Observing Emotions

Observing emotions is a key to coping with life. I often try to wrap things in stories, when the emotions (confused, angry, hurt or whatever) are what really speak to me about things. Staying with the emotion instead of spinning endless narratives about why emotions are there, how they got there, etc. seems to be one helpful way of dealing with them. In a way, observing neither suppresses nor does it add fuel to the emotion.
  This week, I feel rushed: lots of emails to write and taxes to do as well. But what is the emotion? It's just a discomfort in the stomach area, as well as a heaviness in the chest. Such emotions are in the body, but I subconsciously think that these emotions reside in the things that need doing. Taxes become a pain in the stomach; meetings a "pain in the neck". But, in fact, the physical sensation has no relation to the event itself. It's only a bodily feeling that happens to be triggered with some thoughts or events.
  To feel fluttering in the stomach might make a person feel as though the events outside of them stir them to action (note the metaphorical way of thinking). But that sense of fluttering is no more than a nervous reaction that travels to the brain cells and gives signals. Even the sense of "pressure" in the chest has no external correlate; they are only analogies for speaking about stress, and there is no corresponding reality of being pushed, stirred or pressured. Such ideas only form an internal landscape of the mind.
    If one can separate the internal from the external, what happens is that I have this emotion, and then there is this "thing to do", and that is that: the thing to do has no relation to the emotion,and vice versa. In this way, they can co-exist: not needing to do one to make the other disappear, or manage one to manage the other.