Leo Tolstoy said, “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow”. Light and shade are both wonderful properties of reality. We all experience the light and shade of life, the highs, and lows, like a musical melody, or the changing colours of the seasons. Sometimes we experience pleasure, elation, and happiness when everything goes our way, and at other times life pushes back against our hopes and expectations, leading to sadness, and frustration.
Most children in western culture are told fairy tales that introduce light and shade. Sometimes problems need to be solved. There are pleasant and unpleasant people and situations, so we need to build resilience.
Deep within our body and brain, we bias our experience of sensations, situations, and people into pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling tones. Moving your hand towards a fire on a cold day is a pleasant feeling tone and moving it too close becomes unpleasant. Feeling tone arises before we experience emotions and thoughts and goes all the way back to early evolution. Even single-celled organisms will move towards pleasant things like food and away from unpleasant things like heat. So, it is no surprise that we tend to be drawn toward pleasant experiences and push away unpleasant ones.
We experience changes in feeling tone every day. We can be in a relatively happy neutral mood, then something small happens. This could be something like a minor disappointment; finding that we’ve run out of coffee, or dismay that our bank balance is lower than expected, for instance. Whatever the small event is, there’s a subtle change in feeling tone that we often fail to notice. Going unnoticed, the unpleasant feeling tone can then influence emotions and thoughts and colour our mood during the day.
Three things that make feeling tone powerful are that it:
- Arises at a low level, on the first contact with an object or event, before being perceived and interpreted by the mind.
- Generally, operates below conscious awareness, so needs skilful awareness to notice.
- Contributes to our mood, and sense of self and identity. There is always some form of feeling tone in the background of our experience.
As well as feeling tone arising in the present moment, we can also experience feeling tone from our past. For instance, a child has an unpleasant experience eating a tomato, with an associated feeling tone. As the child develops into adulthood, even the thought of a tomato brings an unpleasant feeling tone back to the body, stimulating thoughts like, “I’m not someone who likes tomatoes”. Although this example is relatively trivial, it does make the point that we’re always more than our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. When we make the interactions between them part of our identity, they can define who we are.
Of course, enjoying a pleasant feeling is an important part of life’s experience. The downside are that a pleasant feeling tone can sometimes be about craving for something, like an addiction to tobacco, impulse buying, or about wanting to hold onto a pleasant experience.
We interpret the world from two directions: top-down and bottom-up, each with its own form of intelligence. We interpret top-down through conscious thinking, based on knowledge and experience. We also make sense of the world from the bottom up through feeling tone and then emotions, which are less accessible to conscious awareness.
To work more skilfully with feeling tone means building awareness of this useful resource. After all, feelings are a form of feedback that tells us that something needs attention. For example, we may be at the cashpoint and notice a change in feeling tone. Noticing and identifying the change in feeling tone we could have the thought “There’s a change in feeling tone” while acknowledging the trigger with openness and kindness, “That’s to do with my old anxiety pattern with personal finance that no longer serves me”. Then by exploring where the feeling tone resonates in the body and releasing any physical contraction and tightness, we break the negative spiral of emotions, thoughts, and moods.
Noticing and working skilfully with feeling tone is not easy but becoming more aware of and acknowledging what a powerful seed this is to subsequent emotions and mind-states makes a real difference to our sense of ease, happiness, and wellbeing.
Suggested weekly practice
- Check-in with yourself during the week to see what feeling tone is around.
- When you encounter situations that you know are unpleasant, like getting on a crowded train, sense and acknowledge the feeling tone and work with it as outlined above and see what difference this makes
- Explore what feeling tone you may still be holding from your past that has led to your likes and dislikes.
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
- Then play the second audio to explore your feeling tone
