What are feelings?

Feelings are sparked by emotions and colored by the thoughts, memories, and images that have become subconsciously linked with that particular emotion for you. However, it works the other way around too. For example, just by thinking about something that you feel is threatening to you, an emotional fear response is triggered. While individual emotions are temporary, the feelings they evoke may persist and grow over a lifetime. Because emotions cause subconscious feelings, which in turn initiate emotions and so on, your life can become a never-ending cycle of painful and confusing emotions, which produce negative feelings that cause more negative emotions without you ever really knowing why—if you don't improve your self-awareness. While basic emotions are instinctual and common to us all, the meanings they take on and the feelings they prompt are individually based on our programming, past and present. Feelings are shaped by a person's temperament and experiences and vary greatly from person to person and situation to situation.

Your emotions and feelings play a powerful role in how you experience and interact with the world because they are the driving force behind many behaviors guided by unconscious fear-based perceptions. Living unaware like this almost always leads to problems and unhappiness, in the long run. As the objects in your world induce emotions within you, they are collected in the subconscious and begin to accumulate. This is especially so when similar events are repeatedly experienced. Ultimately, they form a final emotional conclusion about life, how to live it, and more importantly, how to survive physically and mentally in a world of chaos. When this happens, a feeling is born. Once feelings are established, they are often fed back into your emotions to produce the appropriate result to ensure survivability. Feelings are products of emotions. But unlike short-term, intense emotions, feelings are low-key, stable, and sustained over time.