Practicing with Vedana
The 2nd Foundation of Mindfulness

An Interview with Christina Feldman

In 1971, Christina Feldman began Buddhist meditation practice in northern India. She was 17 at the time, and had left her native Canada to travel and explore new horizons. Since then she has played a key role in bringing the Buddha’s teachings to the West, offering retreats at IMS and co-founding Gaia House in Devon, England. Married with two adult children, she introduced the Family Retreat at IMS in 1982, and the Women’s Retreat in 1984 – both popular mainstays of our annual course calendar.

Christina, what are the Buddha’s ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’?

First, it’s helpful to describe the historical context of the Buddha’s teachings. Siddhartha Gautama - the Buddha - came from a society rooted in the belief that life was an obstacle to overcome. The body, the mind and human relationships were all to be transcended. So, once he started his spiritual search, it was natural for him to become an ascetic – he left his family and spent years subduing, starving and abusing his body. On his journey towards enlightenment, we know that these ascetic practices didn’t work; they did not bring about the freedom from suffering that he sought. One of the turning points of his awakening was the understanding that the very aspects of life he was trying to overcome actually held the key to liberation. He then turned towards his body, his mind, his feelings and towards everything that arose in his consciousness, seeing them as the ground for his awakening. He understood that insight and freedom are not separate from the life we live.

This was the beginning of the core teachings he termed the Four Foundations of Mindfulness: the contemplation of the body, the contemplation of vedana (or feeling), the contemplation of the mind and the contemplation of what leads to freedom and what obstructs freedom. These teachings form the basis of insight meditation practice.

What is contemplation of vedana?

Vedana is the Pali word for what is usually translated as ‘feeling’ – it is the essential feeling tone that comes with all experience. The Buddha further categorized this into pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. For example, the laughter of a child may register as pleasant, fingernails running down a chalkboard as unpleasant and the sound of the rain on our window as neutral.

Vedana is something quite different from what we understand in the West as ‘emotion’ or ‘our feelings’. In Buddhist teachings, emotion is a far more complex construction that includes not only feeling tones, but also thoughts, the body and the whole world of associations.

How is awareness of vedana helpful in our meditation practice?

The basic feeling tone of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral regarding any experience is not a problem in itself – it is simply how it is. It is rather like a stage set for a theater production – there could be props to convey a terribly sad scene, or something very dramatic, or something exhilarating. The feeling tone we have is analogous to that fundamental set, before the show starts.

What happens, however, is that we are overtaken by underlying tendencies. If we have a pleasant experience, we of course want to keep it going; we want more of it. And suddenly we’re off - the curtain is raised and the play has begun! We lose sight of the vital truth that all things change. We undermine our capacity to find balance, to be with the full spectrum of vedana in our life.

Similarly, with unpleasant vedana, underlying tendencies of aversion, resistance, hatred or fear arise. When there’s an unpleasant body sensation, an unpleasant thought or an unpleasant interaction with someone, we see how quickly contraction and judgment come in. Once again, we lose balance.

With the third feeling tone of neutrality, the underlying tendency is delusion. We believe there’s something missing or incomplete. We tell ourselves that something is boring or unworthy of our attention. Often, because of this sense of incompleteness, the neutral vedana becomes a springboard for craving – we want something more exciting or more interesting to happen.

Vedana informs so many of our moment-to-moment choices, decisions and actions. It is such a powerful force – we move toward the pleasant, avoid the unpleasant and simply disconnect or phase out the neutral. To experience true freedom, we need to understand our habits of craving, aversion and disconnection. And to do this, we have to become a little more attuned to the essential climate of feeling that is present in all experience.

How can we pay more attention to the neutral state?

We generally pay attention to the neutral state with great reluctance! We are much more inclined towards experience that is pleasant or unpleasant because it offers excitement, drama, fascination and a sense of identity. If we meet somebody we haven’t seen in a while, and they ask, “How are you?” mostly we tell them all the dramatic occurrences in our life. We rarely say, “Oh, nothing happened”, because it would make us appear uninteresting and worthless – nobody would want to know us.

The pleasant and unpleasant appear as events in our life; we tend to define ourselves, inwardly and outwardly, in relationship to them: “I’m happy”, “I’m sad”, “I’m angry”, or “I’m in love”. These are all places where the sense of ‘I’ can find form and meaning.

The neutral, on the other hand, is a fascinating area for practice. It is very hard to make a project out of being neutral - the extremes of excitement or aversion aren’t encountered. It is much more difficult to construct a sense of self within the neutral - there is no benefit for ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘mine’.

If we really pay attention to our lives, we find so much that initially seems quite neutral. For instance, if we look around and notice elements of the room that we’re in – the walls, the curtains, the desk, the door - it becomes obvious that much of life is not grabbing our attention through its intensity. It’s not shouting at us.

And yet, when we’re more attentive to the neutral, we observe that things usually don’t stay neutral. This is because we simply paid attention. We discover that our attention awakens the world, in a very real way. It illuminates that which is there. We discover that this quality of attentiveness doesn’t have an agenda to maintain something pleasant or get rid of something unpleasant. It is rooted instead in interest and curiosity. It is sensitive and alive, and can give us exactly what we spend so much time seeking in vain through intensity. That sense of aliveness abides within our own hearts and is borne of the attentiveness we nurture.

The nature of attention itself is actually pleasant. Understanding this can bring about a profound shift in our practice. As intensity addicts, we tend to believe that our aliveness is dependent on drama, on events, on experience. When we’re bereft of those, we feel somehow deflated. If we can learn to step back from this, we will see that the vitality we long for is not delivered by events but rather by our capacity for connectedness and presence in the world. This insight allows us to form a relationship to life that is rooted in compassion and generosity. We no longer expect life and the external world to deliver to us our sense of meaning, of identity, of excitement. We are loosened from the bonds of dependency and grasping, and can find ease and rest in our own awareness, in our own connection with life.

The culmination of mindfulness is to explore what it means to have an eventless mindfulness – that is the highest peace.

Is boredom something we can work with?

Absolutely. Boredom is the classroom for awakening - it is a form of aversion to the concept of ‘nothing is happening’. If we dig a little deeper, we find that of course life is happening. We need to be willing to be present in those moments that are eventless. We can cultivate tremendous sensitivity in investigating what is really occurring in boredom.

Most of what we encounter is disconnection. The places of separation in our life are the places we learn to connect. On the cushion or off the cushion, we can be profoundly curious about all those little moments when we say to ourselves, “It’s not enough. Nothing is happening. I’m not getting anywhere. It’s boring.” We need to acknowledge this is simply a state of mind overlaying an experience that is not characterized by intensity or events. If we can take away the aversion that overlays the neutral we discover that the neutral is actually very close to peace and ease. It’s a real doorway to resting in the eventless.

After decades of teaching, what continues to inspire you?

As I teach, I am continually inspired by seeing so many new meditators throughout the world coming into this ancient practice and finding themselves and their lives transformed by it. I have the good fortune to visit cultures where the Buddha’s teachings have never been before. Next year, I’ve been invited to lead a retreat in Cuba – it will be the first of its kind there.

On a more personal level, what continues to inspire me is an understanding that deepening of practice is not something that necessarily has a destination or end.