How Well Do You Know Your Feeling?

I recently listened to this podcast and Dr. Aria talked about feeling as something that we can’t control. It is as if it is a different or foreign being in our conscience that we have to have a connection to, and is not what we really ARE. I kinda doubt this, but then I remembered a few books that mentioned something similar. The book The Chimp Paradox, by Professor Steve Peters talks about the brain as separate from us, a primate that needs to be reasoned and can’t be controlled, or at least not fully. He also says that the chimp is not what we really are, but our actions when we vent ourselves are actually our failure in controlling the chimp. I personally dislike this book because it made us seem so weak and our chimps so strong.

Another book, Braintenance by Dr. Julia Ravey talks about the brain behaving in certain ways, and can be molded in certain ways. If we try to make any changes in a rush, we tend to push our brain into resistance mode, much like if we suddenly force our children to eat vegetables, but if we introduce changes little by little, the brain will be easier to adapt.

I am mixing them up here, brains and feelings, but from my understanding the lot above seems to suggest that our brains and our feelings are not what make who we really are. Yet they exist and controlled (and is controlled) by us, and to be great and at peace with ourselves, we need to connect to our feelings/brain/chimp. Yes, I know, sounds a lot like nonsense, right?

I try to reconcile this with my understanding in Islam. I am not a cleric so my understanding is limited, but when talking about feelings, a hadith comes to mind that says there are two parts in a man that decides whether he is good or bad, one is the heart and the other is the tongue. It seems that if you can’t control these parts, you are not doing great. So is the heart in this case, our feelings/brain/chimp? Isn’t it a bit unfair for our fates to be determined by this part, if we cannot actually control them? Recently however I was reminded of another hadith that says that our Iman, or belief, is like our clothes that we wear, which gets faded as time pass. Thus we are reminded to du’a(pray) that Allah renew our belief from time to time, much like our clothes. So is Iman then our feeling/brain/chimp?

Apologies on reading this far to come to the statement that I do not know the answer to any of my questions (assuming that even if the questions made sense to you in the first place). Might be that our heart, iman, feelings and brain are in one way or another the same or have overlapping parts and functions that they intertwine with each other, and make who we really are.