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Guided meditation: Noticing the feeling tone

Good evening. Welcome, welcome. Wherever you might be, whomever you might be, a warm welcome.

So we'll do a little bit of a guided meditation.

Coming into our meditation posture in a relaxed, easy manner. Not forcing some stiffness, but not being cavalier or casual—in terms of half-heartedness, maybe, is the better word. And can we sit, whether that's literal or metaphorical, can we sit and know that we're sitting?

What does this body sitting feel like right now? Think about the body in just a general sense, noticing the posture. Noticing the pressure of whatever it is we're sitting on, pressure against the body. And maybe noticing a general mood of the body. We could think of this in terms of energy. Does it feel like there's too much energy, restlessness, wanting to go, wanting to do anything except sit here? Not enough energy, getting tired and drowsy? Or maybe we're like Goldilocks, there's enough, it's just right. Just enough energy.

And we can also tune into the more specifics about the body. And for this guided meditation, we'll take a particular approach. That is, we'll do a scan of the body, just noticing where there are pleasant sensations. The pleasantness might be very subtle. Maybe the hands are touching something smooth. Maybe it feels good to be grounded, rooted, connected to whatever it is you're sitting on. Maybe it feels nice to have this spine upright.

I'm kind of jumping all around the body. Sometimes it's helpful to do a scan from the top of the head down to the feet, just noticing the pleasant sensations.

Sometimes it's helpful to use a little label: pleasant. You don't have to do that if it feels too cumbersome, but it can be helpful.

Feeling the smoothness of the breath, perhaps, as being pleasant. Maybe there's a little bit of a pleasant sensation with the stretching that happens with breathing.

And we can do the same type of scan, except this time noticing the unpleasant sensations. Maybe there's a knee that's a little uncomfortable. We can scan from the top of the head, taking our time, not in any hurry, and going down, noticing what's a little bit unpleasant, or maybe greatly unpleasant.

Can we do this in a relaxed, easy manner? We don't have to fix anything. We don't have to make anything happen. We're just categorizing the different sensations, experiences. Can we keep it simple? Just unpleasant. No need to go into the story about how you have to fix it, or why it's unpleasant. Just unpleasant.

And then can we do this exercise of a body scan one more time, noticing what is neither pleasant nor unpleasant? What is neutral? These sensations might be very quiet. Sometimes we might be a little bit lost. What do you mean neutral? Earlobes most often are neutral, unless they were recently pierced. Or elbows. The back of the arms in general. Without straining, without pushing, just noticing neutral sensations.

And then just open it up to noticing whatever sensations there are, and noticing whether they're pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Neutral.

You might feel that as we gently label our experience, sensations as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, it really simplifies our experience. Kind of disrupts the momentum of story-making or the proliferation of thoughts. Just by saying, "Oh, this is unpleasant," supports the ending of this feeling that it has to be different. No, it's just unpleasant.

This simplifying might create some spaciousness in our experience, less busyness in our experience.

Simplifying our experience. Just noticing pleasant, unpleasant, neutral sensations can be a way in which we can kind of settle down. It takes a little bit of attention, a little bit of quietness to notice the sensations, the affective, the hedonic quality of the sensations, and that way can simplify and make more spacious our experience.

And that way our capacity to be with difficult experiences increases. As we learn this skill of simplifying them down to pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and this way of increasing our capacity helps us help others. So that we might be available either in the midst of our own difficulties or more general difficulties, societal difficulties. Or maybe we could be available for them also, for others. In this way, our practice supports not only ourselves but others. So may our practice be for the benefit of all beings everywhere.

The Tone of Vedana

Good evening, good evening, and a warm welcome. I'm happy to be here, to be practicing with you all.

Tonight I'd like to continue on this topic that I started last week, this idea of vedanā^[1]. This Pali word that sometimes gets translated as "feeling." But really, we tend to think of feeling as emotions, and it doesn't mean emotions. It means the hedonic quality. It's not a word that I usually use in my vocabulary, "hedonic," but essentially is it how is it related to pleasure? Is it pleasant, is it unpleasant, or is it neither pleasant nor unpleasant? I think the word hedonia maybe comes from the Greek, but hedonism right we often think about.

So vedanā, this Pali word, probably the best translation is "hedonic tone." That translation is the best descriptor, but there's something clunky in hedonic tone. In my ear, it sounds a little bit too much like demonic, and I don't want to be talking about demonic tone. So vedanā. This is maybe best left untranslated. Sometimes it's translated also as "feeling tone." I think that's a little bit better than feeling, just because so much in English we start to think sad, lonely, happy, but that's not what vedanā is pointing to.

Last week I talked about how practicing with vedanā is a way that can really help simplify our experiences. And also I talked a little bit about pleasant experiences, and how we are often chasing—or maybe chasing is the right word—after pleasant experiences thinking that they will be sources of lasting happiness, and of course they aren't, and the disappointment that arises with that.

I'd like to build on that and maybe flesh out some of the things that I talked about last week. Some of you may know that vedanā actually shows up quite a number of places in the Buddhist teachings, but we don't teach about it. Like those of us that sit in the dharma seat tend not to teach about it that much. I'm not exactly sure why, except that there isn't as much material in the suttas, there isn't as much stories around vedanā, but I'd like to spend a little time here to talk some more about it.

Some of you might know that, I think I mentioned this last week also, that vedanā is one of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[2]. So the discourse that is most associated with the mindfulness practice that we do today talks about establishing mindfulness in four different arenas. The first one is the body, in which we often are teaching about the breath and the body. The second one is vedanā, feeling tone, hedonic tone. The third one is the mind, mindfulness of mind, and the fourth one is dharmas, and that gets translated different ways, phenomenon or something like this.

So we have these four ways in which mindfulness is established, or four arenas in which mindfulness might be established. And as it happens, both at Spirit Rock and IMS and IRC, IMC, all of these meditation centers when we teach mindfulness we often teach mindfulness in four areas: breath, body, emotions, and thoughts. So it would be easy to think four foundations of mindfulness in the discourses, four areas of mindfulness being taught at these retreat centers by a lot of different dharma teachers, but they're not exactly the same. Because in the foundations of mindfulness we have vedanā, but over here we have emotions. By saying "over here" I mean what the dharma teachers are often talking about.

Vedanā is non-emotions. In the time of the Buddha they categorized their experiences differently and they didn't really have emotions the way that we understand them. Of course they had emotions, but the way they talked about them and understood them was different than how we do now. So I know plenty of people that have been confused about this, thinking, well there's these four areas and these four foundations, but they're not equivalent.

I'll say that vedanā is also in the twelve links of dependent arising. This is also an area in which we don't teach that much about. There's a number of reasons for this. I'll say for myself personally, one is because twelve is a big number to do in a dharma talk. To list through twelve things seems like a great endeavor, and it just I don't think would be helpful or fruitful to go through twelve things. But what is helpful is just the principle of dependent arising, as opposed to the twelve links of dependent arising. And the principle of dependent arising, this won't be surprising to anybody here: when one thing arises, it causes something else to arise. When A arises, B arises. When A goes away, B goes away. So the principle of dependent arising we teach, but not so much the twelve links.

And also vedanā is one of the aggregates. Another topic that we don't teach that much about. Maybe this will be a dharma talk that's only about what we don't teach, and I won't actually teach you anything, I'll just list all the things that we don't teach about. The aggregates is a clunky translation, but is one way that we might understand all of our experiences, different components of our experiences. So that's just a kind of introduction to say vedanā, even though it's really important and can be a really powerful practice and really supportive for lots of freedom—and I'll talk a little bit more about this today—despite that, it's often not talked about in dharma talks.

I talked a little bit about how vedanā is not emotions and it's often we could think about it as hedonic tone. But I will say that it arises in response to sense contact. What that means is whenever the eye sees a sight, when an ear hears a sound, the tongue tastes a flavor, something like this. So sense contact is when the senses have contact with some object. Whenever that occurs, the next beat is vedanā. Whenever the eye sees something, the next beat is, is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?

Some people will say that neutral takes up the majority of our experiences that we don't notice. There's so many things that are just details that we're not paying attention to. But I'm talking about sense contact, eyes and sight, but also mental events. Some of you know that in the Buddhist tradition, the mind is also a sense door. So any mental event also can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

And vedanā arises, it's just completely natural. We can't stop it, it's something that just happens. And I would say that it's a combination of some physiological and psychological aspects. Or whether we assign the label pleasant, unpleasant, or neither to an experience. That is, if we injure ourselves, I think probably biologically, physiologically that's unpleasant. Smelling rotting food is unpleasant. That's kind of like a biological response, being hungry, these types of things.

But there's also a psychological aspect in terms of what mood we're in or what else is happening. Those that know me know that I am committed to my coffee practice in the morning, if we can call it that. There's something about a cup of coffee in the morning that I find very pleasant. I just really enjoy having a cup of coffee in the morning. I like the taste, I like the temperature, I kind of like the ritual of making coffee. It's a pleasant experience. Probably that little bit of caffeine too has a role there. And I often will have a second cup of decaf coffee not long after the first cup. Sometimes it's just nice to have a cup of something warm in the mornings, even in the summer. But a third cup of coffee? The coffee tastes bitter. It just doesn't, I don't know, it's not as pleasant. It's the same sense experience, right? My tongue is tasting the same flavors, but it's no longer as pleasant, it's a little bit unpleasant. That third cup of coffee just doesn't... I don't know why exactly, but so I would say that's kind of pointing towards some of the psychological elements too, to vedanā.

So it's not entirely our biological response, like amoebas of course they move towards pleasant things that are nourishing and supportive and away from toxic things. I would say that's more biological, but we also have this element that we add to it. And teasing apart what part is psychological and what part is physiological probably isn't important. But what is important is to notice that the pleasantness or the unpleasantness or the neutrality does not lie within the coffee. It lies within the experiencer. It's not inherent to the coffee. It's inherent to the one who is having that experience, to the sensation. Or maybe I shouldn't say inherent, it's associated with it.

Sometimes we think that some things are just always bad, they're always unpleasant. But recognizing that maybe other people in other conditions might think that they're fine. Food is a great example. Different cultures, right? Those people who were not raised in America, my experience has been, do not like peanut butter. But those of us who grew up in America love peanut butter. I don't know if we love it, but you know, for me it's associated with childhood and some goodness of some sort.

So vedanā is this pleasant, unpleasant, neutral to experiences. But I think it's important to recognize that whether something is pleasant or unpleasant does not belong to the object out there, it belongs to the experiencer, the subject here.

And so one other way that we might think about vedanā is because it happens right after a sense contact, the next beat is a way in which what the body is experiencing, whether that's a sight or the tactile sensation as I rub my hands together for example, it's a little bit warm and pleasant. And then in the next beat is the vedanā: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. That's a mental event, the pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. So vedanā in some way is this link between what the body is doing, what the body is experiencing, and the mental experience. It's not the only link, but it's a big part of it. So in some ways, vedanā is the intermediary of how the body and the mind are connected.

And all of us know this, right? When there's an unpleasant experience in the body, the mind might start speeding up and trying to find a solution or something like this. Or when there's an unpleasant thought in the mind, then the body might have a facial expression that's a frown or a furrowing of the brow or something like this. So vedanā is often the link, maybe if I could use that word, I said intermediary, kind of like the medium, the way in which body and mind are connected. And so this can be a key way to understand how, if we're going to make this distinction between body and mind, how they really are connected also.

And so one reason why we might think that the mind likes to do this, that vedanā pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, is because it's a way to categorize our experience. It's a way to maybe make sense of all these things that are arising that we're experiencing at once, and of course we only pay attention to a subset of them. But the mind uses vedanā as kind of a filtration device. Not so much paying attention to neutral. We know that there's a negativity bias, paying more attention to what's unpleasant because that might be harmful. And then paying attention to what's pleasant. So it's one of the initial filtration devices that the mind does.

And it's perfectly normal. It's like beneath consciousness, this labeling. It's not something that we're actively doing. And so the goal of practice is not to stop it from happening, not to make it be different, but just to notice that things are pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. To use this as a place where we can bring some mindfulness.

And I'll unpack this a little bit more here in a moment, but I do want to say that when we do notice them, there's some things obviously that we'll notice. And the Buddha talked about them in this passage in the discourses where the Buddha says:

"Suppose there was a guest house. People come from the east, the west, the north, and the south and lodge there. Aristocrats, brahmins, merchants, and workers lodge there. In the same way, various feeling tones arise in this body: pleasant, painful, and neutral."

So just in the same way, checking in and out of a hotel, we could see there's just people coming from all these different ways. They check in, they check out. These types of people, that type of people. Tall people, short people, people wearing red shirts, people wearing blue shirts, or whatever it might be, right? There's different ways we can categorize them. So another way we might think of vedanā as a way the mind uses to help make sense or help prioritize our experiences.

But importantly, they come and go. They come and go, of course they do. Just like people checking in and out of the hotel. We can't control them and there's different types, and they come and go. So in some ways, recognizing when we are noticing vedanā, we'll notice that they are arising and passing away. And noticing the impermanence of them can really affect our relationship to them. Because they are ephemeral, not only are they coming and going, but they're insubstantial. They're likened to bubbles on the surface of water when it's raining in a body of water. Of course we don't grab bubbles expecting them to be there. Vedanā is the same way.

So noticing that they are impermanent, coming and going, noticing that they're insubstantial, they're not really tangible, there's nothing really there to grab onto just like a bubble, then we stop trying to get all tangled up with them. We just naturally—we don't have to make this happen, it just naturally happens—that we disengage in some kind of way. Maybe we're still a little bit engaged, but not as much. We're not as entangled. And it might be that we completely disengage from them.

So being mindful of them is a way that we can become a little bit less entangled. And why would we want to do that? Because in these twelve links of dependent arising, and probably you know this from your own experience without my having to tell you: vedanā conditions craving. That is, pleasant vedanā creates the conditions in which there's this leaning forward: "I want more." Unpleasant vedanā is pushing away: "I don't want," which is kind of the same, right? Aversion is just the flip side of desire. Aversion is desiring something different. And then neutral vedanā often leads to some boredom or not really connecting, and then there's often either this boredom, which is a form of aversion really, so in some ways we could think of that as being a type of craving. But boredom also, the mind often slips off and wants to go find something entertaining, so then it kind of slips into craving. So in this way, vedanā conditions craving.

Some of you might know that craving, the Pali word is taṇhā^[3], which is also understood as "thirst." So this type of demanding, this type of expectation, or I kind of like this word demanding that things be different. I want more, I want less. Something like this is push and pull with our experience.

And the teachings tell us, and our experience shows us, that this connection between something that's pleasant and full-blown craving, or even mild craving, is a place where we can practice. Why would we want to practice? Why would we want to get rid of craving? Maybe you all know this: craving leads to dukkha^[4]. It leads to suffering, right? Craving is this... maybe suffering is too strong a word, sometimes it is, but maybe it's just this general dissatisfaction. And I might even go so far as to say craving itself is a certain amount of dukkha. It's a kind of a contraction of "I want something." Just having that feeling is the opposite of a contentment, of an ease.

So a sense contact, whether that's what the eye sees or a sound that the ear hears, naturally gives rise to vedanā: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Vedanā gives rise to craving. Craving gives rise to dukkha, suffering.

And we can interrupt this momentum, this movement, with paying attention with vedanā. This is the place which, if we're aware of it, we can simplify it and it doesn't lead into craving. And I played around with this not too long ago when I had an unfortunate amount of dental work recently. And I remember thinking to myself, "This is unpleasant." Yeah, this is unpleasant. Not being a big fan of dental work, I don't know anybody that is, but just saying "this is unpleasant" kind of calmed down this feeling of "I have to get out of here, what's happening." You know, when something is really unpleasant it can often just grow and grow, but just to say "this is unpleasant," there's a way in which you could kind of let things calm down, quiet down, and disrupt that movement, that momentum to having this feeling like things have to be different. "Get me out of here," or whatever it might be. Whatever it might be.

It's striking how powerfully conditioned it is that when something is unpleasant to naturally have some aversion, to want to push it away. But it is a habit, and we can train ourselves to not have it be as strong. And probably all of you have experienced this with a meditation practice. That as the mind quiets, as the mind gets settled, our capacity to be with things that are either really pleasant—some of the joy and happiness that can arise in meditation—or some of what I call body dukkha, some uncomfortableness in the body that might arise, our capacity to just hold that and not have it lead into a storyline ("I gotta get out of here," "I want more of this," whatever it might be), our capacity to do that increases with practice, with meditation.

As we practice with noticing vedanā, and noticing the subtle vedanā and simplifying down to pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, it makes it so much easier to be with whatever is arising. And then we don't get so tangled up. And when we're less tangled up, then the intensity of whatever it is that we're experiencing calms down, goes a little bit down.

And it ends up it can be a very helpful cycle in which the less reactive we are, the less it promotes the "problem-ness," maybe I could say, out of the experience drains out. And in fact, that vedanā could switch. What's unpleasant can become pleasant when the mind is quiet. What's unpleasant can also become pleasant. We could play around with this. I know on some retreats I've had plenty of experiences when the mind is quiet, I'm just sitting, and I remember so clearly this one time having this thought like, "Wow, if I weren't meditating, this would be painful." But instead it just was kind of a fascinating experience, and just this recognition that it's not painful now, it's just a sensation. But if I weren't meditating, a different vedanā would get associated with it and therefore different craving.

So vedanā, this can be this really powerful place to practice. A, because it simplifies things, and as part of this simplification, it interrupts this momentum towards dukkha, this momentum towards unsatisfactoriness.

So I don't know how many times I said the word vedanā. Quite a few times as opposed to feeling tone or hedonic tone. But consider this as a place to practice. And in the guided meditation we could do this, we could practice just with the bodily experience. Just noticing: is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? And just giving a little label, a quick little label. And this way we can bring the problem-ness out of our experiences. We can simplify it down: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And may this be a support for your practice, so it can be a support for all beings everywhere. Thank you.