In this practice, you'll notice feeling tone in two dimensions. First, the worldly: your reactions to external sensory experiences like sounds, sensations, thoughts, and the pull toward what feels pleasant, away from what feels unpleasant, the drifting of neutral. Then there’s the unworldly: the feeling tone that arises in response to your internal states—when kindness emerges, when concentration deepens, when wisdom touches you. This meditation encourages you to cultivate the capacity to notice both.

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Practice reflection:

We’re usually aware of worldly feeling tone—how we’re pulled toward pleasant sensations and away from unpleasant ones. But the Buddhist teaching of vedanā or feeling tone includes something subtler: the unworldly. How do you feel when compassion arises? When you touch clarity? When peace settles in? There’s a feeling tone there, too, and we can grasp at it just as tightly as we grasp at anything else.

The practice invites you to notice both dimensions, partly to recognize that wholesome states also trigger patterns of grasping and aversion. You can cling to peace, you can push away the moment your meditation feels “bad.” Noticing this in yourself is where real insight begins—seeing how the mind works, whether it’s chasing pleasure or chasing spiritual experiences.

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