The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World

© 2023 Mark Williams, DPhil and Danny Penman, Phd

Excerpted from Deeper Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Reprinted with permission of Balance Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.

Every morning, a man walked his four dogs in the park. Three of them always darted about, barking happily, tails wagging with delight. The fourth seemed happy enough but would only ever run around in tight little circles (albeit covering quite a distance), staying close to the man as he walked.

Day after day, the park keeper watched the dog’s strange behavior. After a while, the keeper plucked up the courage to ask the man why his dog was behaving so oddly .¹

“Ah,” the man replied. “She’s a rescue dog. She was locked up for most of her life. That was the size of her cage.”

How often have you behaved like that dog? Free, but constantly running around in little mental circles. Free to be happy, yet caged by the same dark, repetitive thoughts. Free to be at peace with yourself and the world, while remaining trapped and entangled by anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion.

Free as a dog in a cage.

So much of life is needlessly marred by little tragedies such as these. Deep down, we all know that we are capable of living happy and fulfilling lives, and yet something always stops us from doing so. Just as life seems to be within our grasp, it slips through our fingers. Although such periods of distress seem to appear from nowhere, they actually arise from deeply buried psychological forces. Neuroscientists have begun to understand how these processes guide our thoughts, feelings, and emotions; but, more important, they have discovered why they occasionally go wrong and leave our lives as shadows of their true potential. These new discoveries also show why mindfulness is so effective at relieving distress, but crucially, they also open the door to subtly different methods that can be even more effective. Mindfulness has not been superseded; rather, it can be expanded to include an extra dimension that transforms it.

Our new book, Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World, harnesses these new developments. It will help you to step aside from your worries and give you the tools necessary to deal with anxiety, stress, unhappiness, exhaustion, and even depression. And when these unpleasant emotions evaporate, you will rediscover a calm space inside from which you can rebuild your life.

We can help you to do this because we— and our colleagues at Oxford University, UK, and other institutions around the world— have spent many years developing treatments for anxiety, stress, depression, and exhaustion. We co-developed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which has been clinically proven to be one of the most effective treatments for depression so far developed. Out of this work arose Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World. That book, and the mindfulness program within it, has been proven in clinical trials at Cambridge University and elsewhere to be a highly effective treatment for anxiety, stress, and depression. So much so that it is prescribed by doctors and psychiatrists around the world to help people cope with a wide range of mental health conditions, as well as generalized unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life.

But the practices revealed in Mindfulness, and similar skills taught on courses such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), are only the first steps on a longer and more fruitful road. Although MBCT and MBSR can form the foundations for a happier and more fulfilling life, and have proven transformative for many, a lot of people have asked us whether there is anything more they could do to enhance their practice and resolve their remaining issues

The answer is yes. There is a way of taking mindfulness to the next level, of going further and unleashing more of your potential, by exploring another frontier of mindfulness known as vedana or feeling tone. And, importantly, you don’t need to have extensive meditation experience to benefit from these practices. Research is showing that novice meditators can gain just as much from them as those who have practiced for many years.

Although it is an often-overlooked aspect of meditation, feeling tone is in fact one of the four original foundations of mindfulness. These are: mindfulness of the body and breath; mindfulness of feelings and sensations (or vedana); mindfulness of the mind or consciousness; and mindfulness of the ever-changing nature of the world and what helps and hinders your journey through it. Each aspect is cultivated using a different set of practices that, together, bring about profoundly different effects on mind and body. Mindfulness courses generally focus on the first layer of each of these four foundations. This book uses new meditations on feeling tone as a gateway into the deeper layers of the same four aspects of mindfulness. These take you closer to the source of your “spirit”; closer to any difficulties you may be having; nearer still to their resolution.

There is no satisfactory translation of the ancient Sanskrit word vedana. It is a quality of awareness that can only be experienced, not pinned down with precision. It is the feeling, almost a background “color,” that tinges our experience of the world—of mindfulness itself. For this reason, vedana is often translated as “feeling tone.” Although we will use the terms interchangeably, it will always pay to remember that we are referring to a flavor of awareness, and not a rigid concept that can be hedged in by words and definitions. Feeling tone is something that you feel in mind, body, and “spirit,” but its true quality will always remain slightly ineffable. Sometimes annoyingly so.

A typical feeling tone meditation consists of stilling the mind with a simple breath or body meditation and then paying attention to your experiences in a manner that is subtly different to what other meditations request. It asks you to focus in a very specific way on the feelings and sensations that arise in the moment when the unconscious mind crystallizes into the conscious one. Such moments, though fleeting, are often the most important ones in your life. This is because vedana is the balance point in your mind that sets the tone for the sequence of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that follow. It is often subtle, but if you pay attention to it, you can feel it in your mind, body, and spirit— right through to your bones. The feeling tone is of profound importance because it guides the trajectory of your subsequent thoughts, feelings, and emotions. If it is “pleasant,” you will tend to feel positive, dynamic, and in control of your life (at least for a while). If it is “unpleasant”, you will likely feel slightly gloomy, deflated, and powerless. Feeling tone meditations teach you to see, or, more precisely, to feel the way that your life is pushed and pulled around by forces you are barely conscious of. Sometimes these forces act in your best interests, sometimes not— but the important thing is that they are not under your immediate control. Under their influence, your life is not your own.

To help these ideas settle into your mind, you might like to try this little practice to get a sense of your feeling tones: if it is convenient, take a few moments to look around you; the room, the window, the interior of your train or bus, or perhaps the street, field or forest before you. As your eyes alight on different things, or different sounds come to your ears, see if you can register the subtle sense of whether each one feels pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. If you are at home, your eye might alight on a card, gift or memento from a much- loved friend. You might feel the instant warm glow of a pleasant feeling tone in response. Or you might see a dirty dish that you’ve been meaning to tidy away, or something you’ve borrowed from someone and had intended to return, and then you might notice an unpleasant feeling tone. If you are outside, you may notice the sun streaming through the leaves of a tree, or a piece of dirty plastic trash flapping around. If you can catch the moment, you might sense ripples of pleasant or unpleasant feeling tones. But it is not just the external world that has such an impact. You may also become aware of sensations inside your body, such as aches and pains, or perhaps a sense of relaxed calm. These, too, register on the same dimension of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. And sooner or later, you may notice thoughts or emotions arising and passing away soon after the feeling tones.

Yet, feeling tones can be unpredictable. You can never know in advance the flavour of their appearance. They don’t exist in objects themselves but instead emerge from their contact with your mind and body in combination with the state of your body and mind at that precise moment. As an example, you might normally find chocolate cake pleasant, but if you have just eaten a heavy meal, the very thought of it might feel unpleasant. Or if you are busy, the ping of an arriving message might feel like an unpleasant distraction, but if you are feeling lonely, the same sound might create a pleasant feeling tone. This ever-changing landscape of contexts and moods makes it difficult to predict what will strike you as pleasant or unpleasant. The only certain way of knowing is to pay attention in the now. And because feeling tones often arise and pass away quickly, they can be difficult to notice, unless you intentionally cultivate awareness of them. As you will come to learn, somehow there is a “readout” in body and mind on the dimension of pleasant to unpleasant. It’s like a gut feeling. It’s not a matter of thinking hard about it, or hunting for it, it’s more like the taste of something; you just know it when you taste it. Like tasting milk that’s gone sour, you know it’s unpleasant without having to think about it.

This is hidden knowledge – part of the wisdom tradition that has influenced the practice of meditation for millennia – but is only ever rarely made explicit. And its true significance has only recently come to the fore. Neuroscience has now discovered the importance of this ‘first impression’: it is fundamental to all life. Just as plants arch towards sunlight, and roots stretch towards water, so every living being has the means to discern the pleasant from the unpleasant. All life depends upon it.

Feeling tones are immediate and rely on sensitivities built into every cell of our bodies from the earliest days of our evolution. Even single-celled creatures are sensitive to both nutrients and toxins. It allows them to distinguish between one and the other. This is the essence of vedana. It helps all living beings distinguish between the things that they should move towards (pleasant) and those that they should move away from (unpleasant) and encourages them to sit tight if everything is fine (neutral). Without such a sensitivity, they would be like a boat without a rudder, with nothing to steer them away from danger and towards a friendly port.

In countless ways, vedana marks the difference between life and mere machinery

But we humans have a unique and special difficulty when it comes to vedana: our mental life is so complex that we can become lost inside of it. Our thoughts, memories and plans, which also carry feeling tones, can compel us to flee from our own minds.

And while we can flee, we can never escape.

In these ways, feeling tones are hugely significant. Cast your mind back to the last time you were sitting in a café or bar and suddenly felt unhappy for no apparent reason. If you could rewind the clock and observe what was happening “frame by frame” as your unhappiness arose, you would have noticed that the emotion was preceded by a momentary pause. It was as if your mind was poised on a knife edge, a moment when it was sensing whether the evolving situation was pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. A moment of vedana.

So vedana is often a tipping point in your mind that affects how you experience the world in the moments that follow. Good, bad, indifferent. But it is what happens next that is of paramount importance— we call it the “reactivity pulse.” It works like this: If a pleasant feeling tone arises in the mind, then it is entirely natural to want to grasp it, keep hold of it, and be a little fearful that it will fade away or slip through your fingers. If the tone is unpleasant, then it is natural to want to get rid of it, to push it away, fearing that it will stick around forever and never leave. Neutral
sensations often feel boring, so you feel like tuning out and finding something more interesting to do. These feeling tones are primal and can quickly trigger a cascade of reactions in the mind and body. These are felt as emotions and cravings that compel you to try to keep hold of pleasant feeling tones, push away unpleasant ones, and distract yourself from neutral ones. So the reactivity pulse is the mind’s knee-jerk reaction to feeling tone. If a feeling tone sets the scene, then the reactivity pulse casts the actors, selects the costumes, and writes the script for what happens next. And it can write a script and direct a scene that can easily ruin your whole day and sometimes far, far longer. Virtually all of the emotional difficulties that many of us experience begin with the mind’s reaction to our feeling tones— our reactivity pulse. But it’s not even the pulse itself that is the problem, but our ignorance of its existence and underlying nature. We are often not aware that it has occurred, oblivious of the feeling tone that triggered it and unaware of its tendency to fade away all by itself, if only we would allow it to do so. All we are aware of is the cascade of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that follow in its wake.

Learning to sense your feeling tones— bringing them into the light— teaches you to recognize your underlying state of mind and helps you make allowances for your sensitivities and entirely natural biases and reactions. It gives you the space to respond rather than react. It helps you to compassionately accept that although you might be anxious, stressed, angry, or depressed in this moment, this is not the totality of your life with only one depressing future ahead of you. You can change course. Alternative futures are available to you.

And tapping into an alternative future is as simple as sensing the underlying flow of feeling tones. Noticing the reactivity pulses. Realizing that the craving for things to be different is the problem. Craving an end to unpleasantness. Craving for pleasantness to remain. Craving an end to boredom. This idea is common to many ancient traditions. And now, neuroscience agrees.

Feeling Tone Meditation

Preparation

1. Settle in to sit, on a chair or a stool or a cushion. Allow the shoulders to be dropped and the head balanced, so that your posture embodies a sense of being present, awake for each moment. Then choose an anchor as in Weeks One and Two – the breath, feet, contact with seat or hands.
2. When you feel ready, deliberately expand the focus of your awareness to the whole body.

Feeling tone of body sensations and of sounds

3. As you sit here, bring your awareness to whatever sensations in your body are most distinct at any moment, seeing if it’s possible to register if they are pleasant, unpleasant or somewhere in between. For many sensations, the feeling tone may be quite subtle, so don’t worry if you aren’t sure; simply let go and wait for another sensation to arrive.
4. When you feel ready, expand the attention to sounds as best you can, registering the tonality of the sound – pleasant, unpleasant or neither? There’s no need to think too hard about this; simply register what the body and mind already feels when a sound is received.

Feeling tone of distractions

5. At a certain point, when you feel ready, let sounds fade into the background and return attention to your anchor.
6. Whenever you find that the mind has become distracted, as soon as you notice this, see if it’s possible to also notice the feeling tone of the distraction (just as you did with body sensations and sounds). It may be from something happening outside, or from inside your body or from your mind (a memory, or plan, or daydream, or worry) . . . whatever it is, when you become aware of it, take a moment to get a sense of whether it’s pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
7. And then, when you have registered the feeling tone, bring the attention back to the body. Come back and anchor yourself once again in this moment. And when the next distraction arises, once again register its feeling tone, before coming back to your anchor. Remember not to try too hard – if something is hard to register, let it go, and wait for something else to arise.
8. And sit in silence as you continue to do this practice on your own, checking in from time to time to see where your mind is, and noting the pleasantness or unpleasantness of wherever it had gone.
9. And remember that if anything seems overwhelming at any time, you can always let go of registering tonality and bring the focus of your attention back to your chosen anchor.

Ending

10. For the last few moments of the sitting, come back to focus on your chosen anchor, back to the simplicity of sensations, arising and dissolving from moment to moment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Williams is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the British Academy. With his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge, he codeveloped Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) which clinical trials have shown to be as effective as medication and therapy for depression. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), working on behalf the National Health Service, now recommends MBCT as a primary treatment for depression.

Dr. Danny Penman is a mindfulness teacher and bestselling author. He is co-author, with Professor Mark Williams of Oxford University, of the acclaimed Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. This book is credited with popularising mindfulness and is now prescribed across the UK’s National Health Service for such conditions as anxiety, stress, depression and chronic pain. In 2014, he won the British Medical Association’s Best Book (Popular Medicine) Award for Mindfulness for Health: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing (co-written with Vidyamala Burch). His journalism has appeared in the Daily Mail, New Scientist, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph.

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Posted by mkeane on Monday, July 31st, 2023 @ 5:46AM
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