By Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
One quarter of the Buddha's
teaching is based on feeling, which is the first truth that he taught for forty-five
years. It is in not understanding this truth that we are leashed to repetition
of birth and death in one form or another. To a lesser degree it also is one
of the four foundations of mindfulness as outlined by the Buddha in several
Suttas. An ordinary person and a more enlightened one differ from each other
in their response to feelings. While an ordinary person, for instance, would
cling to the pleasant feeling and reject the unpleasant, the more enlightened
one neither clings to the pleasant nor rejects the unpleasant. Rather he pays
total mindful attention to both and always maintains a balanced mind with regard
to both.
All living beings, without any exception, feel. Not very many of them, however,
use feeling as a means of gaining deeper insight into the reality of their experience,
while avoiding emotional reaction. Human beings who use their mind to think
and create are in a very advantageous position. Unfortunately, however, not
many human beings use their feelings as a way to develop their humanness or
humane qualities. There are many human beings who have not learned to use their
unlimited mental capacity and feelings for further development of their mind.
When somebody asks you, "How are you?" You would say "I am fine."
or "I have never felt better." or "I am O.K. and how about yourself?"
or "I don't feel well today." or "I have a bit of an upset stomach.
" or "I feel miserable today." Here you express your feelings
but not any particular reason for how you feel. If you were to perform a psychological
analysis you would make a distinction between feelings and sensations. In your
daily expression, however, you use these two terms indiscriminately. In order
to maintain consistency in this article, I, too, therefore, will use the term
"feelings" indiscriminately to mean both "feelings" and
"sensations". It may be better to put the difference between these
two terms on the back burner until you have completely read this article. I
am not trying to make any neurological analysis here of how feeling occurs.
My attempt is to point out how feelings should be used as an object of mindfulness
training so that you would be able to live with all kinds of feelings without
having a nervous breakdown.
Feeling should be used as a mechanism for gaining deeper insight into the reality
of feelings. We know from the moment we were born until we breathe our last
breath we operate on feelings. Feeling arises from the periphery due to designation
contact or from the deep down our own state of mind due to impingement contact.
As soon as our senses come in contact with their objects we become conscious
of our feelings caused by peripheral contact. Initiated simultaneously with
the development of our nervous system, feeling was present even as we were in
our mother's womb. When our mother ate hot food we felt the heat. When she ate
cold food we felt the cold. When she was angry we felt her agitation and tension.
When she moved we felt her movements. When she sang we heard her singing. When
she cried we heard her cry. When she laughed we heard that too. While we may
not be able to recall this, nevertheless, we felt all of them.
As soon as we were born we cried not only because we felt sad that we had to
leave our mother's womb, or not only because we thought that if we did not cry
that people wouldn't pay attention to us, but because we felt the change of
atmosphere. From the warm, dark and comfortable environment in the mother's
womb we were thrust into the cool, blinding bright light and uncomfortable surroundings
with several people around us. We had never experienced this before. From the
moment we started our struggle of life as a unicellular being, we have been
experiencing feelings. From the moment our nerve cells or neurons began to develop
we have been experiencing our feelings. When the feeling pleases us we wish
to have more of it and when feeling does not please us we wish to reject it.
This is our natural reaction. Our entire search--struggle, achievements, improvement,
development, inventions, working hard or not, desire to live or not to live--
depends on how we feel. Our search for food, clothing, medicine, shelter, sex,
heat, cold, and much more, depends on our feelings. When we feel cold we look
for heat. When we feel hungry we look for food. When we want to evacuate we
go to a suitable place to fulfill that feeling. We have discovered, manufactured,
developed or improved many things because of what we feel. We create and procreate
according to our feelings. Even our reasoning began from our feelings. All that
we do depends on our feelings. Our reaction to any situation depends on how
we feel. After reacting to the situation we may rationalize our reaction. All
our emotional reactions depend on how we feel about a situation. Repeated emotional
reactions to feelings gradually nourish our ego. When emotional reaction becomes
a habit we rationalize our emotional reaction and defend ourselves saying, "I
have every right to defend my feelings when somebody hurts my feelings."
When we begin to learn the universal nature of feelings we begin to train our
minds to use it for the benefit of all living beings, rather than becoming selfish.
When we learn to train our minds to use feelings as objects of our mental development,
we learn more about it and make the full use of it with deeper understanding.
When you universalize your feelings you become more mindful about not saying
anything to hurt anybody. Nor can you do anything to destroy any living being.
All living beings feel the fear of death. Of course, if you ignore others' feelings,
you may justify doing anything. Most of the time your justification does not
come with feeling. You rationalize anything if you can ignore others' feelings.
Religious fanatics are well known for this. Some people, while putting their
own religions on high pedestals, use abusive or disparaging language to attack
people belonging to other religions, because they ignore their feelings.
All these are but a few examples of how much you suffer from your own feelings.
If you look at your feelings with understanding, you would not be very upset
to see somebody different from you. You won't get annoyed if someone speaks
a language you don't understand. If you understand the nature of feelings you
can listen to somebody's complaints of pain without yourself complaining. If
you don't understand feelings you may be very obnoxious, arrogant and insulting,
and later suffer for this behavior.
When you train yourself to have mindfulness of feelings your whole attitude
will change and you will feel more comfortable in noticing differences in the
world. Notice your feeling--pleasant, unpleasant or neutral--focus your total
attention on it without thinking or saying, "Ah! My head aches," or
"My leg aches," etc. Unless you pay total attention to your feeling,
you won't know what is behind it. Pay total attention to your own feeling and
begin to notice the pleasant feeling behind your unpleasant feeling. Only by
giving total attention to something can you notice what is behind that thing.
If you have enough patience to observe your feeling, you will also notice that
it is changing. You would not notice this change in feeling if you did not pay
attention to it. It is your attention, not the word, that brings things to the
surface of your mind.
Suppose you feel depressed. If you pay total attention to this feeling without
adding any other emotion to it, you will notice your depression gradually diminishing.
Of course, you may make your depression more miserable and even may have manic
depression lasting for several days if you become attached to it. Or you can
get rid of it very quickly if you learn to accept the reality of change that
takes place during every moment of your feeling. Fortunately for you even unpleasant
feelings are impermanent.
Suppose you wake up one morning with a terrible headache. Immediately find a
reasonably quiet place in your house or apartment and spend some time quietly
sitting down, closing your eyes and watching your headache without any presumption
or worry, but paying total attention to it. Soon will you notice your headache
diminishing slowly. But if you worry about it, you may make your headache worse
by adding more tension or pressure to it, because you add another feeling--worry--rather
than dealing with just one feeling--headache.
Suppose one night or for several nights in a row you cannot sleep. Following
morning you wake up and you feel a little uncomfortable. If you begin to worry
about not sleeping you may have more uncomfortable feelings. Now it is this
worry, not the sleeplessness that makes you feel greater discomfort. If, on
the other hand, you take it easy and don't worry about not having a good night's
sleep, you feel better. This means that you can use your feelings to make you
feel either comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on how you deal with your
feelings.
Suppose one day you feel very peaceful, joyful and happy. Look at that feeling
as it is and try to pay total attention to it. As long as you feel peaceful,
joyful and happy, try to pay total attention to it and let it fade away when
it fades away. Don't try to make it permanent. If that feeling disappears, don't
get upset; simply accept the disappearance. Welcome it as it is. By accepting
it you allow yourself to recreate it in your mind at another time. If you worry
about its disappearance you won't permit it to come back. What you are really
doing by accepting the disappearance of your pleasant feeling is learning to
relax and be comfortable with the change in your own feelings. You cannot force
any feeling to stay with you as you wish. It slips away from your grip. The
harder you try to keep it with you the quicker it disappears. If you simply
accept it as it comes and let it go as it goes away, you maintain your equilibrium
and this permits you to relax.
By the same token, if an unpleasant feeling arises in you, don't try to reject
it or push it away prematurely. It takes time for any feeling to go away. You
have to cultivate patience with unpleasant feelings as well. If you lose your
patience with it, you lose the pleasantness that can follow the unpleasantness,
and even magnify it. When you "take it easy", you make things simple
and more comfortable for yourself. Simply pay total attention to your unpleasant
feeling. You may have certain unpleasant feelings due to a chemical imbalance
in your brain. You must admit that whether you like it or not, things in your
body and mind change all the time. If you experience certain unpleasant sensations
due to a change in hormone balance, you may prolong the imbalance by worrying
or by being impatient. If you relax and pay total attention to the hormone imbalance
your mind generates better and more positive hormones to transcend the imbalanced
state.
Inadvertently, you cultivate a certain mental attitude towards numerous things
and persons. This attitude can cause you pleasant or unpleasant feelings. When
you mindfully look at your own state of mind, you will see that it is your own
attitude that has created that state of mind which results in one feeling or
another. Feeling does not come from the object that you perceive but from your
own state or mental attitude. This is why when several people look at the same
object they can have several different feelings, several different opinions
about the object.
If you mindfully watch your own mind and feelings, you can see very clearly
and unequivocally that what you feel is your own creation and that you are totally
responsible for it. Mindfully watching the continuous change of your own feelings
can make you abstain from emotional reactions and make you see the truth of
your own feelings. Mindfulness of feelings will not cause you to think obsessive
thoughts or abusive thoughts or harmful thoughts. By unmindful thinking you
abuse your mind. The abused mind always generates abusive feelings, which always
is painful.
Bhavana Newsletter Vol. 11. No. 3 July - Sept. 1995