"You should start by very literally just paying attention to your actual physical sensations."
My problem is I don't get those sensations associated with emotions! I didn't know everybody else did until I went through an exceptionally stressful time which for whatever reason allowed me to feel those things for the first time. Then bam- gone again.
Note that in that section I was specifically suggesting you just pay attention to the physical sensations without trying to associate them with emotions. Associating them comes later.
If you only had this association in a particularly stressful time, maybe they're just more subtle than you're expecting? Outside of full blown triggers, I also don't find that the physical sensations associated with an emotion are particularly attention grabbing, I have to actually pause and reflect on them most of the time.
There's a lovely example of how skill acquisition changes how you perceive the world in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA Expert jazz drummer Larnell Lewis, who has listened to very little metal in general, hears the song "Enter Sandman" by Metallica for the first time and then plays it back near-flawlessly. For our purposes the interesting part is the first half, where you can see him breaking down the song based on his existing knowledge of percussion and song structure. After a while he starts air-drumming along, predicting (pretty accurately, AFAICT) where the song is going to go. When he comes to perform the song for real, he only has to remember a much smaller set of surprising parts, and for me (as a non-musician) it was as interesting seeing what surprised him as it was seeing what he was able to predict.
Oh yes, and route-reading is definitely a learnable skill for rock climbers, and one that a good coach will spend a lot of time on developing. As well as "where are the good holds?" you're also looking at things like "which directions are those holds most useful from?", "where are the good rest positions?" and "where are the good positions to place/clip in to protective gear?".
"You should start by very literally just paying attention to your actual physical sensations."
My problem is I don't get those sensations associated with emotions! I didn't know everybody else did until I went through an exceptionally stressful time which for whatever reason allowed me to feel those things for the first time. Then bam- gone again.
Note that in that section I was specifically suggesting you just pay attention to the physical sensations without trying to associate them with emotions. Associating them comes later.
If you only had this association in a particularly stressful time, maybe they're just more subtle than you're expecting? Outside of full blown triggers, I also don't find that the physical sensations associated with an emotion are particularly attention grabbing, I have to actually pause and reflect on them most of the time.
There's a lovely example of how skill acquisition changes how you perceive the world in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_UcjMusUA Expert jazz drummer Larnell Lewis, who has listened to very little metal in general, hears the song "Enter Sandman" by Metallica for the first time and then plays it back near-flawlessly. For our purposes the interesting part is the first half, where you can see him breaking down the song based on his existing knowledge of percussion and song structure. After a while he starts air-drumming along, predicting (pretty accurately, AFAICT) where the song is going to go. When he comes to perform the song for real, he only has to remember a much smaller set of surprising parts, and for me (as a non-musician) it was as interesting seeing what surprised him as it was seeing what he was able to predict.
Oh yes, and route-reading is definitely a learnable skill for rock climbers, and one that a good coach will spend a lot of time on developing. As well as "where are the good holds?" you're also looking at things like "which directions are those holds most useful from?", "where are the good rest positions?" and "where are the good positions to place/clip in to protective gear?".