Moon PointingGuided Meditation: Sensing Not Thinking; Dharmette: Vedanā (1 of 5) Introduction to Feeling Tones
- Date:
- 2021-07-05
- Speakers:
- Gil Fronsdal [Talks] [@AudioDharma]
- Location:
- Insight Meditation Center [Talks] [@YouTube]
- Generation:
- 2026-08-06 (gemini-3-pro-preview) [Raw Markdown] [YouTube Video]
- Keywords:
This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Guided Meditation: Sensing Not Thinking
Let's begin our practice by finding a comfortable and stable posture. As you settle in, gently close your eyes and allow your awareness to drop down into the physical body. So often, we spend our lives caught up in the stream of our thoughts. Today, we are going to practice a shift from thinking to sensing.
Take a few deep, intentional breaths. Notice the physical sensations of the breath as it enters and leaves the body. Feel the expansion of the chest and the subtle movements in the abdomen. As you sit here, simply feel the weight of your body resting on the cushion or the chair.
When you notice that the mind has wandered back into thinking—which it naturally will—there is no need to judge it. Just gently acknowledge the thought, and kindly return your attention to the direct experience of sensing. Ground yourself in the present moment through the raw physical sensations of sitting and breathing.
Dharmette: Vedanā (1 of 5) Introduction to Feeling Tones
Today, we are starting a short series exploring the topic of Vedanā[1], which is generally translated as feeling tone. In Buddhist psychology, Vedanā is an immediate, intuitive quality that arises with every experience. Whenever we encounter a sensory input or a thought, it is instantly accompanied by a feeling tone that is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Understanding these feeling tones is incredibly important because they are often the immediate trigger for our habitual reactions. When a pleasant feeling tone arises, the mind has a strong tendency to grasp onto it, to want more of it. When an unpleasant feeling tone arises, the immediate reaction is usually aversion, resistance, or pushing it away. Neutral feeling tones tend to lead to spacing out or a kind of dull delusion.
By bringing our mindfulness to the level of Vedanā, we can create a crucial gap between the feeling tone itself and our automatic reactions to it. Instead of being blindly pushed around by our conditioning, we learn to meet our experience with a steady and balanced awareness. This practice helps us cultivate equanimity, freeing us from being constantly buffeted by the Eight Worldly Winds[2]. We begin to see how deeply feeling tones influence our states of mind, and we discover a profound freedom in simply knowing them for what they are.
Vedanā: A Pali word often translated as "feeling" or "feeling tone." It refers to the basic pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality of any experience, rather than complex emotional states. ↩︎
Eight Worldly Winds (or Conditions) describes four pairs of universal opposites that constantly buffet human experience, keeping us bound to suffering unless met with wisdom and equanimity: Gain and Loss, Fame and Disrepute, Praise and Blame, and Pleasure and Pain. ↩︎