Mindfulness 4 (vedan?)

In the Buddha’s eightfold path, Mindfulness is one of the areas to be developed through practice. Specifically, we’re encouraged to cultivate mindfulness based on four domains of experience:

In the Buddha’s teaching, “feeling” is not the same as emotion. Emotions involve physical and mental machinations, most often connected to a story.  Feeling (vedan?) is a pared-down, immediate, involuntary, preverbal response we have to any stimulation. Virtually all the time, we are experiencing attraction, aversion, or neither. Contact with what is pleasant to us is accompanied by a response of desire to continue the cause of that pleasantness; contact with what is unpleasant causes us to draw away. And sometimes we are just not engaged enough to register a response.

We are most often unaware of how our desires and aversions pull and push us throughout the day. Just as we might go for many hours without being mindful of our body or breath, our feelings (in the Buddha’s sense) usually move us to act before we can think about it. Until a feeling develops into an emotion that can be articulated, it generally remains a mysterious process. However, careful attention can reveal to us what our feeling is, how and when it arises, and mindfulness can expand our range of choices in how to act.

I may have told this story before, but it was a key moment in my own practice, so I hope it’s worth repeating. When I was on retreat in Myanmar, Sayadaw U Pandita held a group interview with English speakers. On this occasion, the Sayadaw asked me how I was doing (I’d recently arrived). I said, “Some things I like, some things I don’t”. He stopped me right there and said, “Stay with that. Stay with liking and not liking.” and that was the end of the instruction. Over the next couple of weeks, I tracked my feeling tone (vendan?) and the results were remarkable; they have lasted through to today.

One friend developed a conceptual tool for tracking feeling tone. He called it a “vendan?-meter”, to help us notice whether we were inclining towards or away from whatever was happening in that moment. In that way, if we catch aversion rising, possibly crossing over into irritation or anger, we could step back and decide against going further along that path. Similarly, if we sensed a response to pleasantness developing into lust or greed, we could take a breath and interrupt that process.

A key characteristic of feeling is that it is fluid and temporary; it can change in the time it takes to breathe in and out. If we are increasingly mindful of our bodies and feelings, our ability to live fully in the present will grow exponentially.