What is Vedana?
Vedana meditation deepens and enhances the practice of mindfulness. Clinical trials show that this ancient practice can indeed help reduce anxiety, stress and depression. But what exactly is it and how can it help?
Vedana meditation is seen as a way of deepening and enhancing the practice of mindfulness. Clinical trials show that this ancient practice can indeed help reduce anxiety, stress and depression.[1] But what exactly is it and how can it help?
Vedana is a quality of awareness that can only be experienced, not pinned down with precision. It is the feeling, almost a background ‘colour’, that tinges your experience of the world, and of meditation itself. For this reason, vedana is often translated as feeling tone. Although both terms can be used interchangeably, it will always pay to remember that we are referring to a flavour of awareness, and not a rigid concept that can be hedged in by words and definitions. Feeling tone is something that you feel in mind, body and ‘spirit’, but its true quality will always remain slightly ineffable. Sometimes annoyingly so.
A typical feeling-tone meditation consists of stilling the mind with a simple breath or body meditation and then paying attention to your experiences in a manner that is subtly different to what other meditations request. It asks you to focus in a very specific way on the feelings and sensations that arise in the moment when the unconscious mind crystallises into the conscious one. Such moments, though fleeting, are often the most important ones in your life. This is because vedana is the balance point in your mind that sets the tone for the sequence of thoughts, feelings and emotions that follow. It is often subtle, but if you pay attention to it, you can feel it in your mind, body and spirit – right through to your bones.
The feeling tone is of profound importance because it guides the trajectory of your subsequent thoughts, feelings and emotions. If it is ‘pleasant’, you will tend to feel positive, dynamic and in control of your life (at least for a while). If it is ‘unpleasant’, you will likely feel slightly gloomy, deflated and powerless. Feeling-tone meditations teach you to see, or more precisely, to feel the way that your life is pushed and pulled around by forces you are barely conscious of. Sometimes these forces act in your best interests, sometimes not – but the important thing is that they are not under your immediate control. Under their influence, your life is not your own.
Vedana is one of the four original foundations of mindfulness (that is, of being fully conscious and aware of these core foundations, especially while meditating). These are: mindfulness of the body and breath; mindfulness of feelings and sensations (or vedana); mindfulness of the mind or consciousness; and mindfulness of the ever-changing nature of the world and what helps and hinders your journey through it. Each aspect is cultivated using a different set of practices that, together, bring about profoundly different effects on mind and body. Mindfulness courses generally focus on the first layer of each of these four foundations. Our latest book Deeper Mindfulness uses new meditations on feeling tone as a gateway into the deeper layers of the same four aspects of mindfulness. These take you closer to the source of your ‘spirit’; closer to any difficulties you may be having; nearer still to their resolution.
To help these ideas settle into your mind, you might like to try this little practice to get a sense of your feeling tones: if it is convenient, take a few moments to look around you; the room, the window, the interior of your train or bus, or perhaps the street, field or forest before you. As your eyes alight on different things, or different sounds come to your ears, see if you can register the subtle sense of whether each one feels pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. If you are at home, your eye might alight on a card, gift or memento from a much-loved friend. You might feel the instant warm glow of a pleasant feeling tone in response. Or you might see a dirty dish that you’ve been meaning to tidy away, or something you’ve borrowed from someone and had intended to return, and then you might notice an unpleasant feeling tone. If you are outside, you may notice the sun streaming through the leaves of a tree, or a piece of dirty plastic rubbish flapping around. If you can catch the moment, you might sense ripples of pleasant or unpleasant feeling tones. But it is not just the external world that has such an impact. You may also become aware of sensations inside your body, such as aches and pains, or perhaps a sense of relaxed calm. These, too, register on the same dimension of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. And sooner or later, you may notice thoughts or emotions arising and passing away soon after the feeling tones.
You don’t need to know how you know these feeling tones – you just know. Somehow there is a ‘read- out’ in body and mind on the dimension of pleasant to unpleasant. It’s like a gut feeling. It’s not a matter of thinking hard about it, or hunting for it, it’s more like the taste of something; you just know it when you taste it. Like tasting milk that’s gone sour, you know it’s unpleasant without having to think about it.
Yet, feeling tones can be unpredictable. You can never know in advance the flavour of their appearance. They don’t exist in objects themselves but instead emerge from their contact with your mind and body in combination with the state of your body and mind at that precise moment. As an example, you might normally find chocolate cake pleasant, but if you have just eaten a heavy meal, the very thought of it might feel unpleasant. Or if you are busy, the ping of an arriving message might feel like an unpleasant distraction, but if you are feeling lonely, the same sound might create a pleasant feeling tone. This ever-changing landscape of contexts and moods makes it difficult to predict what will strike you as pleasant or unpleasant. The only certain way of knowing is to pay attention in the now. And because feeling tones often arise and pass away quickly, they can be difficult to notice, unless you intentionally cultivate awareness of them. Noticing them, however, is critically important because they shape what happens next. Pleasant feeling tones tend to trigger a desire for more moments that are similar. Unpleasant feeling tones tend to trigger a sense of ‘aversion’, of pushing away, of resistance. Neutral ones encourage you to ‘tune out’ – for example, you may find yourself getting a little bored.
Such ‘reactivity pulses’, as they are known, are so compelling – and arise so fast – that they can sweep you along in a current of thoughts before you even notice their presence. Without being aware of it, an unpleasant moment may tip you into a negative direction that can last for hours, days or even beyond. A pleasant moment may arrive, but in your hunger for it to last a little longer, you may try to grasp hold of it, only to discover it slipping through your fingers. This triggers waves of frustration and feelings of loss. Existential angst, even. In such ways, feeling tones can be tipping points for the quality of the next moment.
Although you cannot change or control feeling tones, you can control what happens next. Mindful awareness can become a checkpoint that allows you to intercept any waves of reactivity or emotional distress before they spiral out of control. It stops such ‘reactivity pulses’ from dominating your life with all the distress they bring. As meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says: ‘Mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.’[2]
This is hidden knowledge – part of the wisdom tradition that has influenced the practice of meditation for millennia – but is only ever rarely made explicit. And its true significance has only recently come to the fore. Neuroscience has now discovered the importance of this ‘first impression’: it is fundamental to all life. Just as plants arch towards sunlight, and roots stretch towards water, so every living being has the means to discern the pleasant from the unpleasant. All life depends upon it.
Feeling tones are immediate and rely on sensitivities built into every cell of our bodies from the earliest days of our evolution. Even single-celled creatures are sensitive to both nutrients and toxins. It allows them to distinguish between one and the other.[3] This is the essence of vedana. It helps all living beings distinguish between the things that they should move towards (pleasant) and those that they should move away from (unpleasant) and encourages them to sit tight if everything is fine (neutral). Without such a sensitivity, they would be like a boat without a rudder, with nothing to steer them away from danger and towards a friendly port.
In countless ways, vedana marks the difference between life and mere machinery.
But we humans have a unique and special difficulty when it comes to vedana: our mental life is so complex that we can become lost inside of it. Our thoughts, memories and plans, which also carry feeling tones, can compel us to flee from our own minds. And while we can flee, we can never escape.
An analogy might help. Think back to your school days. Remember the experiment where iron filings were sprinkled on to a piece of paper while a magnet was moved around underneath? The iron filings danced as if they were alive. The patterns they made were quite entrancing. And what happened when you took the magnet away? The filings collapsed in a lifeless heap. Vedana is like that hidden magnet, with a force field making the mind dance to its tune, just like those iron filings. Because the feelings it generates are so compelling, we cannot quite bring ourselves to take our eyes off the story being played out above the surface. We don’t see the forces that are creating the story and keeping it alive. The unpleasantness we feel is therefore not a distressing side effect of our painful thoughts and memories; it is actually bringing them to life. It’s the master of ceremonies. If a feeling tone sets the scene, then the reactivity pulse casts the actors, selects the costumes and writes the script for what happens next. And it can write a script and direct a scene that can easily ruin your whole day and sometimes far, far, longer.
Virtually all of the emotional difficulties that many of us experience begin with the mind’s reaction to our feeling tones – our reactivity pulses. But it’s not even the pulse itself that is the problem, but our ignorance of its existence and underlying nature. We are often not aware that it has occurred, oblivious of the feeling tone that triggered it and unaware of its tendency to fade away, all by itself, if only we would allow it to do so. All we are aware of is the cascade of thoughts, feelings and emotions that follow in its wake.
Learning to sense the feeling tone – bringing it into the light – teaches you to recognise your underlying state of mind and helps you make allowances for your sensitivities and entirely natural biases and reactions. It gives you the space to respond rather than react. It helps you to compassionately accept that although you might be anxious, stressed, angry or depressed in this moment, this is not the totality of your life with only one depressing future ahead of you. You can change course. Alternative futures are available to you.
And tapping into an alternative future is as simple as sensing the underlying flow of feeling tones. Noticing the reactivity pulses. Realising that the craving for things to be different is the problem. Craving an end to unpleasantness. Craving for pleasantness to remain. Craving an end to boredom. This idea is common to many ancient traditions. And now, neuroscience agrees.
Feeling Tone Meditation (stream or download).
Deeper Mindfulness on Amazon UK
Deeper Mindfulness on Amazon US
Download Chapter One of our latest book Deeper Mindfulness (the US & UK versions are the same apart from the cover)
Free meditations from our 2-million selling ‘Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World’
[1] Williams, J. M. G., Baer, R., Batchelor, M., et al., (2022), ‘What next after MBSR/MBCT: an open trial of an eight- week follow- on program exploring mindfulness of feeling tone (vedana)’, Mindfulness doi.org/10.1007/s12671- 022- 01929- 0
[2] From Joseph Goldstein (2005) ‘Feelings: The Gateway to Liberation’, talk 19 October 2005 at Insight Meditation Society, https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/36199.html
[3] Damasio, A., The Strange Order of Things (Vintage, Penguin, 2018).
