The "process" for feeling anything is to pay attention to your current thoughts, mood, and body sensations as they occur. Often we're just "lost in thought", and when unpleasant emotions occur we divert our attention to fantasies, musings, intellectualizing, memories -- anything which will pull our attention away from HERE and NOW. But emotions are always here-and-now, they arise, change, and depart in our experience in a moment-to-moment way. Feelings are basically thoughts, body sensations, and a background mood. One technique you can use (lifted from meditation) is to "scan" through these 3 areas while counting your breath slowly. It takes practice, but this is very important practice -- it puts you back in touch with your experience, and that's essential to all sorts of personal and spiritual development areas, including healing pain and guilt.

I don't believe that guilt is real emotion and it prevents one from feeling (and, ultimately, from recognizing), compassion. Mind you it can take a shit load of work to learn how to disentangle yourself from a belief in guilt.

Stableboy's got your answer, but taozen has a point as well, guilt is not an emotion. It's the state of whether or not you did something. If you did, the emotion (unless your a psychopath) is "shame". And shame is a good thing. It's what gets us on the path toward correcting whatever actions led to the guilt.

I think it depends on what you have done. It also depends on your mental state of mind. There are some who feel no guilt for something they have done, and there are some who feel immediate guilt for telling a lie to someone. There is also guilt, from being caught, and guilt, from the act itself. There are levels of guilt also. Some times, you feel bad right away, but you do nothing about it, and it goes away. Sometimes you do something, and you can't get it out of your mind until you rectify the situation.

I refer you to review the Stanford Encyclopeida of Philosophy, it is an interesting read, and contains modern insight into such emotions. Emotion; (An Introduction) First published Mon 3 Feb, 2003 No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers--Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume--had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them--perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word "emotion" and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance. Source cited and Continued at.... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/

guilt: 1. awareness of wrongdoing: an awareness of having done wrong or committed a crime, accompanied by feelings of shame and regret 2. fact of wrongdoing: the fact of having committed a crime or done wrong 3. responsibility for wrongdoing: the responsibility for committing a crime or doing wrong http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861615755 guilt (FEELING) a feeling of anxiety or unhappiness that you have because you have done something wrong, such as causing harm to another person "He suffered such feelings of guilt over leaving his children." http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=34902&dict=CALD Subjective feeling of having committed an error, offense or sin; unpleasant feeling of self-criticism. These result from acts, impulses, or thoughts contrary to one's personal conscience. http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd?guilt Guilt is not feeling. In the examples that I gave here, some dictionaries also describe it that way. The first definition by encarta-msn is clear about it: "awareness of wrongdoing". It may be accompanied by some feelings, but guilt is part of conscious awareness. Feelings and emotions are part of subconscious mind which is the opposite of conscious mind. I will give a real life example from the discussions on the topic here. Mr. PokkiTokki wrote "many of the other questions do not address the question" - the correct wording should have been "other answers". Such a writing is due to rush of emotions from subconscious mind. When a person becomes aware of his wrongdoing after he commits it, that awareness is guilt. It is the conscious mind that tells him about what he wrote out of "impulse which is contrary to his personal conscience." A person who is driven by the subconscious mind most of the time, a stubborn criminal for example, will rarely experience guilt. No metaphysical problem is more vigorously discussed by the present day psychologists than that of mind and body. Most of us assume that all thinking takes place in the brain. It is only since a few decades that psychologists are treating body and mind as one unit called psycho-somatic system. This led to the development of new subjects like Psycho-biology and Psycho-neuro-immunology. Modern medicine has recognized the brain-spine system as one unit, but it does not assign thinking functions to any part of the spine. It is now known that even when a considerable amount of brain is removed through surgery, a person can still have reasonable mental abilities and can lead a near normal life. Modern research found that one region in brain can perform several tasks and so can compensate for the loss of damage of another region. On the contrary, surgical removal of some 'safe' parts from womb of women is known to cause problems of mind like dementia. Then, what are the components of mind and where are they located? Indians put their hand on the chest when they say "I am saying this from the depths of my Manas". Manas (rational mind) is a common word used in India, and no one shows his head when he uses that word. The Europeans have an esoteric tradition that mind exists independently of the physical brain, and thoughts become known to a person through the brain. [The Hutchinson Encyclopedia, The topic on "mind", Computer CD Version, 2002] During the 1970s, neurologists became increasingly dissatisfied with the epiphenomenalism theories of mind and brain. More scientists came to suspect that mind and brain were different in a kind and could interact. [Donald Watson, A Dictionary of Mind and Spirit, Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, 1991.] Epiphenomenalism has had few friends. It has been deemed "thoughtless and incoherent" (Taylor 1927, 198), "unintelligible" (Benecke 1901, 26), "quite impossible to believe" (Taylor 1963, 28) and "truly incredible" (McLaughlin 1994, 284). The resistance stems from the fact that many think that if epiphenomenalism were correct, we could not be the kind of being we are and we could not occupy the place in the world we occupy. We would instead be at the mercy of our brains and we would have to say that our actions are all our brains' actions and that ultimately "we" have nothing to do with them. http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/epipheno.htm#H5 Scientists are not sure how the so called emotional mechanism of the brain works. [The Diagram Group, The Brain: A User's Manual, Berkley Books, New York, 1983, p. 215.] Some modern philosophers wrote that emotion has a strong physical component which is primarily felt in the body [Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Yogi Impressions, Mumbai, 2004, p. 20.] Some modern writers of books on mind-control described 'emotion' as energy of body in motion. The very meaning of the word 'emotion' is given in some dictionaries as that which causes physiological changes and prepares the body for immediate vigorous action. This effect is attested by many painters and music composers who felt intense sensation in private organ when they created master pieces. Hystera in Greek means 'womb'. The Hindu Upanishads say that thinking takes place in centers located along the spine. Information received through perception organs, and thoughts a person has using those perceptions are stored in the brain. The computer analogy for it is - the spine is the CPU where information processing takes place and brain is the hard disk which stores that information. I have published an article on this topic in India in August 2006. An expanded version of that article is available in blog - URL of it is available in my profile page.

I don't believe there is a process of feeling guilt, it is a sudden emotion that overcomes you when you have done something wrong. The process begins after you are conscientious of guilt and must over come it.

i believe guilt comes from conscience, which comes from an divine creator that resembles himself in you. IE. God is trying to get your attention, so that you can get rid of your sin, casting it onto Jesus on the cross- so that you may walk in freedom and communion with him. Because he loves you and doesn't want you to feel guilt or any burden of sin - thats why he brought jesus. PS. it feels completely satisfying and GOOD to be in communion with Him. :)

Action - outcome - realistion - guilt

Doing something you believe wrong?! ;-)