{"id":94,"date":"2016-01-19T06:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/?p=94"},"modified":"2021-02-11T00:52:03","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T06:52:03","slug":"2016-01-19-feeling-tone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/2016-01-19-feeling-tone\/","title":{"rendered":"January 19 – feeling tone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friends,<\/p>\n

After yesterday’s email, Rod reminded me of one of my favorite Sesame Street mindfulness memes:<\/p>\n

\n
“Today me will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant, in which case me will eat a cookie.” ~~ Cookie Monster<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This ties in nicely to the second foundation of mindfulness – the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral “feeling tones” (“vedana” in Pali) that flavor experience.<\/p>\n

An article by Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia<\/a> in the Insight Journal<\/a>, published Barre Center for Buddhist Studies<\/a>, explains how the feeling tone can cause instinctual reactions:<\/p>\n

\n
“Through the body and mind we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think and feel. These experiences take place at what we call the six sense doors: the eye door, the ear door, the nose door, the tongue door, the sensing door, and the mind\/heart door. …
\nWhen there is contact at one of the six sense doors, feeling occurs. We experience the feeling as: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. We say each moment of contact has a feeling tone. …
\nSeemingly automatically, we long for more good feeling and try to get away from bad feeling. And we tend not to notice, to ignore, or space out around feeling that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And this is something very natural in all organisms:<\/p>\n

\n
“When we put a drop of sugar in the corner of the dish all the little amoeba scrambled towards the sugar. Then we put a drop of vinegar in another petri dish of amoeba and the colony scrambled in the opposite direction.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When we are not mindful, we are like the amoeba: reacting to our conditions.<\/p>\n

Bringing in mindfulness to our experience gives us a chance to react outside of these conditioned responses.<\/p>\n

The author continues:<\/p>\n

\n
“However, the Buddha tells us in no uncertain terms that while there is a strong, conditioned tendency for good feeling to escalate into greed and for bad feeling to escalate into hatred or anger, we have the capacity either to go in the direction of our conditioning or not.
\n…
\nThis means that greed, hatred and delusion are not fore-ordained. This is important because it points to a potential for freedom.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s as in a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl described<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The following recording is a ~20 minute guided meditation in which we are encouraged to notice the feeling tone in the moments of meditation.
\nhttps:\/\/www.dharmaseed.org\/teacher\/12\/talk\/30925\/<\/a><\/p>\n

With best wishes,
\nAndrea G<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friends, After yesterday’s email, Rod reminded me of one of my favorite Sesame Street mindfulness memes: “Today me will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant, in which case me will eat a cookie.” ~~ Cookie Monster This ties in nicely to the second foundation of mindfulness – the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral “feeling tones” (“vedana” in\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[13,38,37,39,40],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jan-2016","tag-amma-thanasanti","tag-cookie-monster","tag-feeling-tone","tag-gloria-taraniya-ambrosia","tag-viktor-frankl"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1110,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/1110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}