Bringing Mindfulness to Pleasant and Unpleasant Experiences

“When we're not mindful [of our response to what is happening in the moment], pleasant feelings habitually condition desire and clinging, unpleasant feelings condition dislike and aversion, and neutral feelings condition delusion, i.e., not really knowing what is going on. Yet when we are mindful, these very same feelings become the vehicle of our freedom.” In this quote Joseph Goldstein is pointing out an often overlooked Buddhist concept, that in every moment our minds are labeling the information coming into our awareness as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (not important).

Two examples of the power of bringing mindfulness to this process
I was leading a body scan meditation to some Keene State College students. I mentioned that when you notice an unpleasant or even painful sensation, to see if you can simply observe it rather than hating it. Afterwards, a student said that she had gone to the gym the day before after having not gone for months. As a result, she was sore all over and hating it. After I made my comment, her experience of the sensations of soreness on her body went from being miserable and hating it to realizing that it wasn't that bad and that the soreness wasn't forever.

This is a snippet of a dialogue in a course I was taking after we had meditated for about 30 minutes.
Teacher: What did you notice?
Participant: I noticed that I felt sad.
Teacher: And then what?
Participant: I noticed that I didn’t want to feel sad.
Teacher: And then what?
Participant: I felt even worse.

The point in both examples is that while we can’t control what comes into our awareness, we can bring mindfulness to what we are adding to that experience. In the second case, sadness was the experience and the aversion to this unpleasantness was what was added. Over time we can notice when we are adding and realize that there are other choices.

Jon Kabat-Zinn operationalized this process in the well-known and researched Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. These were his instructions:
For one week, bring mindfulness to one pleasant event each day, e.g., receiving praise or hearing a bird song.
Specifically, bring mindful attention to:
1) your body, e.g., being aware of your shoulders relaxing, a smile...
2) your emotions, e.g., joy, contentedness...
3) your thoughts, e.g., “That was sweet,” “It’s so nice to be outside"...
4) what you noticed as you reflected on the experience, e.g., "It was such a small thing, but I’m glad I noticed it."

For the next week, bring mindful attention to one unpleasant event each day, e.g., waiting in line or worrying about something or a headache. As before, bring mindful attention to what you noticed in your body, your emotions, your thoughts, and what you noticed when reflecting on the experience.

If you are hesitant to do so, you might want to read some of the insights that participants (in the MBSR courses that I taught almost 30 times) noted in our discussions.

Insights from bringing mindfulness to pleasant events
• "Fully experiencing a pleasant event changed my attitude for the whole day!"
• "Those happy moments become elongated and they followed me throughout the day."
• There are actually many pleasant events almost every day.
• “I had an increased openness to so many other pleasant events that often go unnoticed”; we are so often on automatic pilot.
• "Seeing beauty in the ordinary"
• Focusing on the pleasant was helpful to balance the tendency to focus on the negative, which is so common.

Insights from bringing mindfulness to unpleasant events
• When you bring curiosity and non-judgment to something unpleasant, "I realized that it’s not as bad as I first thought."
• When being mindful, the experience went from intolerable to just unpleasant.

This reminds me of a comment my mom made to me when I was adding to an unpleasant experience: she told me I was “making a mountain out of a molehill.” I'm also reminded of a quote from Mark Twain: "most of the worst events of my life never actually happened."

When we bring curiosity and non-judgmental awareness to the unpleasantness, it softens, and our experience can go from highly unpleasant to mildly unpleasant to sometimes just “this is how it is now.” The now is important because we often literally contract in reaction to the unpleasantness because we lose perspective; that is, that this unpleasantness is impermanent.

I acknowledge that it is sometimes almost impossible to bring mindful attention to something that is extremely physically or emotionally painful. In those cases, distraction can be a more useful choice. I was aware of this several times during my stay in the intensive-care unit and during my recovery from the aortic dissection.

I end with the Buddha's actual words: "the uninstructed person does not know of any escape from unpleasant or painful feelings other than seeking something that is pleasant." One of my meditation teachers gave a personal example. She was relaxing at home and suddenly had the desire for a piece of chocolate. Upon reflection, she realized that just before that desire for chocolate, a sudden feeling of sadness had arisen. When she allowed herself to sit with that feeling of sadness for just a few moments, that urge for chocolate dissolved.

If you decide to try out this exercise, other readers and I would love to hear what you noticed.

Why meditate?

"I like this, I want this, I must have this, I need this, I worry that I won’t get it…"
"I don’t like this, I hate this, this shouldn’t be happening..."

So much of our internal dialogue is about what we like and want and what we don't like and don't want. We call these thoughts ruminating, worrying, fantasizing, etc.

Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral
One of the more powerful concepts that I learned from Buddhist psychology is Buddha's statement that we are constantly, mostly unconsciously, labeling the information coming to our senses as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We tend to be drawn to the pleasant, turn away from the unpleasant, and ignore the neutral. Interestingly, neuroscientist have said basically the same thing in their language: our brain assigns a valence (+, -, or 0) to every input. This is true not only of humans, but all living beings. It's hard-wired and essential to survival.

Freud coined the phrase 'pleasure principle': we seek pleasure and avoid pain. When Jon Kabat-Zinn brought mindfulness to mainstream America, one of his catchphrases was that we live much of our lives on auto pilot. Buddha's point was that when we these assessments stay at the subconscious level, we are driven by them, and we suffer from this.

Primary and secondary pain
A common paraphrase of Buddha's response to this is that in life, pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional. Translating his teachings to modern language, he distinguished between primary and secondary pain. Primary pain, physical or emotional, is the initial information coming to our brain. Secondary pain is what we add, for example, "I don't like it," "I wish it would go away," or "why me?" In an 8 week course on meeting pain with mindfulness, I told participants that the secondary pain could be brought to zero, and all of the participants found some or immense reduction in the secondary pain.

Basic mindfulness
The beginning instructions for mindfulness meditation are to pick an object, for example the breath or body, and to cultivate an interested and non-judgmental awareness to what we are paying attention to. When we realize the mind has wandered, we gently return our attention to the meditation object. This alone has brought relief to many people. But it's really the beginning.

The next part is that we learn to pay attention not only to the object of our meditation, but more importantly we also bring awareness to the quality of our relationship to what is happening. The quality is: like, don't like, or neutral.

An example
I'll give a simple example from last night’s meditation. I was sitting in a chair, focusing on my breath, and I suddenly realized that the pads on my right foot were slightly swollen and my little toe ached. I didn’t like it. It was distracting. I brought curiosity to the sensations, but I still didn't like it. So I moved my attention elsewhere. A couple minutes later I checked out my feet again. Still a bit uncomfortable—the sensations hadn’t changed. However, my attitude had—it was now more neutral than disliking. More: it’s like this now. Period.

My teachers emphasize that we meditate so that we practice, in a controlled environment, with simpler stimuli (breath, body, etc.). When we do this, so often, the simple awareness that we are caught in liking or disliking causes that secondary pain to dissolve. When we are caught up in wanting the pleasant or hating the unpleasant, it's like pouring gasoline on a small campfire. When we bring mindful awareness to liking and disliking, it's like pouring water on the fire.

Why meditate?
One teacher's response to the question "why should I meditate every day" was "so you'll remember." That is, so you'll remember when you've been hooked into ruminating, fuming, worrying, etc. Hundreds of times a day. Little things like: someone pulls in front of us on the highway, or we hit three stop lights in a row, or the grocery store doesn't have what we want. Big things, like worrying about the upcoming election, or not having money to pay all our bills, or relationship problems.

I think I'm a slow learner or perhaps my childhood was more traumatic than I realize, but I know that I am remembering more often during the day when I'm getting triggered by something. And I have a variety of tools to respond to that recognition of being hooked. The simplest is to simply take a few slow breaths. I have other simple practices: S.T.O.P, 3-step Breathing Space, and R.A.I.N. on the Resources part of my website. I have more sophisticated practices that are written below the basic practices.

I also believe that meditation is not the only way that helps us to remember when we're triggered. These include making quiet time in the morning to read, to simply sit and look out the window, taking walks, practices like Tai Chi, Yoga, Qigong, among others.

Changes in this blog
I occasionally look at the numbers about activity on my website from the company I used to create the website and the blog. The numbers show that the activity has been steadily decreasing since March. It could be partially due to the pandemic. It could be partially due to my sending out the Quote, Poem, and Story each week since April. It could be that I'm often saying the same thing over and over. I have found this to be true with some of my favorite meditation authors. I've also realized that very few bloggers, who write a substantive post, do so every week.

At the same time, I enjoy the writing. It motivates me "to practice what I preach." I also find that it deepens my practice, giving me more clarity and insight. So I've decided to take a couple weeks off and then beginning in September to write a post on the first and third Tuesday of each month. If you have any feedback to offer, know that I am open to it at any time.

With appreciation,

Tom