What if the way we think about our emotions, what we normally believe about them, isn't true? Psychology researcher Lisa Feldman Barret has spent decades looking at the nature of human emotion, and has discovered a very different process at work:

And so the lesson here is that emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think you do. I don't mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel the way that you would change your clothes, but your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life. So if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience.

We watched this very interesting TED talk after meditation, and it kicked off a lively discussion about feelings, emotions, mindfulness, cognitive-based therapy, and more.