The examination of our feelings as a whole is an integral practice for deeply formed lives. To that end, I have found Alice Miller’s distinction between emotions and feelings to be enlightening. She wrote, “Emotion is a more or less unconscious, but at the same time vitally important physical response to internal or external events—such things as fear of thunderstorms, rage at having been deceived, or the pleasure that results from a present we really desire. By contrast, the word ‘feeling’ designates a conscious perception of an emotion.”
