Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 500: Unhappiness Is Not a Life Sentence | Christina Feldman

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Is it possible to be happy no matter what happens? Today we’re going right to the source of what makes us unhappy to learn how to disarm and disable potential suffering before it owns us. Everything that comes up in our mind is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In other words, with everything we experience, we either want it, don’t want it, or we don’t care. In Buddhism, this is called “feeling tones” or “vedana” and it is known as the second foundation of mindfulness in the Buddha’s comprehensive list. So why does this matter? Because if you are unaware of the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral tones, then you are being controlled by them. Similarly, if you are unaware that certain people or things provoke aversion, then you can unthinkingly avoid or even be aggressive towards them. In this way, we can be like puppets on a string— just yanked around by greed, hatred, and numbness. Today’s guest, dharma teacher Christina Feldman, is going to drill down on this embarkation point for our suffering, zap it with mindfulness and help us understand how we don’t have to live like puppets on a string. Feldman began teaching in the west in the seventies after spending years in Asia studying Buddhist meditation. She is a co-founder of Gaia House, a retreat center in the UK, and has also served as a guiding teacher at Insight Meditation Society beginning in its early days. More recently, she is a co-founder of Bodhi College, which is dedicated to the study and practice of the early teachings of the Buddha. She is the author of a book called, Boundless Heart: The Buddha's Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity, and co-author of Mindfulness: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Psychology.This episode is the second installment of a series we've launched on the four foundations of mindfulness.In this episode we talk about:Why vedana is often called, “the ruler of consciousness” or “the king, or the queen of consciousness”How to practice with vedana, and the benefits thereofHer lovely description of the Buddha as being very focused on understanding “the architecture of distress and unhappiness” Her contention that unhappiness is not a life sentence. Her definition of genuine happinessWhat she means by the power of “giving greater authority to intentionality, rather than to mood or story”And her personal practice of setting life intentions every yearFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/christina-feldman-500See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Ola people, today we are going right to the source, the point of origination for the stuff that makes us unhappy. And we're going to learn how to disarm and disable the potential suffering right there before it metastasizes and owns us. Here's how this works. Everything that comes up in your mind, every sight, sensation, thought, etc., all of it is either

pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In other words, with everything we experience, we either want it, don't want it, or don't care. In Buddhism, these are called feeling tones. The ancient poly word is Vedina. Okay, so why does this matter? Why should I care about Vedina or feeling tones? Because if you are unaware of the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, then you're controlled by it.

In other words, for example, you taste some chocolate, but because you're not seeing how the mind is grasping after the pleasant, you reflexively gobble a whole bunch of the chocolate, and you aren't even tasting it. For the record, I am definitely not anti-chocolate, I'm just pro-tasting the chocolate. Similarly, if you are unaware that certain people or things provoke aversion, then you can unthinkingly avoid or even

be aggressive towards them. In this way, we can be like puppets on a string, just yanked around by greed or desire, hatred or aversion and numbness or delusion. So today, we're going to talk about how to drill down on this embarkation point for our suffering and zap it with mindfulness, which can stop the whole cycle.

My guest is Christina Feldman, who was a part of that whole generation of Dharma teachers that began teaching here in the West back in the 1970s after spending years studying with the masters over in Asia. She is a co-founder of Gaia House, a retreat center in the UK, and has also served as a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society beginning in its early days. More recently, she's co-founder of Bodhi College, which is dedicated to the study and practice of the early teachings of the Buddha, and she's the author of a book called Boundless Heart and Co-author of another book called Mindfulness, Ancient Wisdom meets Modern Psychology. In this conversation, we talk about why Vedina is often called the ruler of consciousness, the king or queen of consciousness, how to practice with Vedina and the benefits of doing so. Her quite maliftlest description of

the Buddha as being very focused on understanding the architecture of distress. Her contention that distress or unhappiness is not a life sentence. Her definition of genuine happiness, what she means by the power of giving greater authority to intentionality rather than to mood or story, and her personal practice of setting life intentions every year. All right, we'll get started with today's guest right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our Healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and The Great Med meditation teacher Alexis Santos To access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all One word spelled out

Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast Baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Skicky Palmer

on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Christina Feldman, welcome to the show. Thank you, it's good to be here. Very happy to have you here. I've heard your name many, many times in the Dharma scene and never actually met you, so it's a pleasure to finally meet you albeit virtually. So, all right, we're talking today about the second foundation of mindfulness, vedina, or feeling tone.

Can you define that for us, for us newbies? Before I dive into Vedina specifically, I think it's good to remind everyone to hold the big picture of the four ways of establishing mindfulness, body, feeling tone, mood, and psychological emotional processes. A friend of mine refers to this as being like the four channels on a television, and they're all broadcasting simultaneously, but our attention may be drawn intentionally or unintentionally

to one of the ways of establishing mindfulness over the others, but it doesn't mean that the others have stopped broadcasting. So today we're focusing on the second way of establishing mindfulness, feeling tone or a vedina. We haven't left the body behind. We haven't left moods behind. We haven't left process behind. In truth, all of this has a vaderna tone.

All of this has a feeling tone. So this is like the hedonic tone of experience. That's one way of presenting it. It's very important to distinguish between what vaderina is and what emotion is. In Buddhist psychology, emotion is quite a complex construction, whereas Vedina or Phelian tone of experience is something much simpler. In fact, so simple that people are often prone to overthink it, to overconceptualise it, to think that it has to be more complicated. In Buddhist psychology, there is a tremendous amount of significance given to being mindful of Vedina.

The Buddha refers to Vedina as being the ruler of consciousness, the king or the queen of consciousness, that this is the first building block of our moment to moment world of experience. And yet it can be so subtle and there are so many Vedina tones that were often really far down the road from the feeling tone to emotion, to mood, to reactivity that we have hardly even noticed what the Vadenotone is. So when we talk about Vadenot, we're talking about the feeling tone of sensory impression. So every sound, every sight, every taste, every touch, every smell, every thought, every mood has a veil in a tone. And this is pre-verbal. You know, we're not sitting back wondering, oh gosh, was that pleasant or was that unpleasant? it's something that is so pre-verbal that sensory impression is imprinting on consciousness as being pleasant or as being unpleasant or as

being neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So those are the three core Vedina tones or feeling tones of experience. So in every moment, the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, the moods, the tastes, the touches, we're swimming in this kind of sea of Vadenat. One after another that are happening so quickly, imprinting on consciousness, and yet playing such a significant role in what happens next,

because not only is the feeling tone quite preverable, many of our reactions are also quite preverable. We see ourselves so impulsively and so hastily moving towards the pleasant. We find ourselves so impulsively, recoiling or moving away from the unpleasant. And that which is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, we tend just to ignore,

or it becomes almost like a launch pad for craving, something's missing, something's absent, there's something wrong, you know, there's nothing happening. I need to make something happen in order to feel more alive, more interested. The Buddha was quite passionate about understanding the architecture of distress and unhappiness and struggle. He recognized or pointed out that unhappiness is not a life sentence. Distress is not a life sentence. That this is something that is created and recreated mostly unconsciously on a moment to moment level. He also pointed out that happiness or the end of

distress is not something we have, it's not something that happens to us. Happiness and the end of distress freedom is something that is cultivated and practiced moment to moment. So in perhaps simpler terms, according to Buddha's psychology, happiness is not something we have, it's something we cultivate. Unhappiness is not something we have, it's actually something we're practicing. So we said we need to understand the architecture of distress and the architecture of freedom. And to understand that, we also need to understand the architecture of our own world of experience, how our world of experience is being constructed and built moment to moment. And in that constructive process,

Veydener plays a very pivotal role. We would all recognize that we don't live in the same world of experience. I look outside of my window and I see quietude and a lot of silence and not many people. And I look out my window and I'm delighted. Another person would look at that same window and feel, oh, there's so much missing. Where's the excitement? You know, where's the buzz?

Where's the stimulation? We live in very, very different worlds of experience. And these worlds of experience are being constructed and built moment to moment. So the Buddha presented a very, almost kind of very simple cognitive chain that we can track and trace in our own experience. So is to bring about a clear understanding of how our world is born, and also to bring about the possibilities of choosing more freely what world of experience we are going to inhabit.

So this cognitive chain is quite simple, and I'll just go through it, and I'll unpack it a little bit. So it begins with contact. The eyes meet the sight, the ears meet the sound, the nose meets the sense, the tongue meets the taste, the body meets sensation, and the mind, which in Buddhist psychology is the sixth sense door meets the world of

arising and passing thoughts and images and memories. That meeting together of the sense door and the sensory impression is called contact. So in this chain the Buddha says when there is contact there is feeling tone. So there is the feeling tone in that meeting of something being sensed as being pleasant or unpleasant as neither. When there is feeling tone, there is perception. What we feel we perceive, we begin to place a name or a label upon what is happening. Oh, that sight is a bird singing or it's a car alarm going or that sensation in the body is, you know, my aching back or my aching leg that mood is all know that familiar visit of depression or sadness. When there's contact, there's feeling tone. When there's feeling tone, there is perception. What we perceive, we think about.

Why is this happening? Where did it come from? What is its history? What is its future? What we think about, we proliferate about. And what we proliferate about, this becomes the shape of our mind and the shape of our world. It sounds quite simple. It's something we can track in our own experience.

In reality, it is happening so quickly that we arrive at that place of our world being shaped. Our world of experience being shaped. That this is beautiful. This is ugly. This is exciting. This is boring. I am like this.

You are like that. We arrive there so quickly. So the place of mindfulness is to begin to slow down that process. Victor Franco, who was a concentration camp survivor, there's a quote attributed to him where he says between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose. In our power to choose lies our growth and our freedom. So what we are endeavoring to do is to more and more cultivate that space between stimulus and response, so that there is the power to choose how we interface and how we interact with the world around us.

Vedina is ethically neutral. It's not something we necessarily choose in. There will always be Veydner tone and liberation or freedom doesn't mean the end of Veydner. The Buddha had also swam in a sea of Veydner. So then we would think what really is the problem and the problem or the issue is the way that feeling tone taps into this background world of habitual reactions, habitual patterns. Let me just share an observation I had upon listening to you and I want to get into great detail about the role of Vadenah in our distress. I love that phrase, the architecture of our distress and practices for unpacking this, slowing it down. But just the first observation I found coming to my mind as I was listening to you talk

is just the brilliance of the Buddha who was able to stare into the swarm of ceaseless change in his mind, the mind, our minds, and figure out that all of it actually is unfolding lawfully, even though it seems chaotic. And to be able to put things in an order, okay, contact leads to, you know, Vedina leads to whatever I can forget the order. That's just an incredibly impressive move among many on his part. It is. I am consistently awed by the genius of the Buddha, and I often think of the Buddha as being a kind of map maker, that he could look at his own mind, and he could look at the minds of others, and he could sense both the personal story but also sense the universal

story of how the mind works and then come forward with these maps almost I think of them as maps or charts that he could offer to people as tools you know he says I couldn't do this I couldn't look this. I can see this unfolding in this way. And you can too. And by looking at this and understanding this, you're actually going to find the same freedom that I've discovered in my investigations. Come see for yourself, I believe that was one

of Israeli and Christ. Yeah. You invoke the Buddha when you described Vedina as the king or queen of consciousness. It rules consciousness. You covered it a little bit, but it's worth breaking it down. So what happens, and I'll restate this clumsily, and you can jump in and correct me, is something arises in our mind. We see something here, something case, something,

think something, feel something. And then it has this flavor of pleasant or unpleasant or neither. And that just sets us down a road that is often unconscious and it can lead to all sorts of deleterious impacts. Yeah. It's the embarkation point that sets off a certain trajectory of reactivity. A road we've been down a million times, and yet often we go down that road, we end up in very familiar places of struggle or fear or anxiety or reactivity. We can often have this sort of sense of bewilderment. Like, how did I end up here, often followed by the word again? I think one of the great gifts for the great blessings of being able to track some of these processes, is that it takes a sense of bewilderment out of experience.

We know how we ended up here. We know that, yes, we really experienced that smell, this being something so pleasant, you know? And then we remembered, oh, yes, it's that coffee, I really love. And then before we know it, we're moving towards the coffee shop. And we find we're on our third cup of coffee and then we're buzzing and then we're kind of overstimulating.

We say, how did I end up here again? And we start to know how we ended up there and maybe well, do it goes. And maybe in that first smell, maybe we have the ability to pause for a moment. And to ask, is this really what I want? Is this really beneficial to me? Is this really helpful? Or maybe we are ending up in the coffee shop and we're still able to pause and say, well, maybe one cup's enough. You know, maybe I don't need that second or that third cup. And maybe in those moments, we're beginning to cultivate those choices rather than being held hostage to those underlying patterns of reactivity. It could feel like a technical meditation point, but the ramifications are profound. The huge, the huge.

You said before, and I think it's worth just double clicking on this. Feeling tones are not to be confused with the popular vernacular of feelings or emotions. Yeah. Can you just say more about that just before we proceed with other questions, just so that we're super clear on what vaid in our feeling tones are and aren't? If you stroke the back of your hand, the basic impression is this quite pleasant. Mm-hmm.

It's quite pleasant. That's not an emotion. It's just a very simple imprint. This is quite pleasant. If you were sitting on a bus and a stranger stroke the back of your hand, what would the feeling tone be? It would be unpleasant. Now, we can go from the pleasant to, oh yeah, that feels quite pleasant. I wonder if I can now perhaps book myself in for a hand massage, you know, I'd be like a little bit more of this, you know, or, oh no, this reminds me of my ex-partner, you know, who used to love to stroke the back of my hand and I loved it so much. And now that's over and it's gone and I was so heartbroken, that's the emotion.

The emotion is that construction of the feeling tone, the memory system, the somatic experience, the sense of wanting or not wanting and all of the story and the narrative. That's the emotion. Suddenly I'm really happy. Or I'm sitting on the bus and a stranger strokes the back of my hand and that initial imprint is really unpleasant. And how many seconds does it take before I'm actually in the emotion? I hate this. There shouldn't be happening. Who is this person? I have to get off this bus. You know, I'm freaked out. I'm scared. I'm out of here. That's the emotion. So the key player in slowing this down and not being carried away in this often habitual reflexive, automatic

chain of reactivity. The key player is mindfulness. The key player is mindfulness, but I would also suggest that mindfulness is rarely enough in itself. Mindfulness is always part of a happy cooperative extended family. So it's not just the mindfulness of seeing, oh yes, that's pleasant or that's unpleasant. There may be very many other family members cooperating with mindfulness in order to change and transform some of those patterns.

It might be the cousin of investigation. It might be the cousin or the brother or the sister of committed intentionality. It might be the cousin of skillful effort. It might be the cousin of compassion. But mindfulness is never a stand-alone quality. It's a beginning point, but it invites other family members in in order to change the paradigm of reactivity. So, mindfulness, this clear seeing of whatever is happening right now, paired with the investigative with the investigative faculty of mind with compassion for heroine suffering or that of others, and many of the other positive capacities of the human mind can help us get in there close

to the embarkation point before we're all the way in the coffee shop or departing to bus. Yeah. I mean, according to the Buddhist teaching, the awareness of Vedina is the weakest link in breaking the chain of reactivity. That's not to imply that if we're not mindful at the place of Vedina that all is lost because mindfulness can kick in, you know, along the chain of reactivity at different points. But it's you know, along the chain of reactivity at different points.

But it's the weakest link of the chain. So when we think about why such emphasis is given to Vajna, it's not because, you know, as I mentioned before, you know, Vajna is ethically neutral. It's more about how the different Vajna tones are are triggering craving aversion and confusion. And how it seems to be almost hot-wired in. The pleasant seems to be almost hot-wired into the craving wanting more, more, more pattern. The unpleasant seems to be almost hot-wired into the aversion ill-will-fear reactivity landscape. And that would just be the pleasant or unpleasant. Seems to be hotwired into the confusion landscape.

I just don't know what's going on. Although I and many other teachers really have ongoing questions about this third category of something being either pleasant or unpleasant. And whether it's actually just what we're not really paying attention to. If I look around my office right now, the colour of the walls doesn't immediately impress me as being pleasant or unpleasant. My computer screen doesn't immediately impress me as being pleasant or unpleasant. And so, after my attention, we'll drift away. I'll think, that's not worth attending to, because it doesn't excite me, or I don't have a particular

story or history with it. Whereas, actually, if I have the intention to be quite aware and attuned to those simple things, you know, about 80% of our experience in every moment is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. If I actually make the effort and have the intention to tune into this, it doesn't stay neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It might become quite interesting and I might find myself quite curious about it. I might become quite appreciative of it because mindfulness also has evaded it down, which is pleasant.

Hmm. So even just merely paying attention to something that may seem neither pleasant nor unpleasant, utterly irretrievably neutral, merely attending to it carefully being mindful of it, could imbue it with some positive valence because mindfulness tastes good. Yeah, and now this is stretching the conversation a little bit, but if you just kind of put the vaginatones, the three vaginatones alongside, for example, the broma vahara practice of kindness or matter, and how that is often taught in these categories, you know, of friends, benefactors, pleasant, difficult people, and sometimes ourselves unpleasant. And then there's

a category of people who we see as being more neutral. Some years ago, as a life intention, I made the life intention to not have any more neutral people in my life. So it didn't mean I was going pursuing people with matter. But I mean, I mean, how many people pass in and out of my world on a daily basis that I don't actually see because I have no personal history, no shared story, no sense of shared meaning with them. And so they become neutral, which is again, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And by bringing that intention into my life to have no more neutral people, I discovered it had quite actually transformed me. It means I see people. You know when people pass me on the psychopath, I actually

see them. There's a wonderful Tibetan teaching that says, wherever my gaze may fall, may it be filled with tenderness and respect. And I think of that as being sort of the essence of practicing kindness with people we see as being neutral, but I also see it as being the essence of practicing with this domain of vaginat that feels neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And what we see is that mindfulness actually brings the world to life. It in live ends, it animates the world. You know, you go out on a walking path and we know that if our minds are full and busy, we can come back from a walking meditation and realize nothing has touched us. And we go out and that's a walking path in another moment where there's far more

wakefulness, intentionality, presence, and suddenly the world comes to life. We see the nuances, the subtleties of the light and the grass and on the trees. We hear the sounds that would normally we would just be background. And mindfulness in that sense is really bringing the world to life. Coming up after the break, Christina Feldman explains exactly how to practice with Vaterna and the benefits of doing so after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-ex not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego

in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you'd like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You've brought us to the notion of practices. And I have some more technical questions about how Vaden works, but now that we're talking about,

you know, kind of what to do about all of this, let's just stay here for a second. Imagine that there are people listening to the show who really have very little experience with meditation, and they've heard you talk about this key often overlooked link in this chain of our distress, Vaden, our feeling tone, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. I imagine people who are reasonably new to meditation

might be wondering, okay, what to do about this? I heard you just talk about eliminating neutral people from your life, well, that's very interesting. But what do I do in my meditation practice and by extension my life to get a clear sense of Vaden as they arise and so that I'm not so hooked by them. There was a couple of suggestions I would make. First of all, I mean, I would mention, you know, in my experience and in seeing how other people's practice unfolds, that we really

can struggle and not do well with overgeneralized intentionality. You know, we can wake up in the morning and say, well, I'm just going to be mindful today. Well, good luck. The intention is so generalised. It doesn't really probe beneath the surface of things. And I find there's much greater benefit in having specificity of intention and allowing an exploration or investigation to really deepen until it's much more in our bones. And I think the contemplation of Veyna is

one of those intentions that benefits us hugely by being quite specific about it. In this different ways of doing that, first of all, we could start in the place where we often end up. In the impulse, I'm moving towards something. I'm moving away from something. This is often quite obvious to us, and we know that it's so distress causing to be a prisoner of the surges of craving and aversion, to feel that we have no freedom, no autonomy in that world, that we just end to see either pursuing or fleeing. So we could start on that level.

Let me get up in the morning and just have that intention. I'm just going to track those impulses of craving, or I'm just going to track these impulses of aversion or fear. I'm just going to track these impulses of a version or fear. I'm just going to get to know this territory a little bit better. What is actually going on here? I'm learning maybe I can begin to pause in the midst of those impulses that my hand is reaching out for my screen. Ah, maybe I can just pause for a moment. What it's really pushing me here? Maybe I could just pause for a moment. Would it really push in me here?

Maybe I could just pause in that moment where I find myself kind of shutting down because something's unpleasant. And maybe I can just stay present for just a few moments longer and really begin to sense the landscape, the painful landscape of fear and diversion. And maybe in those pauses, I can

begin to learn, you know, maybe a little bit more resilience. Maybe I can learn a little bit more about equanimity. Maybe I can learn a little bit more about freedom. I think this is a practice that we could benefit from, stayed with for quite some time because we're dealing with some of the kind of really core human patterns of distress making. We could also begin to take the contemplation of feeling tone itself as something that we stay with. The sight, the sound, begin to really notice, make that impression on consciousness less pre-verbal and more in the field of awareness, ah, that's pleasant, ah, that's unpleasant. Maybe we begin to see and do in this of our period of time that we're actually stepping

out of that chain of feeling, perception, proliferation, craving, aversion, clinging, maybe we're just making those spaces a little bit bigger and naturalizing them. And beginning to find that choice of freedom is in truth in our hands. But it asks for intentionality, it asks for mindfulness, it asks for care, and it asks for some commitment of awareness to actually understand the process as we find ourselves in. So in this second practice you're proposing here, are you saying that in our formal meditation practice, we might set the intention to just look at the feeling tone of anything that arises in the mind, or you're saying, in our walking around life, we should look for it. Both. Both.

Both. I mean, in our walk around life, of course, this is all happening so quickly, it can feel overwhelming to begin to track the feeling tones. But in our more formal meditation practice, when the activity of our sensed doors is a little bit more restricted meditation practice, when the activity of our sense doors is a little bit more restricted and protected, we cannot, she I think, begin much more to notice, ah, that body sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, that thought, ah, pleasant, unpleasant. We can begin to slow down those processes much more, which it isn't truth or training for our lives. And it does raise some bigger and more profound questions. We imagine that feeling tone is implicit in sensory impression, events and experience. We have the perceptions that this is implicitly

beautiful, this is implicitly ugly, this is implicitly lovely, you know, this is implicitly fearful. In the absence of awareness, we tend to externalize, fade in the tones, into experience, events, people, situations. Now from the perspective of the Buddhist teaching, there are certainly rounds of experience universally that hold that implicit unpleasant experience. A broken leg, we don't enjoy. No one's going to say this is pleasant. Grief certainly has universally as well as personally. as well as personally, very painful tones, depression, no one enjoys depression. This is a percentage of experience. The rest of it we're kind of making up. Because when we see the veil in a tone as being implicit in experience, that's the basis of craving, of wanting, of the sense of insufficiency. When we see the unpleasant as being implicit in a sight or a sound or an event, that's the root of aversion, of ill will, of fear. And yet

we see when we begin to really look, we see it's actually not implicit. Something that we've experienced as being quite pleasant in our lives, the piece of chocolate cake. Try it on the tenth slice. Something that we may have experienced in our life and imagine that this implicitly holds the power to make me unhappy. That a person or an event has the power to make us unhappy. We discover and develop in some resilience, some curiosity, courage or wise protection. We say it doesn't actually hold the power to make me unhappy. And yet the huge implications of investing in this implicit feeling-town experience, the implications of that are enormous. All of the things I avoid in life, all of the things I feel I have to have

in order to be happy, all of the things I have to avoid, so I'm not going to be unhappy. This makes us a subdued-a-put-a-hostage to the world of conditions. And you know, the Buddha recognized that we're all vulnerable to the world of conditions and need to be vulnerable and to be touched by the world of conditions and need to be vulnerable and to

be touched by the world of conditions. But we don't need to be hostage to the world of conditions. What do you mean by the world of conditions? All of the sights, all of the events, all of the experiences, all of the sounds, all of the somatic events, everything that happens to us in a single life. This is the world of conditions we live in every moment. It rains today, it's sunny tomorrow. You know, the grass grows, we have a drought, we have pleasant people in our lives, we have

difficult people in our lives. This is the world of conditions. And if you're hostage to it, you can never self generate happiness. You're on a string all the time. You're on a string all the time. You're on a string all the time. Marco Ceruleus, thinker of the past, he once said, we can dance like puppets through our lives on the ends of the strings of our impulses. I think this is not very a description of freedom or our happiness.

What's the alternative? Well, we can move from reactivity to responsiveness. And I think this is actually the heart of the Buddhist teaching, is to move from this kind of like habitual automatic reactivity of wanting and not wanting, pursuing and pushing away to a life of responsiveness. We appreciate the pleasant. we celebrate the pleasant, we savor the pleasant, we get touched by it deeply without holding, without needing to make it mine.

We will experience the unpleasant in life and there is a great deal of it. Then we can ask the question of what does this need? Is it more resilience? Is it this need? Is it more resilience? Is it more compassion? Is it more space? Sometimes it's more boundaries, but we can respond to the unpleasant rather than fearing it or fleeing from it.

There's also a way in which seeing through the illusion of inherent pleasantness or inherent unpleasantness or inherent neither nor can, and I believe this is an argument you make and I'd be interested to hear you say more about it. Can it relieve us from some shame and blame? Oh, well, this is my fault. Yeah. You think about someone who lives with a chronic pain or chronic illness. It is unpleasant.

It's implicitly unpleasant. And yet the unpleasant can be so compounded by the reactivity, by the blame, the shame, the fear, I've done something wrong. If I was a better person, this wouldn't be happening to me. You think about someone living with depressive relapse. It's unpleasant, and yet it's made so much more unpleasant and difficult by the amount of judgment that is added to it.

That if I was a better person, I wouldn't feel this way, I wouldn't experience this. The Buddhist story of the two arrows is so pertinent to this. You know, the story of somebody being shot by an arrow and it hurts. It would hurt anyone. And then the way that the second arrow is, you know, who shot that arrow? What is that arrow made of? Where did it come from? Why did they shoot that arrow?

Why did it happen to me? Things are always happening to me. We can see the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth arrows flowing our way and then we're lost. Then we feel really lost. Or we can come back to that first hour and say, yeah, sometimes life hurts. Sometimes life is lovely. Sometimes that first hour is really painful.

And I can respond to that painfulness. I can care for that wound without adding the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth wounds. I've inserted many arrows voluntarily or at least habitually. Let me ask something about the pleasant feeling tone. This harkens back to your invocation of the Buddha around not being hostage to the world of conditions. But are you saying that we shouldn't enjoy chocolate cake? We should definitely enjoy chocolate cake.

There is so much in the world that is lovely and pleasant. In the world of arts, the world of nature, the world of relationship, there is so much that is lovely and pleasant and it gladens our mind and in truth in the Buddhist teaching, this cultivation of appreciation and joyfulness is what resources us inwardly to be able to meet the difficult in a clearer and more balanced way. That appreciation and that celebration of the lovely is certainly not ruled out in the Buddhist teaching. In fact, it is something that is encouraged. We can appreciate, we can celebrate, we can be touched by the lovely and gladdened by it without adding the second arrows.

You know, I need more of this or where did this come from? How do I make it last? We can see already that the moment that appreciation moves into craving or clinging, the appreciation itself is already quite substantially muted. We've moved into a different world where there is distress. I think there's something about seeing the painfulness of craving and seeing the loveliness of appreciation and the difference between those two. You've said pleasantness is often sabotaged by craving. Yeah, because craving is painful.

Sometimes we have a memory of the pleasantness, but not the pleasantness itself. Right, so we're on the 75th Oreo because we have this memory of the dopamine from the first. Exactly. How do you practice with this? Because I think food or all the other pleasant things in the world, our capacity for addiction can kick in really quickly.

How do you recommend we practice with this really seductive, pleasant feeling tone? One of the similes to describe mindfulness is the image of the wise gatekeeper, learning to be a wise gatekeeper, a wise gatekeeper in the image that's used in mindfulness stands at the gates of the city and welcomes in all of the visitors who mean to serve the city well

and recognizes but doesn't welcome in the saboteurs. And in many ways I think we learn to be a wise, gatekeeper of our own hearts and minds of knowing when there's that movement from appreciation into insistence or craving. Knowing when we're chasing stimulation, where we're chasing sensory, contact impression in the search of feeling more alive. The Buddhist teaching is, yes, appreciate the loveliness of life in the world,

but recognize that true happiness is inwardly generated. So perhaps, you know, we learn to be a wisegate keeper of knowing when we're into those places where we're either indulging or entertaining the saboteurs of well-being, or when we're pursuing that, you know, I need more good visitors. I need a population of good visitors when we're pursuing that. Learning to be a good gatekeeper, I mean, I realize I'm kind of using multiple images here, but one of the images you see in Buddhist artwork is the image of the house with five open windows and an open door. And the five open windows represent

the five traditional sense doors, the eyes, the ears, taste touched, was now. And the open door of the house represents the sense door of the mind. And through the open windows and the open door of the house represents the sense door of the mind. And through the open windows and the open door flows as endless stream of sensory impressions. We don't have too many choices about that, although we can learn to practice a little bit more restraint at the sense doors. But through the open windows and the doors flows as world of sensory impressions and out through the open windows in the door,

flows something. And it's either going to be our habitual patterns of craving and aversion, confusion, flowing out through the windows in the doors, or it's going to be the qualities of heart and mind that we can cultivate in terms of restraint and kindness and compassion and mindfulness that actually flows out to those open windows and doors. And in the artwork or in this image, what we do is we see mindfulness upon the windowsills and the door sill. So we're quite attuned and sensitive both to what is flowing in, but also to what is flowing out. And this is also another way of seeing the wise gatekeeper, is that mindfulness seated on the window cells and the door cells that we have choices. After the break, Christina Feldman answers the question, what is genuine happiness?

She also talks about what she means by the power of giving greater authority to intentionality rather than to mood or story, and she shares her personal practice of setting life intentions every year. Keep it here. Let me go back to something you said a few minutes ago, you were quoting the Buddha, you were here or both of you used the words genuine happiness. So what is genuine happiness if it's not, you know, unlimited ice cream? I think it's very easy to mistake happiness with gratification. And then much of our craving is driven by an inner culture of deficit, of insufficiency. I don't have enough, I'm not enough, I'm not good enough.

And so we prowl the world. You know, we prowl the world of sensory impressions that we have attributed Pleasant Vadenah to. And it's not a genuine happiness. Yeah, we can have moments of success, moments of gratification, you know, moments of association, we think, oh, good, you know, it worked. Got what I wanted. But it's not enduring.

It's not lasting. It's a hip. It's a hit of gratification. And I think when the Buddha speaks about genuine happiness, it doesn't have anything to do with gratification. It has much to do with having a well-trained mind and heart. Said the source of happiness lies within our own hearts and minds.

Developing, cultivating a heart, a mind where there's a sense of collectedness, aliveness, wakefulness, connectedness, calmness. This is actually the cultivation of enduring happiness. It's interesting that Dhamma Pada, one of the most loved early teachings of the Buddha, he says, true joy is born of a disciplined heart and discipline doesn't mean shouting at ourselves or scolding or controlling. It means cultivating that, which really contributes to a much more enduring trust where they well-being and happiness in the midst of all things, and happiness in the midst of all things, not just in the good moments of our lives, or the easy moments of our lives, but in the midst of the challenging and the difficult and

the uncontrollable, to have that heart and mind that's not bound by fear and aversion that's experience, the experience is rooted in this deep sense of collectedness, gatheredness, calm, spaciousness. For me, this is the nature of genuine happiness. It's not about elation or highs or the peak moments or the peak experiences. It's something quieter but reliable. This is a tremendous freedom, you know, in getting up in the morning and not looking at the world and saying, make me happy. So what are you looking at the world and saying?

You're looking at the world and saying, we are interconnected. We are interrelated. I am touched by you. You are touched by me. And how are we touching each other today? You know this person I meet the situation this event that I meet. How are we touching each other today? That to me is very different than saying make me happy. Are you saying that your practice has helped you be happy no matter what happens, regardless of conditions. Depends, again, it depends how we use the word happiness. In the terms of how I describe happiness, I have found that the practice has been transformative and hugely helpful in meeting life's difficulties without panic and without fear. My parents never really could understand whatever

I did, but they for sure, every time they went to a hip surgery or an illness, who do we call? We call on you because you're the one who brings calm. You're the one who doesn't panic. You're the one who can show up and not feeling particularly to brag about that, but it's a reality of being able to meet the difficult, I think, without being overwhelmed. And we're asked to do that in our lives. I'd be interested to hear a little bit more about how exactly you do that. Let me give you an example for my own life, because I can see this chain that we've talked about, the map, the chart that the Buddha made that includes as a key link, Vaden playing out in my own life.

Many years ago, I don't know, 13, 14 years ago, I had some surgery on my face, which is invokes some feelings of precarity among people like me, who are TV anchors. So I had surgery on my face to remove a non-lethal form of skin cancer, basal cell, carcinoma, and have a little scar that's very hard to see, kind of amazing, because it was a huge cut. They took out of my face, but now all there is is a little scar. But right in the middle of that little opaque scar,

there is this red dot that has appeared in the last couple of days. My wife, who's a physician, is telling me it's probably nothing, but I can see this whole chain. This is an unpleasant thing to see on my face. And I can go right down. This is metastatic melanoma. So how would your mind, as opposed to my untrained mind, or relatively untrained mind,

greet a data point such as this? Well, I might have those thoughts, but I might not feel obliged to believe in them too much. I might know that this is a very human response because of the pain associated with what has happened in the past. I might recognize that, oh, yeah, it's throwing me right back into something that's gone by. I might have those thoughts. I don't know, but I don't believe that I would be tempted to give them too much authority. I might have those thoughts, I don't know, but I don't believe that I would be tempted to give them too much authority. I would be tempted actually to call my doctor and say, look, something's going on here. I don't know what it is. Do you know what it is? Because certainly my proliferation

and my anxieties and my storytelling is actually not going to be helpful here. So that's classic respond not react back to the Victor Frankl quote before. So the stimulus question will red dot and the space is okay. I can bring mindfulness investigation compassion to bear and respond wisely to this rather than freaking out blindly. Yeah, that is optional. That freaking out blindly, that's actually optional. And I think that, you know, we start to recognize how quickly our world is built on the feeling tone of that red dot, you know, how you could go down that road and end up in really terrible places, emotionally, psychologically.

You could also see, okay, I've gone down that road a bit, and I can actually feel some compassion for the humanness of that, but I actually don't need to give authority to those thought patterns. One of the biggest shifts I ever see people make in practice is when they give greater authority to intentionality rather than to mood or story. I'm not sure I understand. Can you say more about what you mean by that?

Well, in the example that you just gave, you can see how much authority you could give to the whole emotional world that arose. It means this. I'm going to be like this. You know, oh, I really believe in these thoughts. You know, they're going to govern how I am just now, they're going to govern, we know what I do. That's giving authority to mood. How often people say, well, I feel like doing something, so it's true. It's valid, it's authentic. It may not be. It may be far kinder to ourselves to give much more authority to the intentions we have, to heal and to understand and to liberate rather than to the passing mood of the moment. That's the reactivity part, you know, when we give authority to move.

This is what I feel. I feel really angry. So it's totally legitimate for me to shout at you. You could be broadcasting from inside my skull. Just to get back to the shift that you described, you seeing among your students, my default mode is not what you just described. I feel this way, so I'm justified in doing whatever I want. My default mode, the place I revert to is, well, my intention is actually to not take

every thought that flits through my mind as a dictator that I have to act out and that's what I revert to more often than not. Yeah. Let me pick up on this word intention because in your conversation with one of the producers for this show, you had a conversation with one of my producers and then I read the notes from that and that's how I prepared to talk to you. And in that conversation, you talked about life intentions and cushion intentions. And I'd like to get you to talk about what those phrases mean and then maybe also be quite specific about how we could apply it to Veydena.

On a yearly basis, I commit to a life intention, something that I will wake up in the morning with, that I will remind myself of several times in a day, that I will return to, and I will give it the space of a year for it to really naturalize, for me to really understand the landscape that's involved. For example, one year I had the intention to give up hurrying. That was my life intention. I was going to give up hurrying, quickly realizing that I could move quickly without hurrying. That hurrying was really a state of mind. So making that intention to give up hurrying didn't mean like I moved through my life like a tortoise. I could still move quite effectively when

needed. But I was giving up that state of mind of hurrying, which was always I realized about leaning forward into something that hadn't happened or somewhere I hadn't arrived. In fact, it was so delightful to give up hurrying that I've never been tempted to take it up again. It's just one of those life shifts that you can make. As I mentioned, I've made the life intention to have no more neutral people in my life. And that was actually one that I brought forward. I think a few years ago now, but it's been so revealing and so transformative that I continue to stay with it.

And then on the cushion, I will make a meditative intention in my formal practice. But I will stay with anywhere between three and six months at a time. You know, I may make the intention to cultivate matter or compassion or joyfulness, you know, for several months at a time. That will be the intention of my practice, or I might make the intention to cultivate more somade, more collectedness, more, yeah, more gatheredness. And I will stay with that intention for a period of time. I find it very beneficial in terms of deepening. Now, in Buddhist psychology, when the Buddha speaks about, why is intention? It's a really short list. It's kindness, compassion, and the third is often spoken of as renunciation, but you can actually interchange renunciation with generosity, kindness, compassion,

generosity, not holding onto anything. And he speaks about three unwise intentions, craving ill will and clinging. We can bring those intentions into everything that we explore, including Vedina, including Philin Town, to have the intention of kindness. When we find ourselves, you know, in the familiar loop, sorry, in those lost spaces, to bring compassion and to bring generosity of non-clinging. You can't always make direct links between all of the pieces of the Buddhist jigsaw, but the wise intention is always important in everything that we do because it's a forerunner of our speech, our actions, of our thinking. With Vedina, you can bring Vedina into the field of intentionality, to actually feel compassion,

to feel compassion for the painfulness of craving and aversion. You can bring the generosity, the non-clinging, to our stories, our narratives, that are born of the Vedina imprints, make non-clinging a generosity at the heart of our lives is quite profound. And much of our storytelling, you know, so easily becomes the ground of our holding, our world shaping, our self shaping. And if we were going to make an intention, a cushion intention, or life intention around, Vedina, can you just say a little bit more about, you know, pretty technically, you don't have to guide us in meditation per se, but how we could boost the salience of Vedina, say,

on the cushion, and therefore, by extension, our lives. It's easier on the cushion. It is easier on the cushion. You're actually, when you sit down, you know, you set that intention to be mindful of feeling tongue. That's actually really important. This is not a kind of random mindfulness.

It's not an accidental mindfulness. It's that you actually set the intention to be mindful of faith and a tongue. Now you may still be continuing to be mindful of the breathing process of the body. And yet you will see that whenever your attention is drawn away, say from mindfulness of breathing or mindfulness of body, it's because there's been the imprint of a stronger vedent tone, a thought or body sensation or a sound. And in those moments, when your attention is drawn away from your initial focus, so you start to see that your attention is beginning to kind of jump on something, pause for a moment. What's the Veydana tone? What's the feeling tone?

Christina, you've done a great job of defining Veydana, helping us understand its key role in the architecture of our distress and suffering, and then helping us think about how and why to practice with it on the cushion and in our lives. I'm sensitive to your time, so before I let you go, if people want to learn more from you, can you just mention some of the books you've written or other resources you've put out into the world, retreats, etc. I'm quite involved. I have been quite involved in the contemporary mindfulness world, in what I've taught in a number of universities, training people to be mindfulness teachers. My last book was Mindfulness, Ancient Wisdom meets contemporary psychology.

I have a couple of books out on the brome of a horrors, the boundless heart compassion. In my past and in my present I've been very involved in the place of women, both in Dharma circles and socially. So I have a few books out on that. Most of my teaching at the moment happens through Bodhi College, B-O-D-H-I College. This is where I have the opportunity to teach more extended courses, to dive into the early texts, and to teach from those places, and to co-teach with people who are both very skilled

and learned and engaged. So if you go on the Body College website, that's actually where you see really where I'm teaching most these days. Well, thank you for teaching us about Vedna and for sharing those resources for people who want to learn more. And thank you for your time today. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Dan. It was also a pleasure. Enjoy. today, it was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Dan. It was also a pleasure. Enjoy. Thanks again to Christina Feldman, great to finally meet her. Just to say, I have been experimenting

with the intention of not hurrying or rushing. Every morning, I just tell myself today, I'm not going to hurry or rush. Of course, I do, but I am more prone, I think, to notice it, having set that intention. And it's been really interesting to watch the Russian Russian and to ride it rather than be owned by it. So anyway, thanks again to Christina. Thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin, Dave Davey and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet

Audio. We'll see you all on Friday. And by the way, our series on the four foundations of mindfulness will continue on Wednesdays. So coming up on Wednesday, we're going to talk to the great Buddhist scholar, Bikubodi. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen

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