There is always an emotional experience happening when you’re awake. Sometimes there’s also a story — sometimes there isn’t. Emotions existed before complex thought, and all mammals have them. When emotions move without an accompanying story, they move “so much quicker, so much nicer.”
Animals demonstrate this: their emotions move very fluidly because there are fewer stories attached. A dog shakes and moves on. A child zones out into pure awareness naturally. The state of no-thought — experienced during awe, flow states, moments of presence — is deeply natural, though the thinking mind has difficulty identifying these moments precisely because it isn’t active during them.
Joe’s daughter at nine years old reported regularly experiencing a sense of “something greater than you looking out behind your eyes — like vastness.” This suggests that storyless emotional fluidity is our natural state, obscured by the accumulation of neurotic thought patterns. Meditation retreats often feel like returning to something familiar rather than achieving something new.