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Guided Meditation: Being with Feeling Tone; Dharmette: Knowing Feeling Tone (Vedana) Clarifies Experience - Dawn Neal

The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Being with Feeling Tone

So lovely, lovely, good to see you all. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dawn Neal, and I'm here picking up a little bit on the themes that Gil¹ spoke about in the last number of weeks in his introduction to mindfulness series: breath, body, emotions, and thoughts. This week I'll be offering a series on the core elements of mindfulness, which are feeling tones and ways of working with awareness and attention. So that's a very brief overview of the week.

Today, the first of these elements of mindfulness I'll be covering is vedanā²: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feeling tone. That is a very, very simple kind of overlay or assessment our systems make about the raw sensory data of life.

So that's the basic overview, and I'll ask you to start to settle into meditation. I'm loving seeing the greetings from people in Santa Cruz especially. But maybe weave back and forth a little bit; get yourself in balance over your hips, or in balanced alignment. If you're lying down, have your spine and your head aligned.

Just by way of introducing the meditation and talking about how feeling tone is a really simple, sometimes powerful way we can relate to experience, you may want to just notice throughout the meditation if you're leaning in or leaning away from anything in your experience because it feels good or because it doesn't feel good. This can be physical, mental, or emotional. Remember, for the purpose of mindfulness, any object is as good as any other object of attention. Unpleasant experience isn't wrong or bad, it just is. Pleasant experience is lovely; it's not inherently a better thing to pay attention to for the purpose of mindfulness.

So settling into meditation. Perhaps starting with two or three deeper, slower breaths, and in these deeper, slower breaths, allowing the exhale to be longer than the inhale.

Noticing as you settle in, how the breath is today. Is it pleasant? Maybe tune into the pleasant. If it's unpleasant, I call that "cardboard breath." Just notice. Noticing that perhaps it's neither; it's neutral, or some undefined feeling in between.

Allowing the breathing to be natural. Maybe doing a quick scan in through your body, and just noticing throughout your sensory experience of your body areas that are pleasant, unpleasant, or in that vast territory in between. Just experience. No need to hang out there, just allowing.

And then tuning into whatever anchor of attention makes the most sense for you. The breath coming and going like waves. The body sensations coming and going, scintillating like water. Or perhaps it's ambient sound. Tuning in and resting for a while in the lived sensations of breath, of being alive.

Allowing yourself to abide in this moment just as it is.

Tuning in again to whatever sensation or experience is predominant, and simply notice its tone. Its feeling tone. Is it pleasurable, an enjoying, savoring? Not pleasant? Allowing. Is it neither? Simply being with. Noticing any little motions towards or away in your being. Any resistance, any wanting. And also noticing the simplicity of allowing, just being.

Allowing the mind, the heart, to rest in experience, and noticing any movement towards or away. Perhaps gently mentally noting "pleasant," "unpleasant," and allowing.

Noticing if your attention is pulled by a new sensation or sound. Noticing the quality of that: is it pleasant, not so pleasant, or just is?

And in the last remaining moment of this meditation, the invitation is to notice that there's a part of the mind, the heart, unmoved, unaffected by whether what is flowing through is pleasurable or not. Perhaps noticing the quality of mindful awareness, just simple attention on whatever is unfolding in this moment.

And as we bring this meditation to a close, casting your inner gaze on any moments of clarity, or mindfulness, ease, and appreciating them. And casting your inner gaze outwards to the others in your life. Those close or on the margins of your life, those near, those far away, known and unknown, and wishing them well. Making the determination that this practice be of benefit to the others in your life as well as yourself. May the benefits of our practice here together ripple outwards.

Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette: Knowing Feeling Tone (Vedana) Clarifies Experience

So good morning again, Sangha³. Special good morning to those of you who may have tiptoed in late into the YouTube chat, into the international meditation Sangha we have here together. It's a delight to be with you, and I'm just going to jump in now with our theme for the day and for the week.

The theme this week is mindfulness of the different ways our systems can know experience, elements of mindfulness that will complement the introduction series Gil has been doing for the last number of weeks now. The first of these elements, today's topic, is very simple: it's vedanā, feeling tone, the tonality or the quality of direct experience. In Buddhist teachings, all experience is categorized at its most basic level in one of three broad categories: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This is a huge territory that we often ignore because it's not interesting enough, but it gets really interesting if you really be with it.

Vedanā itself is the Pali⁴ word for this feeling tone, and it's related to the word veda or vid, to know, to experience. It is this simple, direct way of knowing present⁵ experience. Okay, so it's simple. Why does it matter?

Well, noticing feeling tone in practice is a key place that prevents getting lost in wanting or not wanting, desire or aversion. It keeps us from ending up on those "party boats" or "war boats" that Gil often talks about with thinking, where an entire flow of thought will just take us away from our place at the riverbank—that solid place of mindfulness—and get us lost.

Noticing feeling tone can also clarify how thoughts are thoughts, and emotions are emotions, and the impact that a thought or emotion has on us in a really simple way. Here's an example of how vedanā can shift based on context and what's happening: imagine yourself on a beautiful day, taking a hike or a walk in the woods. Sun is dappling through the shade of the trees, the birds are singing, it's an idyllic temperature, and it's just gorgeous, luxurious green foliage with little waterfalls. This can be highly pleasant, right? And it can be really unpleasant if you're completely lost. "I don't know where I'm going!" All of a sudden, my mental feeling tone takes over, and the birds are still there, and the dappled light is still there, but there's anxiety there maybe, and there's a generally unpleasant sense.

So that's the power of feeling tone: the context, our attitude, and our emotions can shift feeling tone in many, many kinds of experiences, and I'll talk more about that later this week. But meanwhile, it's just humbling to see for me how often my experience and actions, and other people's actions, are shaped by pleasant or unpleasant in a moment. In a sit, like we just had, or in a situation, how often do we go through gyrations, move around, change things, just to avoid an unpleasant interaction, person, or conflict? And what lengths do we go to to get or keep just a little bit more pleasantness? It's kind of amazing.

So, there's how we practiced together with feeling tone today, and just to recap that a little bit, it's something to simply notice. And it's baked into our systems. It turns out that this movement towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant is kind of reflexive; it's automatic for most sentient life. Single-celled organisms move towards sugar and away from a prod. Well, guess what? You and I can be very similar to an amoeba in this way. We move towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant.

This simple, basic movement towards and away happens at the level of physical movement, like from a hot stove. And it also happens at a very subtle level of movement in our minds, our attention. I might suddenly be touched by a really unpleasant memory or thought and pull away from it. Or conversely, become completely hooked by it and build a whole stack of cards, a huge story about it, maybe casting blame outwards or self-recrimination inwards. And it's possible instead to just tune into that feeling, bring a sense of inquiry, a nonverbal question mark—"Oh, unpleasant"—and the whole system relaxes.

This sort of explains another reason vedanā can be important. Not only can it prevent getting lost in thought or help us notice the impact of thought and emotion, it can also cut through whatever is extra. Even fully lost in fantasy, or vengeful thinking, or "poor me," the simplicity of recognizing pleasant, unpleasant, or neither can cut through the thicket of confusing thoughts and clear the air. "Oh, it's that simple. This is pleasant. I don't have to think about it fifty times during my meditation. I can just notice it's pleasant."

Simply being with feeling tone gives us alternatives, choice, and space on how to respond wisely rather than reflexively. It can take us back to that powerful place of being able to observe the river of experience flowing by, versus being caught up in it. It can take us back to simple mindfulness awareness. And while mindful awareness may seem neutral, over time it can become a very pleasant abiding, especially when we consider the alternatives.

So, to summarize: vedanā, feeling tone, is a simple way of parsing experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It can prevent all kinds of unhelpful stories, projections of blame, distortions, "poor me," to simply walk it down to that level. Yes, the space between stimulus and response. It can cut through the confusion of mental activity, fantasy, fear-based projection, whatever collapses the whole house of cards.

Noticing vedanā can clarify how thoughts or emotions move through us as processes, and that in itself is a form of freedom. It can begin to help us recognize that, "Oh, you know, thinking about that ice cream ten or fifteen times in this meditation seemed pleasant, but it's actually kind of causing tension in my body. That's unpleasant." It can clarify our relationship to our attitude toward what's happening, and that really helps to understand the cause and effect, the impact thoughts and emotions have on our system, which in itself is a source of wisdom.

So that's my little wrap about vedanā, and we have just a few minutes left, so I thought rather than talking more, I won't be able to catch them all, but if there are a couple of questions people want to put into the chat, I might be able to answer one or two. So I'll give it a minute because there's a lag time on my end. Questions or comments are welcome in our remaining three minutes together.

Q&A

You're noticing in this moment what's pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Oh, these are great questions.

From Laura, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right: More about the relationship with the body and the thought process.

So basically, feeling tone applies to any physical sensation; it also applies to any thought, any emotion. So I might feel desire as very pleasant in a moment, and then notice that it's causing tension or contraction in my attention. I might notice more about how that desire causes tension in my shoulders, for example. So that's a short answer. I'm going to be going into this more and building on it, actually, in the next days.

Is pleasant versus unpleasant a judgment?

Well, sometimes it is. So this is a more subtle level; it can be an overlay or a judgment on experience. For example, if someone touches your shoulder, you don't know who. You might find it very pleasant if it's an old friend or a lover, or very unpleasant if it's a total stranger being presumptuous. So it can be contextually oriented, the pleasant or the unpleasant. And then there are things that pretty much all of us are going to find unpleasant, like that hot stove for example. So it's sometimes more basic and sometimes it's highly subjective.

If we're wired to run away from negative stimuli, why do we sometimes dwell on them?

That is one of the great mysteries of human life. Sometimes our minds have the idea that to keep us safe from the negative stimuli, we need to figure it out, we need to parse it out. So it can be helpful to again notice the unpleasantness of the dwelling, and that can help cut through the perseveration or the looping, or whatever it is.

Phil asks: What's the difference between vedanā and preference?

So there are layers there, and this is a profound question. Vedanā is simply the acknowledgment, the knowledge that something is pleasant or unpleasant. A microsecond later, a millisecond later, most of us have a judgment preferring the pleasant or pulling away from the unpleasant. So wanting and not wanting in the Abhidhamma⁶, in the Buddhist psychology, is a separate layer, but it is so close. It's worth noticing for yourself when pleasant and unpleasant can happen and not have a reaction. There are states of meditation, there are states of mind that allow equanimity to be there, where pleasant and unpleasant can just flow through, or when it can have that little subtle overlay of wanting and not wanting.

So I hope that that was helpful for all of you. I really appreciate the questions, and this is a profound topic actually. Those of you who are getting into sort of the amoeba level and the reflex level, there are ways of relating to this pleasant, unpleasant, and neither that can give us much more space and a kind of a profound level of equanimity if we're willing to be there with it simply. And that's building a muscle.

So that's all we have time for today. I will wrap some of these other questions into the rest of the Dharma talks because they're kind of a little bit cumulative. And just to briefly say that noticing vedanā helps cut through delusion. So maybe if you'd like, play with this over the next day, and tomorrow we will pick up on the next layer: attitudes of mind and heart.

So thank you all for your practice, and may our practice here together benefit ourselves and everyone around us. Joy to be with you, Sangha.