6/14/23  Dealing with adversity.

Our July talk will be about the second foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the feeling tone, called Vedena in Pali.  These are not feelings like we call them in English, like happy or sad, but the tonal quality of an experience.  All the experiences we come across are either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral in quality.  The practice gives us instructions in how to become aware of what a particular moment feels like and how we relate to it.

Difficult situations usually cause us unpleasant feelings - not surprising, however if we are not mindful of how we feel in the present moment, a difficult or unpleasant situation can overshadow everything making everything we experience around the same time unpleasant - in otherwords being in a bad mood.  Just because something in our lives  may be challenging and difficult doesn't neccesarily mean we are stuck feeling unhappy/unpleasant the entire time.   Being able to check in and say to myself,  "How's it going?"  lets me see the truth in the moment.  Prior to practicing this I would have felt unhappy for the entire time something wasn't going my way., but looking at that now it is pretty foolish.   Unless someone asked me how I was feeling I probably wouldn't have even known, but that isn't the case today.

Even with this current difficulty I can still enjoy myself and I truly believe being able to look and name how it is right now is a big part of why, but not the only part.

The second big piece of dealing with adversity is understanding that "it is NOT what happens but HOW I respond that determines how I experience something." I believe the Buddha said something like this  but up till now I have only heard other teachers saying it. I will keep looking for the Buddha's actual quote.   However Epictetus who lived in a similar time in history is quoted as saying "We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us.”

Both statements in essence are telling us that regardless of our situation, how we experience it, how we feel about it, is up to us.  When something happens do we catastrophise it in the mind, do we automatically go to worst case scenario?  If we do of course we will feel bad.  There is another option - using the eightfold path to see things clearly.

The Noble Eightfold path when practiced gives us tools to act skillfully and respond wisely.  Beginning with UNDERSTANDING.   When we are faced with a situation first we need to Understand what is actually happening, not how it feels.  Once we have a basic idea of the current situation than we can consider what we might want to do or what a propper response might be - this is INTENTION, number two in the Noble Eightfold path.  We set a right intention by basing it on a clear understanding, not an emotional or frightened or angry feeling.  As we work through the other factors of the path we should also include Metta and Karuna (kindness and compassion) in whatever we choose to do and how we choose to think about the situation.  Ruminating and worrying for the most part is unkind towards ourselves. Rarely will it help change an outcome and it won't make us feel any better either.

So I see the practice of mindfulness of the feeling tone helpful in seeing where we are at in any given moment.  When we notice we don't feel so okay, we can investigate where it stems from and then work to see clearly with these tools.  As we become well versed in this we can see ahead of time that negative thinking brings us nothing and we learn to stop doing it as often.