I'm not sure if there's some gaslighting involved here, but can one be sentimental without emotional?
I listened to a lady talk about how sentimental she can be with almost everything/everyone she comes across, feeling things deeply, yet not be emotional about it.
The only context I could find for a possible causation is she's in a spiritual path or rather a spiritual seeker, so I guess she might have reached that stage where she can separate the milk from the water within the same bowl, so to speak.
Arguably, sentiment is the mother of all emotions, i.e it encompasses all of them without strictly attaching to any one of them.
Think later
Experientially, there's usually a short circuit of sorts from feeling a sentiment to reacting based on it. The missing link is the processing phase of the sentiment as both usually happen at the same time like the snap of a finger, especially with physical processes that unfortunately aren't entirely within our control.
My body will run with the first sense of danger even before my mind can process what's going on and then debate how severe this danger could be and whether I should run or not.
Sometimes, I ask this seemingly trivial question on the distribution of feeling within the body and mind, which really feels between the two and the other being a proxy for the observer?
I feel pain in my body, then the mind exaggerates it pushing me towards the realm of suffering. Certain thoughts can pop into my mind, say a traumatic past experience, that makes the body feel some type of way, even though the present moment may be very different from the past.
To be able to differentiate one from the other takes an incredible degree of self-awareness.
In terms of the attachment aspect that binds feeling to suffering, I'm guessing at this moment in time that perhaps what this lady understood is the difference between experiencing and owning.
As in, analogically, feelings are like weather passing through a valley. The valley allows weather to move through and doesn't own the storm or become the rain. At the end of the day, experiences are... well, experiences. Fluid and temporary.
I think trying to own what's fundamentally a fluid dynamic is one of the main root causes for human attachment and its accompanying disappointment.
So, can one be sentimental without being emotional?
Yes, if sentiment is understood as the ability to experience experience without claiming it as identity.
I think it only becomes gaslighting when this distinction is used to deny the body’s reactions or invalidate others’ suffering; otherwise, it names a real shift from owning experience to allowing it, where feeling remains intact but attachment no longer converts it into emotional obligation.
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