How do you feel?

 "How are you feeling?"

That can be a tricky question.  Sometimes we use that line of inquiry to explore emotions, and at other times thoughts.

Are they all that different?  Emotions are clearly felt in the body, which is why we call them 'feelings'.  Yet, most of our thoughts also have a corresponding physical reaction.

While we like to think of our intellectual faculties as distinct from our emotional ones, the truth is that they are all interconnected.  Perhaps we would like to believe that thought is 'immaterial' or 'non-physical,' but the truth is that our physical disposition directly effects our thoughts.

We can observe that a headache can negatively alter our thought processes.  But, what about more subtle conditions of the body that we aren't even paying attention to?

Someone who feels depressed will have depressive thoughts.

The path of recovery begins when we acknowledge not only the power of our physical experience of our feelings to derail us from what is good, but also that these feelings are just that... they are experiences that are not necessarily attached to reality.  

You can be depressed without having any reason to be.

If we accept the notion that our feelings are not consistently reliable measures of reality, we can be freed from their tyranny.  We don't have to believe them.  We can reject their demands.

An emotion is a decision to act, which is why we have the physical experience of emotion generally after a thought.  But, if you stop to observe the feeling more closely, you can prevent yourself from jumping off the cliff that the feeling demands you do to make it 'feel better.'