Compassion and Emotions

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood

From Open-Hearted Life

Emotions 'organize' our minds by affecting many aspects of our mental experience:

• Bodily experience... some emotions arouse our bodies, while others relax them
• Attention... shape how narrowly or broadly our attention is focused, as well as what we pay attention to
• Thinking and reasoning... emotions shape how flexibly we're able to think and also what we tend to think about
• Imagery: often, emotions involve mental imagery, like little movies or pictures that we play in our minds
• Motivation: emotions help to shape what we find ourselves wanting to do and why we want to do it
• Behavior: emotions shape our behavior; we behave very differently depending upon what emotions we're feeling

From evolutionary perspective, according to Kolts, emotions are here for 3 reasons.  (I'm dubious about this breakdown, but it's interesting!)

In Compassion-Focused Therapy, there are 3 types of emotions: the threat system, the drive system, and the safeness system. (Refers to emotions that help us detect and respond to threats, help us to pursue goals and acquire things that we need to survive and reproduce, and those that evolved to help us feel safe, connected with other and at peace.