In this meditation,
We'll be cultivating awareness of feeling tone by learning to attend to the sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness that automatically comes with anything that arises in the body or mind.
So coming to sit on a chair or a stool or a cushion,
Letting the eyes close if that feels comfortable or lowering your gaze,
And sensing the whole body sitting here,
Present,
Awake.
And when you're ready,
Bringing your awareness to a place in the body which for you can act as an anchor for your attention in this sitting.
It could be the contact between the feet and the floor,
Or between your body and the seat,
Or the hands on your lap,
Or the breath.
If the breath,
Choosing one place to follow the breath and remaining here in this one place at the nose,
Or the chest,
Or the abdomen.
And now at a certain point,
Deliberately expanding the focus of your awareness to the whole body as you sit here,
Noticing which sensations are arising moment by moment,
And seeing if it's possible to register their feeling tone,
Whether they are pleasant,
Unpleasant,
Or somewhere in between.
Perhaps first noticing any sensations arising on the surface of the body,
The air moving across the face or hands,
Or contact with clothes,
Or the contact the body is making with whatever is supporting it.
Pleasant,
Unpleasant,
Or neither.
Then at a certain point,
Bringing awareness to sensations inside the body,
In feet or legs,
In the upper body,
In arms and hands,
Neck and head.
Holding the whole body in awareness now,
And noticing sensations wherever they arise in the body,
Registering the feeling tone of these sensations as they arise,
Pleasant,
Unpleasant,
Or neither.
For many sensations,
The feeling tone may be very subtle,
So don't worry if you aren't sure,
Simply letting go and waiting for another sensation to arrive in awareness.
Now at a certain point,
Expanding the attention to sounds,
As best you can,
Registering the feeling tone that comes with any sound.
Some sounds are not obviously pleasant or unpleasant,
So it can take time to tune in to the subtle sense of the tonality of the sound,
A mild liking or disliking for a particular sound.
Other sounds are more obvious and it's easy to tell if they're pleasant or unpleasant.
Now letting sounds fade into the background,
And allowing your awareness to be the awareness of thinking itself,
And any feelings as well.
To help in this,
You may wish to return your attention to the body as a whole sitting here,
And then keeping the body in the background,
Waiting to see if thoughts and feelings arise,
As if you were sitting by a river and the thoughts and feelings were floating past,
Or looking up at the sky and they were clouds.
So as soon as you notice a thought or feeling,
Just as you did with sensations and sounds,
Seeing if it's possible to notice the feeling tone of what's going through the mind.
Is it pleasant,
Unpleasant,
Or somewhere in between?
And if your mind seems to get completely lost in thought,
There's no need to be concerned,
No need to track back to what took you away,
Simply registering the feeling tone of the whole thought stream,
Pleasant,
Unpleasant,
Or neither.
And for the last few moments of the practice,
Coming back to your anchor in the body,
And remembering that whenever you find your mind is scattered and dispersed by the events of your day,
You can come back to the simplicity of knowing and acknowledging the pleasantness and unpleasantness of what's arising in each moment.
And knowing too,
That becoming more mindful of these feeling tones can bring freedom from many of the stresses that afflict mind and body,
And so become an important part of taking care of yourself.
