Are you expecting a sappy, philosophical article based on the title? Well, sorry to disappoint you but this one is going to be a lot more scientific. and hopefully, make you think and feel.

Let’s all agree on one thing first, thoughts and feelings are real, yes? We can’t see them, we can’t smell them, we can’t touch them, quite like the air we breathe. Yet, we can say this with absolute certainty that each one of us has thoughts in our heads and feelings in our body.

You make a poker face to mask yourself from the person sitting across you, and yet at any point in time, there’s a lot happening behind your eyes, between your ears, within your heart and under your skin.

There has to be some logic to all this right? Surely you must’ve wondered at some point. It can’t be a coincidence can it? That nature gave you the ability to think and feel. Nature doesn’t waste anything, ever.

What are thoughts? It’s a voice in your head. And what is voice? To put it bluntly, yet honestly, it is noise, right? A dog’s bark is noise to you, your voice is noise to them. Heck, being in Europe, when I’m around my football teams and they’re talking in their language, it’s noise to my ears. I don’t get what they’re trying to say.

To put it more scientifically, thoughts are vibrational energy. All vibrational energies have a frequency and they have information, just like the sounds you make from your mouth or like the WiFi you receive at your house. Sometimes it is audible and sometimes it is not.

Are you still with me? Good. Do you need a bit of proof?

Do you have a clock in your house? If you’re immersed in your thoughts you will barely hear the seconds hand tick, even in silence. It’s not like time stopped or anything. You were just paying attention to the voice in your head.

Now start paying attention to the clock, you will hear each and every second. I’ve tried it, it is crazy. It’ll take a while for you to not notice it again. Until you get busy in your head that is.

Even in public transport, sometimes you can hear every conversation around you and sometimes it’s just background noise. Why? Now you know why!

Take a minute to just close your eyes and observe your thoughts. You’ll notice the thoughts are just happening on their own. If you’re new to this then probably after 5 or 10 seconds the first thought you’ll get is “How much more do I have to wait?” or “Why am I doing this? This guy is crazy.”

Take it as a challenge if nothing else and try to not think.

Can’t do it? Sorry to say this, but you’re not thinking, you’re being thought.

Thinking is a voluntary activity, you control it. If you want to not think for a minute then you should be able to do so. Anyways, let’s leave it at this and move on to our feelings shall we? Before your thoughts convince you to abandon me. Don’t give in, stay with me!

So, what are feelings or emotions? I might sound a bit heartless but I’m not, I have a lot of emotion. Emotions are the chemical end product of an experience in your body.  When you say you feel a certain way, certain chemicals are released (oxytocin, cortisol etc.) in your body and that precise chemical composition in your body at the time is the emotion you feel.

So every experience that you have in your life results in you emoting to it – love, anger, guilt, love, sadness, bliss are just some of the many emotions you feel. Honestly, the more I dive into all this, the more I realize there aren’t even words in the vocabulary for everything that you feel.

The more profound the experience you have, the stronger the emotions you feel and the stronger the chemistry in your body.

Now the body does not differentiate between a positive and a negative emotion. It feels what it feels because you, its master, directed it. But the body is only human, it gets addicted to these chemical reactions.

If you feel angry, your body craves the neurochemistry associated with anger. If you feel self pity or sadness, your body loves to feel that way. On the flip side, if you feel love and joy, your body loves to feel that way too.

Are we clear so far? Any lingering doubts? Feeling anything in your body? Curiosity? Are you smiling? Please do if you’re not!

Now, what is the relation between our thoughts and feelings, between the body and the mind?

You can never think greater than how you feel. Overtime, the body’s cravings get too strong. It’s like an addiction. You don’t question an addiction, you just do it.

The body and mind always work for one another. The mind serves the body and the body serves the mind. To feed the chemistry, the mind starts thinking thoughts equal to how you feel.

Imagine you had an experience that made you extremely angry in the past. Your body reacted to it chemically. A powerful chemical reaction is what a long term memory is. The body makes a note of what caused it, inside and outside.  Now as time goes by, the mind creates thoughts that make you feel the same way – angry in this case.

As mentioned earlier, thoughts are finally information. A powerful thought backed by emotions creates your personality. It is your personal reality, the way your body and mind perceive the world. You end up attracting events into your life that mirror what’s happening inside of you.

So in this example, if you’re an angry person, you end up in situations where anger is the response. The event that caused you to be this way in the first place is long gone, but the chemistry lingers on in your body.

If you feel victimized, then you’re likely to find yourself in a situation where you are victimized. Because that’s the narrative that your body and mind are reciting. That’s the veil of your life experience.

But on the flip side, if you’re loving and kind, you will find yourself in those situations.

The universe is mirroring what you already are. Your deepest desires, your deepest emotions.

The complexity of it all is the science. And the simplicity of it all is the art. Imagine the possibilities!

What do you think? What do you feel?

Ahhh! What a wonderful time to be alive. Peace!