a form of what A. H. Almaas calls inquiry, where the stated affirmation forces us to confront the openness of the question it poses. “I sense” becomes “What do I sense? How do I sense it?” “I am present” becomes “How am I present to what is here, now? What is my capacity to be present (at all)?” “I feel” becomes “What is it that I feel? How do I feel it?” “I know” becomes “What do I actually know? How is it possible for me to know (anything at all)?” Similarly with the three latter phrases: “I am” becomes “What am I? How am I?” “I can” becomes “What can I? What am I capable of (at all)?” “I wish” becomes “What do I wish? How can I wish (anything) in a unified manner? What is actually worth wishing for?”

As we habituate ourselves into posing these questions from a place of genuine openness and unified curiosity, we become open to feeling the “processual” and “relational” nature of how we are in the world, and of how we interact with the others that make up that world. The exercise is in this sense consonant with Spinoza’s ideal of building “strength of character” that increases one’s capacity to care for oneself and to care for others. Strength of character requires a certain unity of character; and caring for oneself and others requires an openness to what is actually going on with ourselves and others.

As one repeats the exercise, it becomes something one can do quickly in the midst of activity. A brief “reminder” version of it can be the part in the “emotional body” exercise where one pays attention to “ambient sources of subtle arousal.” When conducted in the midst of an activity, there will always be such sources — for instance, breathing, bodily movement, the sound of the wind, the rain, or traffic, or indeed anything — which can become sources of a kind of bodily and emotional enjoyment. Gathering this sensation of enjoyment into a kind of “global” sensory/feeling awareness and infusing it with mental cognition (“I am here… with this”) can give rise to feelings of gratitude and Spinozan “joy” that serve as little reminders of one’s capacity to attend, deepen, and respond to the affordances of the moment (and of any moment).

In enabling more effective work toward changing one’s capacity for action, this becomes an ethical and political practice for being and acting in the world.

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Notes:

[1] John P. Muller, Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce and Lacan, New York: Routledge, 1996; Andrew Younkins, “Lacan avec Peirce: A Semeiotic Approach to Lacanian Thought,” Hampshire College, 2005; Colapietro, “Subjectivity as an Unlimited Semeiosis: Lacan and Peirce“, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2004.

[2] Armstrong, “Affective therapy: Spinoza’s Approach to Self-Cultivation,” 31, in Ethics and Self-Cutivation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Matthew Dennis and Sander Werkhoven, Routledge, 2018.

[3] Hampe, “Rationality as the therapy of self-liberation in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in Philosophy as Therapeia, ed. C. Carlisle and J. Ganeri, Cambridge U. Press, 2010, 35-49, qu. P. 45.

[4] Gurdjieff’s account is actually more complicated than this. He sometimes spoke of three centers, sometimes of four, and sometimes of seven, but he also claimed that each of the centers had its own moving-instinctual, emotional, and intellectual “parts” in addition to being distinguishable (sometimes) into “positive” and “negative” valences. See here for an illustration.

[5] On Gurdjieff’s contemplative practices, see Joseph Azize’s excellent recent book Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (Oxford U. Press, 2020).