As an answer, I will give an excerpt from a workshop on gestalt psychology. It makes it clear that the mind and the senses are not really opposed to each other.

Emotion is a constant process; every moment of life has a certain perceptible tone of pleasantness or unpleasantness. However, since in modern people this continuity of emotional experience is most often excluded from awareness, emotions are considered as a kind of periodic bursts that inexplicably occur in behavior just when a person would like to “own himself”.

Such intrusions-so “unjustified” — frighten and make you stay on your guard. As much as possible, people try to avoid situations where they arise.

Most people, however, agree with this use of the term” emotion “only for such” explosive ” situations, but they are aware of other phenomena that are similar in many ways, but not so frightening. They are commonly referred to as” feelings, “so the scientific descriptions of this entire field are called”Feelings and Emotions.” We believe that this separates what is really a continuum. What determines the place of a given emotional experience in this continuum depends on the degree to which the interest of the organism experiencing the “organism/environment” gestalt manifests itself from the background in the figure.

Emotion, considered as a direct value experience of the organism of the field “organism/environment”, is not mediated by thoughts and verbal judgments, it is direct. In this capacity, it is a crucial regulator of action, because it not only forms the basis of awareness of what is important, but also gives energy to the corresponding action or, if action is impossible, gives energy and direction to the search for action.

In its primitive, undifferentiated form, emotion is simply arousal-excitement, increased metabolic activity, and increased energy mobilization, which is the body's response to experiencing novelty or stimulation in a situation. In newborns, this response is complete and relatively undifferentiated. As the child gradually differentiates the world, he accordingly differentiates his general excitement-excitement into selective, situationally polarized excitements. They get the names of specific emotions.

Emotions as such are not vague and diffuse; they are just as differentiated in structure and function as the person experiencing them is differentiated . If a person experiences their emotions as vague and gross, then these terms can be attributed to themselves. It follows that emotions in themselves are not something to be disposed of on the basis of the fiction that they interfere with clarity of thought and action. On the contrary, they are not only important as regulators of energy in the “organism/environment” field, but they are also irreplaceable carriers of certain experiences — our interest, what we care about the world and ourselves.

These functions of emotion are highly distorted in our society. As already mentioned, it is believed that emotions arise only in moments of crisis, and then only if a person “loses control” and then “becomes emotional”. Equanimity is valued as the antithesis of emotion; people tend to appear ” cool, calm, collected.” But calmness itself is not devoid of an emotional tone when it is born from a direct evaluative experience of this particular situation as one that can be confidently handled, or-at the other extreme-as a situation in which nothing can be done.

Only a mobile, open situation, in which something is at stake for a person and his own actions affect its balance, can cause real excitement. Pretending to be calm in such a situation is like putting on a mask that suppresses expressions of interest. Fooling others in this way can be useful if they are enemies, but what is the point of taking yourself for an enemy and fooling yourself, depriving yourself of awareness of “what is being done”?

A number of “negative feelings” are usually denied emotional significance. However, for example, things like frigidity or boredom are very strong feelings, not just a lack of feeling. The experience of cold is as real as the experience of heat. The absence of sensitivity where it is supposed to be is, paradoxically, an excitingly strong feeling — so strong that it is soon excluded from the realm of awareness. This is why it is so difficult to find gaps and restore sensitivity in these experiments.

Children's emotions — because of the inconvenience they cause adults who have worked so hard to suppress awareness of their own emotions-do not get the opportunity to go through natural development and differentiation. The ” adults “do not realize, and they begin to deny, if they are told about it, that their concern about the child's gaining” control over their emotions “is rooted precisely in the fact that in their own childhood,” authorities ” also cautiously distorted their own emotions. They themselves did not get the opportunity to adequately differentiate their childhood emotions and outgrow them without external compulsion. They only suppressed them — and they continue to do so! When a child behaves spontaneously, it arouses the same latent tendencies in adults and threatens the carefully maintained “maturity” of their own behavior. As a result, children are forced to suppress their feelings as early as possible and put on a false mask of accepted “self-control”once and for all.

This is largely achieved by bringing to the fore the “external world” and its demands as reality , while the voice of organic needs, realized through proprioception, is largely neglected as something that is “only in the mind”. The child adapts to this continuous pressure, his sense of the body becomes vague, and he devotes to the “outside world” whatever interest he can arouse.

This whole crusade for “controlling emotions” has, of course, its own emotional basis and is conducted very emotionally. This is not to say that it does not achieve results, but these results are not at all those that are mentioned in the justification of the entire program. “Undesirable” emotions are not excluded from the personality at all, because it is impossible to nullify the way in which nature organizes the functioning of the organism. What is achieved is to further complicate the already confusing field “organism / environment” by creating a large number of situations that, if not avoided, cause a strong discharge of emotions.

For example, if a “well-behaved” person in a certain situation “loses power over himself” and spontaneously discharges what has accumulated in him, this itself will be the basis for such very painful emotions as shame, annoyance, feelings of humiliation, self-pity, confusion, disgust, etc. To prevent a repetition of such a demoralizing experience, he will reduce his self-control to even more suffocating limits.

This represents the visible success that can be achieved in achieving “emotional mastery.” What happens is that certain emotions, before they reach the level of organization of an action, or even before they reach awareness, are silenced and demobilized by the counter-emotions they cause; all of this together forms a dead end. a dead center that is more or less effectively excluded from awareness. Awareness of this unattractive position in one's own personality brings back painful conflict, confusion, anxiety, and “dangerous” arousal. But if we refuse to recognize this as the existing state of affairs, it will not be subject to change, it will remain hopelessly self-replicating.