Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright

Your Body Knows What Your Mind Doesn't: Decoding Life's Sacred Signals

• Scott Conkright

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That persistent ache when everything looks perfect on paper but something still feels missing – it's not ingratitude or failure. It's what I call divine discontentment, a profound developmental signal that your current reality has become too small for your emerging self.

Through the story of Patricia, a successful CEO wrestling with this very phenomenon, we explore how this sacred ache serves as a compass pointing toward growth and greater meaning. Drawing on affect theory and the pioneering work of Sylvan Tompkins, we examine how our core feelings – those fast, automatic bodily responses that precede emotions – drive our search for meaning and authentic expression.

The moment of "lacense" represents that first crack in our narrative when we realize the story we've been living is no longer our own. For Marcus, a decorated military veteran, this manifested physically: "I know who I was. I don't know who I am now." His body knew what his mind hadn't caught up to yet – a common experience during times of transition.

We also delve into cultural narratives about aging and introduce the concept of "laidalescence" – a revolutionary framework that challenges outdated notions of middle and late adulthood. Rather than viewing aging as decline, laidalescence recognizes it as a phase of adaptation, purpose, and self-renewal that can begin at different points depending on one's circumstances and mindset.

Understanding your core feelings – the biological foundation of your emotional life – provides powerful tools for channeling your sacred ache into transformation rather than suffering. What if that restlessness you feel isn't a problem to be solved but a message to be decoded? What if your sacred ache is the truest thing about you – the part that refuses to settle for a life smaller than your potential?

Have you experienced this divine discontentment? How has it shaped your journey? Share your thoughts and join the conversation about rewriting our stories of meaning, purpose, and growth.

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For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright

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I was sitting with a client named Patricia, a successful CEO in her early 60s, when she said something that really made me reflect. I have everything I thought I wanted. She said a voice, barely above a whisper the company, the accolades, the financial security. But there's this ache, like something essential is missing and I can't name what it is. If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone. This is a common experience, particularly during times of transition or when we're seeking personal growth.

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That ache Patricia described, that persistent sense that something vital remains unmet despite external success, is what I've come to understand as one of the most critical signals in human development. It's not pathology, it's not ingratitude. Let's call it a sacred ache, an experience particularly pronounced during later lessons. When I use the word sacred, I'm not talking about religious ceremony or spiritual tradition, though these can't certainly be pathways to what I'm describing. Instead, I'm referring to something more fundamental, something your body recognizes before your mind constructs any belief system around it. This embodied recognition of the sacred connects directly to what we explored in the previous chapter about our core feelings, the affects. When Patricia describes her ache, her body communicated through her core feelings, through the affect system, a complex interplay of interest and excitement on the good side that couldn't find an object mixed with distress and shame of unmet longing. What Patricia was experiencing wasn't the peaceful enlightenment often promised by self-help books or spiritual paths. I've come to call it divine discontentment, and I'll tell you a story about how I came up with that word later on. Divine discontentment is that uncanny and disruptive unrest that precedes transformation. This isn't a comfortable state, but it's a profoundly generative one. I often share with clients how this divine discontentment has historically appeared in those who shaped our world. For instance, kierkegaard paced the streets of Copenhagen with an ache he couldn't quiet. Van Gogh's restlessness poured onto his canvas in ways that still move us. Harriet Tubman's refusal to accept the world as it was drove her through darkness towards freedom, not just her own, but that of countless others. Each of them lived with an ache that wouldn't let them settle. That ache wasn't a design flaw. It was more than just feeling off. It wasn't a major existential crisis. It signaled that their current reality was too small for their emerging self. They needed a bigger story to make life meaningful. This is a story of growth, of becoming more than we are, and it's a story that's available to each of us From an affect theory perspective, the sacred ache represents a fascinating phenomenon.

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It's what happens when our positive affects, our positive body feelings, core feelings, particularly interest, excitement, are activated but can't find adequate expression in our current life structure. Unlike the shame we explored earlier, which interrupts our positive affects, the sacred ache is positive affect seeking a worthy object. Dr Sylvan Tompkins might have described it as interest excitement in search of a proper stimulus. Our nervous system signals that we're capable of more engagement, deeper meaning and authentic expression, but our current life story doesn't provide adequate channels for this vitality. Recent neuroscience research supports this understanding. Studies on meaning-making and purpose show that our brains are wired for survival and significance. The same neural networks that process physical pain also process the pain of meaninglessness. This brings us to a crucial concept in understanding later lesson development.

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The moment of what I'm terming lacence, if later lessons, is the longer journey of rewriting our life story. License is that first crack in the narrative, the moment when we realize the story we've been telling ourselves and living is no longer our own. Let me share how this appeared in a patient of mine named Marcus. A decorated military veteran, marcus had built his entire identity around service and strength, but sitting in my office at 55, he couldn't stop his hands from shaking. I know who I was, he said I don't know who I am now. Laysen's is when your body knows what your mind hasn't caught up to yet. For Marcus it came as physical symptoms insomnia, anxiety and a strange nausea. Whenever he tried to return to his old patterns, his affect system was screaming that his current narrative no longer fit, even though his conscious mind insisted everything should be fine.

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Here's where things can go wrong and where understanding the sacred ache becomes clinically crucial. When we don't recognize this ache as a signal for growth, we often mislabel it as a personal failure. This is how the sacred ache can transform into chronic shame syndrome, which we'll explore more deeply in an upcoming chapter. I've seen this pattern repeatedly the executive who interprets her restlessness as ingratitude, the teacher who sees his desire for change as a betrayal of his calling, the parent who reads their longing for personal growth as selfishness. Each represents a missed opportunity, a moment when the sacred ache could have been a compass pointing towards growth, but instead became evidence of personal inadequacy. So how do we work with the sacred ache constructively? How do we let it the sacred ache constructively? How do we let it guide us rather than shame us. Here are approaches I've developed through years of clinical practice.

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Do you remember Alina? From our introduction, she learned to recognize her sacred ache through what I'm calling now vitality scanning. Several times a day she would pause and notice where in my body do I feel most alive? What activities make me forget time? When do I feel that quality of engagement goes beyond mere pleasure? For me it's writing. For me it's doing podcasts. These aren't random sensations. They're your affect system, your core feelings, communicating about potential directions for growth.

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The second one is I call the thread of interest. I often ask patients to track what I call midnight thoughts, those ideas that wake you up and won't let you sleep. Patricia discovered that her 3 am thoughts were consistently about educational reform, something she'd been passionate about before her business career. These persistent interests are breadcrumbs left by your sacred ache. The third are micro-movements towards meaning. The sacred ache doesn't require dramatic life overhauls. Thomas, a writer from earlier chapters, began with 15 minutes of morning writing. That's all he had time for. Sarah started with one pro bono financial planning session per month. These micro movements honor the ache without overwhelming our existing life structures.

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Working with the sacred ache has taught me something profound about human nature, about human nature we're not designed for comfort but for meaning. The affect system that helped our ancestors survive by making them restless enough to explore new territory, to explore new worlds, now makes us restless for new territories of meaning and contribution, part of our evolution. This understanding reframes so much of what we pathologize in modern life, that midlife, so-called midlife restlessness. It might be your sacred ache calling you towards your next chapter, that sense that something's missing despite external success. It may be your core feelings signaling that you're capable of more.

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The sacred ache takes on particular significance during later lessons, unlike earlier stages, where external structures like education, career building, family formation provide clear channels for our interest, excitement and enjoyment. Joy, late adolescence often requires us to create our own channels. This is both the challenge and the gift of this life stage. The sacred ache during late lessons isn't pointing towards predetermined goals. It's inviting us to become co-creators of our own meaning, as Patricia discovered when she finally listened to her ache and began developing educational programs alongside her CEO duties.

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The ache wasn't telling me to abandon everything. It was telling me to expand. She said as I close this chapter, I want to return to our definition of the sacred. If one definition of the sacred is what our body recognizes as essential before our minds have words for it, then the sacred ache is your body's way of recognizing essential possibilities that your current life hasn't yet made room for. It's about recognizing that our affect system, that fundamental biological inheritance we explored earlier, consists of a drive towards meaning and growth as real as our drive for food or connection. In the next chapter, we'll explore how this sacred ache relates to the specific developmental challenges of the Laodalesans and how understanding our fundamental relationship with self meaning, money and others provides a framework for channeling this ache into transformation rather than suffering. For now, consider this what if that restlessness you feel isn't a problem to be solved but a message to be decoded? What if your sacred ache is the truest thing about you, the part that refuses to settle for a life smaller than your potential? Patricia's journey didn't end with her recognizing her ache. It began there, and perhaps yours can too.

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That sleepless night in DC, as I wrestled with my own complicated feelings about aging, I realized I wasn't just contending with personal demons. I was grappling with narratives about aging that stretch back through centuries of human civilization. The shame I felt about my aching back and my restless mind wasn't just mine. It was inherited from a complex interplay of cultural stories about what it means to grow older. Though not formally schooled in literary theory, I've spent years studying how narratives fundamentally shape human experience.

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Our lives are guided by scripts, both conscious and unconscious, that emerge from our cultural context. These scripts don't just suggest how we should act. They infiltrate our deepest beliefs about who we are, what roles we're meant to fill and how we should feel about the entire performance. And when it comes to aging, these scripts have long been contradictory and often deeply flawed. Contradictory and often deeply flawed. Throughout Western civilization, our attitudes towards aging have oscillated between two poles a reverential awe for elder wisdom and a visceral dread of physical decline. These aren't merely abstract cultural attitudes floating in the philosophical ether. They're active scripts that play out in therapy rooms, around dinner tables and in the quiet moments of our own internal dialogues.

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Consider how differently ancient Greeks viewed aging compared to our modern perspective. Greeks viewed aging compared to our modern perspective. For philosophers like Aristotle, the later years of life represented not decline but the height of contemplative wisdom. The Stoics, particularly Seneca, saw aging not as something to fear but as part of nature's grand design. They didn't have Instagram filters or anti-aging creams, but they had something more valuable a cultural framework that gave meaning to growing older. This reverence for age wasn't limited to classical philosophy. Biblical texts portrayed old age as a blessing, a reward for righteous living.

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During medieval times, aging was considered a sacred preparation for eternal life. Even during the Enlightenment, thinkers like John Locke and David Hume recognized the value of accumulated experience in shaping human identity. But something shifted dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, older workers were replaced by younger ones. Their experience deemed less valuable than physical vigor. This economic devaluation of age coincided with the rise of mass media, particularly Hollywood, which began crafting new stories about aging, stories that emphasized loss over gain and decline over development. In my therapy practice, I see the impact of these narratives daily. A successful executive in her 50s recently told me I feel like I'm playing a game of hide and seek with my age. She excels at her job, maintains an active lifestyle and enjoys deep, meaningful relationships, yet she apologizes for her age as if it were a character flaw rather than a natural part of human experience. This is where Laidalescence enters the conversation.

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Adolescence is a stage of life defined not by decline, but by adaptation, purpose and self-renewal. An alternative to outdated notions of middle and late adulthood. It is not an age bracket, but a phase of growth that can begin at 25, 50, or 75, depending on one's circumstances and mindset. It acknowledges that reinvention is not optional. It is the foundation of meaningful living. The term middle age itself reveals the poverty of our current language around aging. It emerges as a cultural construct, a euphemistic way of saying someone was of a certain age. But what does middle mean when life expectancy keeps increasing?

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The very notion of a middle point in aging reveals a peculiar assumption in how we think about adult development. To understand this oddity, consider how strange it would be to divide childhood or adolescent into before and after phases around an arbitrary middle point. What would it mean to be in mid-childhood or mid-adolescence? These concepts feel inherently awkward because we understand childhood and adolescence as continuous processes of growth and change, not as journeys toward and away from some pivotal middle. Yet somehow, from some pivotal middle, yet somehow we've accepted the concept of middle age without questioning its underlying logic. What exactly are we in the middle of? What are we moving toward and or away from?

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In developing later lessons, I've drawn significant inspiration from Eric Erickson's pioneering work in developmental psychology. Erickson revolutionized our understanding of human development by proposing that growth continues throughout life, not just in childhood. His model identifies eight distinct stages of psychosocial development, each characterized by a fundamental conflict that must be resolved for healthy progression. However, erickson's final stage integrity versus despair assumes a developmental reckoning at age 65. In reality, this conflict arises when death is imminent, not necessarily at a specific age. When death is imminent, not necessarily at a specific age, many people in their 70s, 80s and even 90s are still actively engaged in growth, reinvention and adaptation.

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The cultural assumption that aging is a process of inevitable decline forces too many into early psychological and social withdrawal. Laidalescence recognizes that until one's agency is irreversibly diminished, reinvention is mandatory. This perspective challenges society's treatment of aging populations. Forced retirement, limited social engagement and lack of opportunities to share skills and wisdom create a reality where aging itself is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a stage to be embraced, with an increasingly growing older population. In the United States, we have the power to rewrite this narrative, and nowhere is the commodification of aging more evident than in the multi-billion dollar anti-aging market reached 194.4 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow substantially in the coming years.

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Massive industry thrives on perpetuating the very shame narratives that make us feel inadequate about natural aging processes, that it co-ops the language of empowerment while reinforcing disempowering messages. Anti-aging and age-defying products aren't sold through explicit shame. They're marketed as self-care tools, as ways to be your best self. The underlying message, however, remains the same Aging is something to be fought, masked and denied, rather than understood and accepted as a natural part of human experience. I've seen how commercial messaging interacts with personal identity in my practice. A patient of mine recently brought in a magazine advertisement for an expensive anti-aging cream. I know it's ridiculous, she said, but every time I see these ads I feel like I'm failing at being a woman. The industry hasn't just created products. It's established a standard of perpetual youth that no one can maintain and positioned itself as a solution to this impossible problem. But here's the thing about stories we can change them.

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The narratives that have shaped our understanding of aging aren't carved in stone. They're written in the malleable medium of human consciousness. Laid-a-lessons offers us a revolutionary new story that not only honors the wisdom of the past but demands a radical re-imaging of the future. It calls on individuals to challenge inherited scripts, defy cultural expectations and recognize that aging is not something to be feared but something to be embraced as a continuous act of authorship. This is not just a conceptual shift. I like to think of it as a movement. We have the numbers, the experience and the collective voice to demand respect, reshape societal structures and reclaim aging as a period of power, purpose and limitless potential.

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I'm going to share with you now what I stumbled upon, so to speak, several years ago, which totally changed how I see the world, understand myself and work with patients. I came across the works of Sylvan Tompkins, a psychologist at Harvard who is remarkably well-known and highly respected in his day and he still is. But his astonishingly brilliant ideas got lost in the excitement about the invention of the computer. He was actually part of the group of researchers and theorists interested in computer information processing, then called cybernetics, and he was interested, along with these other researchers and theorists, about how it could help us understand what it means to be human. Alan Turing, the inventor of the computer, by the way, was also interested in the same question.

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You may have heard of the Turing test. Imagine you're chatting with someone through a screen. You can't see them, just their words. One person is human and the other might be a computer. The Turing test asks a simple but powerful question Can the computer talk so much like a person that you can't tell the difference If you honestly don't know which one is which? If the machine feels human enough in how it responds, then it passed the test. Turing believed that if a machine could carry on a conversation like a real person conversation like a real person that might mean it's thinking in its own way.

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It's not about perfect answers. It's about feeling like you're talking to someone, not just something. It's more complicated than that we're finding out with AI, but Tompkins discovered something, I believe, that is just as important as the computer. Really, I think he's like the Einstein of psychology. He discovered the biological basis of feelings, which he called affects, and I hope to convey how monumental a discovery this was, as it completely rewrites what motivates us.

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The short version of this is that feelings come first, then thinking. We have big and small feelings, but either way they guide what we think about. If you have not eaten or slept for a long time, or somebody just cut you off in traffic, if you have not eaten or slept for a long time, or somebody just cut you off in traffic, or flipped you the bird, or you just won the lotto. I can make a good guess about what you're thinking about, because I can make a good guess about what you're feeling. Hangry, by the way, is not an emotion. Hangry is hunger and the core feeling of distress. But let me slow down.

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Let's start with a word that throws people off Affect. If you've ever heard it, you probably thought it just means emotion, a fancy word for sad, mad, happy, afraid. But that's not quite right and it's where a lot of confusion begins. Affect is not emotion. Affect is what comes before emotion. It's the body's raw, fast, automatic response to what's happening around or inside you. It doesn't have a name, yet happening around or inside you. It doesn't have a name, yet it doesn't have a story, it just moves you.

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According to psychologist Sylvan Tompkins, who devoted his whole life to studying this I mean 40, 50 years affects are the building blocks of our feeling life. He identified a small number of them, usually using two words to describe the range of core feelings involved. So, for instance, interest, excitement. Interest is on the low end, meaning something caught your eye, and excitement means it caught your eye and you are putting a lot of energy into it. Enjoyment is on the low end, joy is on the high end. So enjoyment, joy, Anger end. Joy is on the high end. So enjoyment, joy, anger, rage. Anger on the low end, rage on the high end. We also fear terror, distress, anguish, shame, humiliation and disgust. The smell, which is a word that he invented to cover another affect, core feeling that I'll talk about later and, interestingly enough, startle, surprise or surprise, startle that is is also an affect. It's a reset button.

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All of these are not emotions yet. They are fast, core, bodily responses. They are built into us. We don't learn them, we're born with them. You can see them in babies. A baby gets curious and leans in that's interest, excitement. A baby cries out when no one comes, that's distress. When their whole body lights up when someone they love walks into the room, that's distress. When their whole body lights up when someone they love walks into the room, that's joy. They don't need words to feel these things. Neither do you. You never did.

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Because affect can be such a confusing word and because people often mix it up with emotion people often mix it up with emotion I've resorted to calling them core feelings. Core feelings, I like it. Core feelings are your body's built-in ways of reacting to life. They're fast, shared by everybody and completely human. You don't choose them. They show up. They're like the first wave of feeling that rolls in before your mind tries to figure out what that wave means. People often talk about them when they say someone's having big feelings. Kids are having big feelings. It's a popular word, now a phrase. Even if they don't know the science, they're pointing to something real Beg feelings.

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Core feelings are raw, unfiltered bodily states that flood the system and beg to be understood, soothed, expressed and understood or held. That's precisely what core feelings are. So how do we get from a baby's cry to an adult saying I'm devastated? Well, according to Tompkins, core feelings come first. They're the raw biological reactions that rise up in your body's response to something happening either in the world around us or inside of us. Again, emotions come later. They're built when the brain starts making meaning out of those core feelings, based on past experiences, memories and what we've been taught to believe.

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Here are two examples to show the difference. So example one with shame, I'm not good enough. Let's say you're talking in a group and someone interrupts you and you feel like it's rude. You interpret it as rude or disrespectful. You feel like you're being dismissed in some ways. Before you even think about it, you suddenly feel your face getting hot. Your chest might tighten, your voice pulls back, the affect of shame.

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The core feeling is taking place. It's fast, it's physical, it's your body reacting to a sudden sense of disconnection or rejection. Actually, it's a hindrance to the positive feelings. You didn't think your way into it, it just hit you. Then your brain kicks in. You may have questioned yourself. You may say I must have said something stupid. Or you may interpret it as they don't respect me. Or you may judge yourself and say I always mess things up. Or you may judge yourself and say I always mess things up. Now you're not just feeling the core feeling anymore, you're inside the emotion, a full-blown story, a full-blown narrative built on top of the original spark.

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The second example is interest, excitement, calling it, this could be love. You meet someone. They say something that surprises you and interests you. You feel your body lean forward, your eyes widen, maybe you smile without meaning to. That's interest or excitement, core feelings telling your system hey, this matters, pay attention. Then your brain starts weaving it into a meaning they're really into me. This could be something big. Maybe this is love. What started as a core feeling fast, curious, alive. Feeling fast, curious, alive has now become an emotion with expectations, hope and maybe even risk, maybe even shame. Core feelings are shared by everyone. They're the basic instrument we're all born with. Emotions are how we play them, the melodies we create from the notes our body gives us. When we understand core feelings, we stop blaming ourselves for having them, we start noticing what they're trying to tell us before we get lost in the story, and that gives us a chance to respond with awareness, not just react out of habit.

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So I'm going to give you a couple different analogies. See if one of them, be patient with me, see if one of them fits for you. I'm going to give the analogy of our body how things, how affects, emotions and so forth work. The first one I'm going to use is a computer one. Imagine your body is like a computer, not just any computer, but one made of blood, breath and billions and billions of little electric pulses Every day. It helps you wake up, feel things, react to danger, fall in love, chase ideas.

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But here's the secret your body, your mind and your feelings all work together in a very specific way. Just like a computer runs because of its hardware software and something else quietly running in the background called firmware. I'm going to slow it down for a minute here. I want you to understand this as best you can. It's important. Your hardware is your actual body, the stuff you can touch your brain, your lungs, your heart. It's like the keyboard on the screen of a computer. If it's damaged or unplugged, nothing works.

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Now picture your software. In this case. That's everything. You've learned how to ride a bike, bike. 2 plus 2 equals 4. More or less it has up to now how to text with just your thumbs. It's also where your beliefs, habits, fears and dreams live. Software can be updated. You can change how you think about something or learn a better way to handle a tough situation. But software doesn't run without power, without a deeper layer that tells it when and why to act.

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Here's the most fascinating part your firmware. It runs deep inside you, quietly making sure everything stays alive and alert. You don't choose it, you don't even see it, but it's working all the time. It keeps your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your eyes blinking when something flies in your face. But firmware doesn't just handle body stuff. It's also where your affects live. Now, that's a weird word, affect, but here's what it means.

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Affects are your body's built-in responses to signals from your inner world and outer world about how to feel, about what to pay attention to. They happen fast, as I said before, even before you know what you're feeling. Imagine the sudden excitement when you see a puppy, or the jolt when somebody yells your name. The core feelings flash of feelings before your brain tells you a story about. It is what this firmware is all about. What's so important about this is that these core feelings power everything we do. They motivate everything that we do, and that's what's so brilliant about Tompkins' discoveries.

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When you're startled by a loud sound or object coming very quickly at you, that's the core feelings of startled surprise or fear or both. When you're leaning into something new and interesting, curiosity slash, interest, excitement. When something interrupts gets in the way of what you want, what you desire. That causes what I call the slump of shame. You have this body reaction of just your head going down and feeling dejected, sad, disappointed. These are all shame responses. It's on a continuum. These feelings are not chosen. They choose you, so to speak. They just happen like a reflex. They're your firmware's way of saying hey, something's happening here, pay attention. You don't have to think your way into these feelings. They happen before you even make sense of the moment and yet they shape how you breathe, move and later how you tell the story of what happened. Here's how it all fits together.

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Hardware, your body, your senses, your biology. Firmware are your core feelings. Fast, automatic, deeply embedded Software are your memories, beliefs, habits and stories. The user interface, the you others see, are your words, your choices, your personality, the way it plays out, the way you move in space around other people. This is what makes you feel alive. The firmware keeps the system running smoothly. The software lets you adapt and grow and the interface helps you connect with the world. Interface helps you connect with the world.

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Now the question you might ask is can firmware be changed? Well, not really. I mean not easily at all. Just like computers, firmware your core feelings are built in. But here's the magic While you can't totally rewrite your firmware, you can learn to work with it. You can learn to slow your breathing to calm a racing heart. You can learn to recognize shame before it becomes a story about not being good enough. You can learn to move your body to shift your state, meaning you dance, you stretch body to shift your state, meaning you dance, you stretch, you walk, you cry.

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You do something to get yourself out of that affective core feeling state. Let somebody see you and let that safe connection slowly retrain your inner world. That's a big part of group psychotherapy, individual therapy as well. Over time, with care and practice, your system becomes more flexible. Your core feelings stay fast and deep, but your responses to them get wiser, I hope, kinder, more tolerant, more attuned to the life you want to live, more attuned to the life you want to live.

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Here's a final thought You're not broken. You're biologically brilliant. Your heart, your breath, your feelings, they all come from this ancient firmware that's been helping humans survive for thousands of years. It's not perfect, it can get overloaded, but it's not broken, it's just trying to help. When you learn to listen not just to what you think but to what your body feels first, you begin to build a life that runs smoother, with more clarity and more compassion. You're not just a body, not just a brain. You are a symphony of core feelings, thoughts, choices, all of them woven together by something remarkably alive. That's the real operating system of being human.

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I'm not going to use the analogy of how affects software, hardware, so forth work in the life of a musician. You've got a body which is your hands, your lungs, your heartbeat. That's your instrument. It's what you use to move through the world, to show up, to connect. Whether you sing, strum, tap, hum or just groove to a rhythm no one else hears, you're always playing something. You've also got skills, things you've learned. Maybe you know how to read music. Maybe you've figured out how to keep a tight rhythm or how to bend a note just right. That's your training. That's what you picked up over time. Some people call that your style or your musicianship. It's what makes you you when you play.

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But underneath all that, deeper than your body and your skills, there's something else, something you didn't have to learn, something that's always been there, something that feels first before you think, before you speak, before you know what's happening. Guess, guess what it's called. Yes, you're right, you got it. Your core feelings. Guess, guess what it's called. Yes, you're right, you got it. Your core feelings. Your core feelings are like your inner beat. Your core feelings are your body's built-in reactions to the world. They just happen like a drum beat that starts on its own. Did you hear that sudden noise? Your body jumps. That's fear showing up before your brain has time to explain it. Someone turns away and you're trying to talk, like the example I gave. Again, that automatic feeling of feeling small is shame moving in. So think of it as your body being an instrument.

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Your skills in life experience are the songs you've learned to play and your core feelings are like the steady beat underneath it all, the thing that keeps the music alive. You can learn new songs, you can get better at playing, but that steady beat, that part of you that feels things first, that's always been there. That's your foundation. It tells your body when to slow down, when to get louder, when to pull back, when to lean in, even before you know why, it's already shaping how you show up. Now can you change it? Well, like I said above, no, not really. You can't make your heart stop reacting. You can't shut off your feelings but, just like music, you can learn to listen better. You can learn how to slow things down when the tempo gets too fast. You can notice when the energy shifts and respond instead of reacting. You can learn to trust that steady beat, even when the song gets messy. And with practice, just like in music, you get better at staying in tune with yourself.

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Before you ever picked up an instrument, your body was already moving into its own rhythm. Before you knew the names for feelings, you were feeling them. Before you ever said I love this song, something deep inside you already understood what it meant to feel joy, sadness, excitement, sadness, excitement, connection. You don't need fancy words to get all this. You already know it, because you are it. Being human isn't just about what you do. It's about what you feel and those feelings. Those feelings are not mistakes. They're the music that plays you into being.

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When a musician phrases a line, the way he or she plays it whether it's a singer shaping a lyric or a saxophonist sliding into a note or a guitarist holding a band just long enough to ache what they're really doing is expressing timing, emotion and meaning all at once. And that timing doesn't come from sheet music. It comes from inside, from the core feelings, that says this needs a pause. This note wants to lean forward. This note wants to lean forward. This part should fall back.

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Gentle and slow Phrasing isn't about following rules. It's about listening inward, then shaping sound to match what's already moving in your body. Before you decide how to phrase, your body already feels the moment. A tiny swell in your chest, a sudden tightness, a deep breath before you begin that's core feeling in action. Joy might lift your rhythm and make you push a phrase ahead. Sadness might stretch time, letting certain notes hang and ache. Curiosity might pull a phrase unexpectedly into a new direction.

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These aren't just techniques. They're felt signals that your body sends before your brain names them. You don't have to think now I'll add some pathos here. You just do it because it feels right. You can learn to play the notes, but you feel how to phrase them. That's what core feelings are Deep, automatic responses that shape what comes out of you before you explain it.

Speaker 1:

That wraps up today's podcast. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your listening and if you've got something from this, if you're learning something and there's something special about it, I would love it if you would subscribe, hit like. But more importantly, I would love it if you would make a comment and engage me in some way. It'd be great to have a dialogue with you about what this means to you. It means a lot to me. Keep in mind that I'm also on all the other social media platforms, so watch this, listen to this on YouTube, instagram, so forth. As well as other things that I'm doing, I have a lot of writing that I put out on my website, as well as on LinkedIn and Substack, so let's keep talking. Until next time, be well and be kind.

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Scott Conkright

Host