Mindfulness with Nathanael ROUX

Feelings (Vedana)

Goal : Deepen our understanding on the process of sytematic evaluation / judgment and automatic reaction

Help :

feeling tone split

pleasant / unpleasant / neutral

applied to the 6 spheres of consciousness

Advice:

Abide contemplating feelings unfolding (linked to the 5 senses)

Appear / stay / disappear

Evaluation / judgement

Each time we lose contact

Be aware of it

No complaint, no judgment

Gently come back to it

Benefit: observe the sequence: perception => evaluation / judgement => reaction

Pratical exercise: investigate how feelings make us react in an automatic way (mostly without control)

Commentary

Sitting meditation practice gives the opportunity to experience unpleasant feelings linked to sitting still for a long time 

Observe how sitting posture could be pleasant at the beginning and after a while become unpleasant.

Abide if even the slightest unpleasant body sensation urge you to make a little move to release the tension.

Verify if you are able to perceive the naked sensation, just before judgement and before an automatic reaction is triggered.

Try not to react, to let it be, to wait still.

What happens?

Is the sensation evolving?

Is it stable?
Is it pulsating ?
Is it growing?
Is it diminishing?
What shape?
What color?
Do it disapper ?

If yes, where?

Is the associated feeling evolving?

As soon as the sensation has become too tiny to notice, come back to breathing (if the sensation come back again, you could shift back to it again).

Note: of course, in case of strong/violent suffering, please adjust without waiting your posture to make it stop

My experience feedback

I’m an engineer, my job is to think, organize, plan, investigate root causes of the problems, find solutions, run them and verify.

In addition, I have another side artist oriented, non-conformist, innovative and creative, I love to brainstorm and most of the time I have a lot of ideas.

My mind is very often full of different kind of thoughts.

Also, I have never been trained to master my emotions: identifying emotions, knowing when an emotion is here, describing it, speaking about them is not my cup of tea.

So, the meditation on thoughts has been and is still a very interesting challenge for me.

The first significant step forward for me on the subject was the day I have been able to say: I have some anger and sadness in me (and not I’m angry or I’m sad).

The second time is when a manager has shouted after me with no true reason and that my instinct pushed me to come back to my office and seat on my meditation cushion:

I seated
I took contact with my breath
I abided the physical impact of what I was confronted to

I fully felt the pulsating energy of anger and sadness in me

In all its dimensions and details

Without trying to escape or to reject
And I proceeded like with my daughters when they were young and ill

I imagined « taking in my arms» these unpleasant physical sensations and rock the slowly

And I stayed still for a long moment paying attention to the physical sensations being there and at their evolution

And like magic, by the full acceptance to what was here, being totally and plenty mindful of them, the unpleasant physical sensations progressively dissolved et finally disappeared

And the associated thoughts and emotions also

A little bit later I cross again the same manager in a corridor and I sincerely smiled at him…

Note: you may remark that what allowed this breakthrough is the fact that this time I did not start thinking about it: why that, why me???

Step6 : Thoughts and emotions