Mindfulness of Emotions (3 of 5) Emotions and Feelings

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Dharmette: Mindfulness of Emotions (3 of 5) Emotions and Balance. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 09, 2020. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Mindfulness of Emotions (3 of 5) Emotions and Feelings

Introduction

Good morning. Before I begin with a little talk, I wanted to mention that on Friday, we could have another one of these community meetings for our 7:00 a.m. community. After we finish at about 7:45, you can switch over to a Zoom link, and we'll have a meeting in which we can have some discussion. It's a nice time to add a little breakout group so you can meet each other. Those of you who have been part of this community for so long probably recognize each other from your names, in the chats, and in your comments. Then, maybe I can take some questions. Information about that Zoom link will be posted, and I'll talk more about it tomorrow.

The Four Frames of Reference

What we're doing this week is looking at mindfulness of emotions. We are doing so by looking at our emotional life through the four perspectives that the Buddha gave for the practice of mindfulness. Some people have called them the four frames of reference upon which to look at our experience, and for this week, that experience is emotions.

The first of these frames of reference is the body, breathing in the body, and being centered in the embodied, somatic experience of emotions. To have that as a skill, a capacity, and a habit gives us a tremendous amount of information about how we're feeling that's not readily available by just thinking about it or in the stories and ideas of what's happening.

It's also a way of helping the whole psychosomatic system we have to process emotions and let them be free within us. There is great beauty and power in allowing our emotions to live freely within us—to let them unfold and move without giving in to them, and maybe without expressing them. This means a kind of involvement with them, but letting them express themselves. One of the great places to do that is in meditation. You're sitting still, you're not going to move, but you allow it to course through you freely.

To do this, it helps if we can do it with some equanimity. This means we don't get pulled into our preferences, our likes and dislikes, what we take pleasure in and don't take pleasure in, and our wants and not-wants, because that complicates the situation. Instead, we just give the emotion freedom and then feel it more fully.

Mindfulness of Feeling (Vedanā)

To find that equanimity or freedom, one of the most significant teachings the Buddha gave about mindfulness and the path to freedom is to bring mindful awareness to feelings. In English, I think it's difficult to really define what an emotion is, and I think it's even more difficult to define feelings; some people see them as synonymous. Feelings are more the subjective experience of how an experience is perceived, taken in, or processed.

When the Buddha focused on mindfulness, he focused our attention on a particular aspect of feeling, the subjective experience, and that is the feelings that are either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This can be quite boring and even off-putting to hear a teacher just go through that list, but it turns out that a tremendous amount of human activity, motivation, and how we respond and react to the world is based on whether things are pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is based on whether we perceive them as such, hope they'll be pleasant, or are afraid they're going to be unpleasant.

This movement for and against the pleasant and unpleasant is something we need to see and understand. Becoming free of it allows our emotional life to have a freedom that it can't have if we are constantly for and against things. Some emotions arise specifically because we are for and against things^[1], which makes this very interesting.

In Buddhism, a distinction is sometimes made between afflictive emotions and beneficial emotions. The afflictive ones are hurt; they're "ouch." I think of this as the same distinction between surface emotions and emotions that well up from deep inside. The afflictive ones are more surfaced; they're more reactive to things. The deeper ones are not reactive, but are a wellspring of the goodness within us that has a chance to arise.

The Buddha tells us to pay attention to what he calls vedanā^[2]. It's usually translated as "feeling," which is probably accurate enough, provided that in the instructions for mindfulness, we understand it's a particular aspect of feeling emphasizing the pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Because it is a subjective experience, it's not inherent only in the experience being pleasant or unpleasant, but it also has to do with how we are in relationship to it and how we evaluate it. The same physical experience can be evaluated as pleasant or unpleasant depending on the judgments we have, the associations we have, and the memories we have.

I saw this very clearly when I lived in Davis, California. In the wintertime, there was a very cold Tule fog^[3]. I used to bike to school without any gloves, and by the time I came to class, I couldn't hold a pencil or pen to take notes because my hands were so frozen. It was bitingly cold. One day, I was biking, feeling that cold, and I remembered that as a kid I used to go skiing a few times. I had exactly the same feeling in my fingers, but it was exhilarating. Biking to college, I kind of felt pity for myself and thought, "Poor me."^[4] I could see how much the same sensation was evaluated differently and experienced as pleasant or unpleasant depending on that evaluation.

Taking Pleasure and Displeasure

Because the word vedanā is subjective, this idea of pleasant and unpleasant being purely in the experience is not quite right. Some people actually translate it as "liking and not liking." To me, that seems a little bit too far away from pleasant and unpleasant. Something that maybe sits between those two is the idea of "taking pleasure" or "taking displeasure."

The word "taking" means we're doing something. We're not completely innocent in experiencing even physical pain or what we take as being pleasure. We have some involvement with it—engagement, savoring it, resisting it, or doing something. Regardless of how it is, many times our behavior is motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of displeasure.

It's a little bit humbling, maybe sometimes a little embarrassing, to realize that very sophisticated people with sophisticated philosophies of politics or life—if you trace back the origin of the whole reason why they do anything, it turns out it's because there's something they took pleasure or displeasure in. It's humbling how that's really at the root, at the fulcrum, of so much that can be seen as quite sophisticated.

When we have emotions, there are a number of things to do with this. One is recognizing that the emotions themselves can be pleasant or unpleasant. If you want to let the emotions be free when we're meditating—which is the great laboratory for this exploration—you want to just allow the pleasantness or unpleasantness of it to just be there. Have no problem with it, with no leaning forward or leaning away.

We're not really free, as I like to say, if we're only free when we're comfortable. We're really free when we learn how to be free when things are uncomfortable, and we learn how to be free when things are pleasant and nice. Real freedom is not the freedom of just saying, "Oh boy, I get to ride the ride and enjoy this." To really begin studying an emotion, ask: Is it pleasant or unpleasant, and how can I be free and balanced with it?

Uncovering the True Source of Feelings

Does the emotion arise because I'm relating to something as pleasant or unpleasant? Do I like it or not like it? It's very fascinating to do this, because when you start tracing it back to where we're taking pleasure and displeasure, we find out that it might be different than what we thought.

Just to make up a silly example: maybe I take pleasure in making spinach smoothies^[5], but they don't actually taste that good. I really enjoy my spinach smoothies, but if I look to see where the pleasure is in them, it turns out the pleasure is in the idea that if I drink them, I'll be healthier. And if I'm healthier, I'll be able to lose weight. That idea of losing weight is where the pleasure is. I take pleasure in the idea that I might someday lose weight.

Where is the pleasure and displeasure? It could be that you have to go on a long trip and you really don't want to go. Where is the pleasure and displeasure? It turns out that what you find really unpleasant about the long drive is the problem of where to stop to go pee. The driving itself seems okay. It's about identifying where the pleasure is and what specifically is pleasant or unpleasant around the emotion.

Feelings of the Flesh and Not of the Flesh

Finally, the Buddha made a distinction between two general forms of this subjective experience of pleasant and unpleasant. One is what I call the surface, and the other is what I call what wells up from within. He called it feelings "of the flesh" and "not of the flesh."^[6]

Feelings of the flesh have to do with our reaction to things. The world does things, and we react to it. It gets cold, and we react with displeasure around it being cold; it's unpleasant. The temperature is nice and comfortable, and we react positively; we want more warmth or enjoy it. That would be of the flesh—that's more on the surface. Someone calls us an ugly name, and that's very unpleasant. We don't deny it, but those reactions are more on the surface.

What's in the wellsprings deep inside is the pleasantness that wells up from inside: compassion, peace, calm, and joy. These are emotions and feelings that are not in response and reactivity to what goes on in the world, but are really coming from being settled, calm, open, and free. We discover that it's possible to have peace within, calm within, and joy within while the circumstances around us are unpleasant.

When we see that difference, it's freeing. Many people don't see that difference, and so when things are unpleasant in the world, it's almost like they are unpleasant personally. We identify so closely with it. When we realize it's more just a surface of circumstances, and inside there are wellsprings of peace, joy, love, and compassion, then we can experience an unpleasant situation and not be identified with it. We don't become the displeasure.

This is a very important teaching around emotions: to really start looking at the pleasantness, the unpleasantness, and taking pleasure or not taking pleasure, and asking where that is working. As we get more settled and less pulled into that world of reactivity, we also notice a different kind of pleasantness—the pleasantness of the inner wellspring of our goodness.

Thank you, and I look forward to continuing this tomorrow.