This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Vedana (Feeling Tone) of Thoughts; Dharmette: Internal Wise Speech. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everyone. It’s a delight to see all the comments. I read them all, and I really appreciate them. And it’s great seeing some very old friends there too. So good day, good morning, afternoon, evening for some.
We’ll go ahead and start with a little bit on feeling tones, or vedana1 of thinking. Vedana is a Pali word that’s translated as “feeling tone.” It’s a very fundamental way that we experience the world through our senses and through our mind. When a sensation arrives, it’s either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Some people call it neutral. It’s immediate; it happens right away, and it’s much simpler than an emotion.
It’s important because this is how clinging arises. We experience something pleasant, and if we don’t pay attention, we often just want more of it, and we start grasping and trying to get more. But staying mindful at the level of the feeling tone can keep us from grasping at what’s pleasant, at what we enjoy. And conversely, the same is true if something’s unpleasant; it’s very easy to fall into wanting to push it away, getting rid of it.
For the first 10 minutes of this meditation, we’ll emphasize noticing the feeling tone of our experience, just as simple as what we feel: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. And don’t worry about being correct. Sometimes it’s like, “Well, it’s almost pleasant,” or, you know, that’s fine. Sometimes it’s subtle. It’s really what you notice now, not whether you label it correctly. And sometimes it changes. The same warmth that felt really good a moment ago can feel uncomfortable. So however it is, just notice this moment: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. And just try to do this in a relaxed way, without adding too much to the meditation. So we’ll do just the first 10 minutes, we’ll focus on this.
Let’s take a comfortable but alert posture, settling into our seat, gently closing the eyes. And begin by taking a few deep breaths, and with each exhale, relaxing a little bit more. Relaxing into your cushion or chair, to the earth that supports us all.
Now, allowing the breath to return to normal, you might get a sense of the whole body and allow the attention to meander freely throughout the body, relaxing any obvious tensions. You might check the head, the face, the shoulders, the belly, the hands, whatever can be relaxed.
Now, finding the breath within your body, allowing your attention to rest on the breath, just settling into the rhythm of the breath.
Now shift the attention to notice the mood of the mind, the mind state, just a larger environment of the mind in which all the sensations of the breathing of the body are occurring. How does the mind feel? Is it tense or relaxed, spacious or contracted, tired or alert, calm or agitated? However it is, just noticing it. Is there resistance or accepting? You don’t need to pick any words, just notice how it feels.
Now shift the attention back to the sensations of breathing, allowing the sensations to come and go, but briefly notice the feeling tone of the breath. It can change with every inhale and exhale. Is this inhale pleasant right now? Is it unpleasant or neither?
If any other compelling physical sensations arise, also briefly notice their feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, neither.
And just for the next couple of minutes, if any thinking becomes obvious, notice if it’s pleasant or unpleasant. Are you enjoying the thinking? Is it pleasant? Is there some stress there? Is it unpleasant? And it can easily change from one to the other. See if you can observe these feeling tones without getting carried away by the content of the thoughts or by any reaction to the thoughts. If no significant thinking arises, just rest on the breath.
Now we can just return to keeping it very simple, returning to the rhythm of the breath. But maybe your mind will notice a little bit more easily the pleasant and unpleasant qualities that arise with all our sensations, all of our thoughts. Just resting in our breath.
If your attention has drifted or gotten lost, just gently welcome it back home.
This morning, I’m going to talk a little bit about internal wise speech, and also how vedana, the feeling tone of our inner voice, affects us.
Vedana is that our experience is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. And we tend to cling to the pleasant and push away the unpleasant, and usually not even notice the neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But as the mind slows down, it’s much easier to see that feeling tone of our sensations, and we can relax into them, however they are, and not get pulled into them. Life is filled with unpleasant sensations; they’re not going to go away. It’s not like we can manipulate our life for things to always be pleasant. So the idea is not to have one over the other, but to be at peace with however those sensations are.
But one of the reasons we get caught in our thinking is that we’re unaware of the feeling tone of our thinking. Worrying and negative judgment thoughts, regrets—they tend to be unpleasant. Thoughts like anticipation, maybe thinking about loved ones, gratitude—they tend to be pleasant. And when we get into our thinking, it can often come in patterns of thinking for many of us. And the patterns we get caught by, for instance, in particular during meditation.
So some of us really fall into planning. We might plan and replan the same thing many, many times. Now, planning in itself can be pleasant or unpleasant, and it’s helpful to know what’s feeding the pattern. I like to plan; often planning is fun—planning a project, planning a vacation, maybe planning what we’ll do later that day. And sometimes we may do this during meditation because we’re bored, which is unpleasant. It’s slightly unpleasant. We tend to think there’s nothing happening, but something isn’t quite pleasant, and we become aversive to the boredom. We push it away by entertaining ourselves with planning. Or maybe we’re feeling really good, which is pleasant, and when we feel good in our daily lives, we’re used to doing something with that energy, and so we want to plan what we’re going to do next. So we’re excited, and so we get caught by the feeling good.
But planning can also be fueled by anxiety, by trying to control things. It’s usually unpleasant and usually not useful. You know, maybe we’re having friends over for lunch, and we need to plan the menu, and we’ve already sort of planned the menu, but then we find ourselves doing it over and over and over again, all the details. There can be a tension, a compulsiveness to this kind of planning. In working with repetitive planning, it can be very helpful to notice if it’s pleasant or unpleasant. Am I enjoying it, or is it stressful?
So, in this path, most of us have put some effort into practicing wise speech in our daily lives and maybe have even refined our speech, making our speech kinder, more honest. Maybe we’ve noticed the separation we create between people when we’re gossiping, or how our heart feels more closed, or maybe how frequent complaining is stressful and fatigues the other person and actually decreases empathy, decreases the connection between people. You know how unskillful speech can strain relationships, it can isolate us, it can erode our sense of self-worth.
One way of thinking about wise thinking in meditation is as internal wise speech. And the effects of internal speech are even more extensive than our verbal ones. So the guidelines that the Buddha offered for wise speech can apply just as well to our internal speech, to our thinking. Though it’s not so easy to refrain from those things, one of the ways that can be helpful though is when the guidelines are expressed as four simple questions: Is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? Is it the right time?
Let’s take a little time to look at those. I’ve known practitioners who think to themselves, “I can’t concentrate,” and they’ll do that over and over in their minds, and they believe it. I had a student I worked with, and he told me, “I just can’t concentrate. I just get lost constantly.” So I asked him to close his eyes and pay attention to three breaths and then open his eyes. And lo and behold, he was able to do that. But the story that “I’m someone who can’t concentrate” just discouraged him, stopped him from applying himself. And even if you didn’t get past three breaths, that’s concentrating. And we still settle: three breaths distracted, three breaths distracted. We can still settle the mind. So, is it true, whatever we’re saying to ourselves?
Is it helpful? So if we’re planning something for the 10th time, we might be telling ourselves a story we’ve got to get it just right, but is it helpful? It’s usually not, especially during meditation.
And is it kind? The quality of the voice putting down on ourselves is not kind. Repetitive thoughts of not being good enough are not kind. Would I speak to my child that way? In the 70s, there was a period of time when in some circles it became very popular for people to practice brutal honesty, a particularly direct and unfiltered form of truth-telling without consideration for the recipient’s feelings. The idea was, “They’re responsible for their own feelings; I’m just going to tell the truth.” And it often caused harm. It often broke relationships. Sometimes the truth might hurt, and sometimes we do have to tell painful truths, but it can still be communicated with kind intentions.
Is it the right time? Sometimes something might be true, it might be kind, it might be helpful, and really deserve attention, but we’re meditating. It’s not why we meditate, to figure these things out. It’s not the right time. And in meditation, we can just very easily say, “Oh, not now.” It can come out of respect for the thoughts, for the idea. “I’ll think about that later. That’s worthy of reflection,” and we put it aside for later. Not a rejection of it, but just a putting it aside. It’s just like in a relationship, you might have something you really want to say, and you know it’s true, it’s kind, it’s helpful, but it may not be something that your partner wants to hear when they first wake up in the morning. It’s not the right time. In your mind, it’s like, “Oh, it’s really, it’s really alive,” but they’re still groggy. Give them some time. So these are the aspects of wise speech that really can be internalized to help develop more helpful thinking processes.
Some of the repetitive patterns we can fall into, when a particular theme keeps reappearing in our thinking, such as I mentioned planning, we can use those four questions whenever we’re caught in one of those patterns, one of those eddies. Just by adding the question, it adds a little bit of space, it adds a wholesome element to the moment.
Another common pattern might be worry, you know, “what if” thoughts, imagining unwanted future events. It can be really helpful to notice the emotion underneath, some form of fear or anxiety, to attend to it. Is it true? Often not. I like to remember what Mark Twain said: “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.” And it might be true, but is it kind? When we bring kindness to worry, it begins to change. Is it helpful? Are we going to make things better with worry, with rehashing, rethinking? And if it’s something worthwhile considering, meditation is not the right time.
Another pattern that’s really common is impatient thoughts, which are not pleasant usually, and they’re not helpful. And in fact, they can cause harm. This seemingly harmless kind of repetitive thought pattern can have a great impact on us. It tells us the present moment is not worth experiencing, that the present moment is not okay, it’s not enough. And it creates a sense of contention with our experience, which adds tension and stress. So when we see these repetitive thoughts, you know, “How much longer before the bell?” or however we might be impatient, there’s always an underlying aversion or pushing away of the present moment experience. And can we turn to it? We might ask ourselves, what is it we don’t want to feel? In daily life, how often are you waiting for something to be over? Waiting in line, waiting on hold on the phone, waiting until the person you’re talking to gets to the point. All that waiting is supported by thoughts, thoughts that ignore the value of the present moment. So can we get interested in that moment?
And one other pattern that many of us have is repetitive judgment, just a recurring kind of judging ourselves, other situations. We even judge our judging. And what’s really important is how to tell the difference between judgment and discernment. For instance, the judging mind sees what’s wrong with anything, right? What’s wrong with ourselves, what’s wrong with someone else. And the discerning mind might notice what’s wrong, but it’s non-reactive, it’s with an easy heart. Reactive judgment has a meanness to it; it’s not kind. For instance, as a boss, if you have to evaluate an employee, you have to know their strengths and weaknesses, but there doesn’t have to be any unkindness in seeing their weaknesses. And so when we view ourselves, we do have weaknesses. That’s what we practice, because we still have greed, hatred, and delusion. That’s why we practice. So it’s there. So can we be discerning about it? “Oh yeah, that quality of mind, that way that I didn’t do things the way I wanted to do them, that’s what happened.” And if it hurts, I can bring compassion, but there’s no need for that meanness of judgment, that harshness of judgment. And not to push away when it happens. We can be kind about our judging mind.
And lastly, of the patterns I want to mention: regrets. Because sometimes we dwell on painful things from the past, and they come up over and over. It can be a very, very deep habit that darkens our minds. And when they’re painful memories, can we bring kindness and compassion to the pain of the regret? This is dukkha2. Even though it happened 20 years ago, it’s still dukkha right now. When we remember it, it’s painful. And when we’re hurting, we deserve compassion and kindness.
So lastly, I want to say, most thoughts come and go, and they’re just ephemeral. They just go away very, very quickly. We can’t hold on to it; it’s gone before we know it, incredibly brief. But repetitive thinking patterns are sticky. They don’t flow easily. If we continue with it, it gets stronger. The more we do it, the more it’s easy to do it. But we can attend to those when they show up with care and with kindness. And maybe we can ask if it’s true, if it’s helpful, if it’s kind, if it’s timely.
So I’ll just end with my wishes for all of us. May this sangha3 be filled with loving kindness. May we be happy. May we be peaceful. May we be free. May our goodwill spread to all beings everywhere. Thank you.
Vedana: A Pali word that translates to “feeling tone.” It refers to the immediate, pre-cognitive experience of a sensation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a core concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental suffering inherent in life. ↩
Sangha: A Pali word meaning “community” or “assembly.” In Buddhism, it can refer to the monastic community or the wider community of all practitioners. ↩