Last week’s introduction and overview of the second of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Feelings, was comprehensive but also dense so I wanted to circle back and talk a bit more about this important practice. First of all, feelings in the Buddhist context refer to the initial positive, negative, or neutral response we have to any input - physical or mental, from the external world or internally (thoughts, etc). Emotions are more complex and, thus, are included in the third Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Mind.
The beauty of being able to notice feelings or feeling tone (Vedana in Pali) is that we can discern the positive, negative, or neutral feeling tone before or just after the cloud of associations spring up to complicate the experience with thoughts and opinions. Sometimes the associations spring up so quickly we get both the feeling tone and the entire “story." This can be quite illuminating if we remember that the “story” is not inherent in the object of perception. As an example, I love dogs. My love of dogs is not inherent in dogs but has been conditioned by positive experiences of dogs in the past. So when I walk in the park and a dog bounds up to me, I am happy to see them - positive vedana or feeling tone with more complex feelings of happiness and various associations arising shortly thereafter. But if a dog starts running after me fast and coming from behind, the feeling tone is neutral to unpleasant. I feel a note of warning and turn to face the dog and come to a standstill. The aversion is accompanied immediately after by a memory of a dog which chased me from behind and bit me. So friendly dog approaching and dog chasing from behind will elicit two different kinds of vedana or feeling tone - both conditioned by past experience or associations.
The Pali word vedana has connotations of both feeling and knowing. So as Venerable Analayo says in his comprehensive book Satīpatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, “To contemplate feelings means quite literally to know how one feels, and this with such immediacy that the light of awareness is present before the onset of reactions projections, or justifications…” And later, “The systematic development of such immediate knowing will also strengthen one’s more intuitive modes of apperception, in the sense of the ability to get a feel for a situation or another person. This ability offers a helpful additional source of information in everyday life, complementing the information gained through more rational modes of observation and consideration."
Of course, the stronger feeling tones will break through the background noise of all the gradations of feeling tone from positive to neutral to negative we experience. But every experience that we encounter - internally or externally, mental or physical - will have a feeling tone.
The other important fact is that these feelings tones are conditioned. So they can be altered by other experiences around the same stimulus.
This may be especially noticeable around traumatic or disturbing events. My brother works on the far side of the Key Bridge in Baltimore. He crossed the bridge to come home from work barely two hours before the bridge was hit and felled by a tanker. Up to that point, I usually enjoyed bridges as I crossed them. Since I live on an island, the pleasant vedana is a response to the beautiful expanse of water that appears or the sense that I am nearing home or the sail boats out on the Bay, etc. Now I have a greater awareness that bridges are not indestructible, that they are very high up, and that they are what is between me and the water. So something that usually is a pleasant or at least a neutral vedana has now taken on a slight negative feeling tone. Since vedana is moment-by-moment arising with each new stimulus and the crossing of the bridge takes several minutes, the feelings tones can shift from one end of the spectrum to the other depending on what I see, hear, think, remember, etc. So my overall experience of the bridge crossing may depend on the frequency and intensity of positive or negative or neutral feeling tones.
As I wrote last week, the importance of discerning these feelings tones is that, without our awareness, they can condition or lead to grasping, clinging, and attachment, aversion and pushing away, or delusion. And this can color our experience of the world. If I think only of the Key Bridge when I am crossing a bridge, the crossing will be unpleasant and may condition the next crossing to be more unpleasant. Last week I talked with someone who is now much more anxious about crossing bridges that they were before the Key Bridge collapse.
This kind of “conditioning” occurs in every aspect of our lives and can determine whether we look forward to parties or hate them, like to sit in silence or find silence makes us restless, listen to the news regularly or find television news too disturbing. It can even create feedback loops in our own minds in which we have a negative feeling tone produced by a disturbing thought while we are engaged in an everyday activity and begin to fear that every day activity because we fear the negative feeling tone that arose the last time even though the experience of the everyday activity itself had been quite neutral for years.
Mindfulness of feelings tones begins to free us from the automatic conditioning these feelings initiate. It helps us notice when feeling tones lead in the direction of aversion or greed and returns to us the choice to decide when moving away from or toward different experiences is wholesome or unwholesome.
Even if we miss or are unmindful of the beginning of a sequence, mindfulness or awareness of feelings tones allows us to notice when we are suddenly engrossed in a pleasant fantasy. We might think back and realize the pleasant fantasy was prompted precisely because we encountered a painful experience minutes before either in the body or in a memory or thought. The move toward the fantasy was our automatic reaction to replace a painful experience with a pleasant one. This is an experience we can have during meditation or during any aspect of our lives.
To refrain the Buddha from Joseph Goldstein’s reference last week: “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure. [Here he means pleasure of the senses.] For what reason? Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”