This is the third part of a four-part series exploring ordinary sensory perceptions.
Feel Contrasting Sensations
• 4. Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling
The language used to explain mindfulness practice just as often leads to confusion. This is a challenge that comes with the territory. The most important thing is to clarify your understanding through direct personal experience rather than relying solely on intellectual reasoning.
For instance, let’s consider what it means to develop nonjudgmental awareness.
Being judgmental means habitually responding with harsh criticism. When someone consistently expresses negative opinions, we describe that person as judgmental or critical. To be nonjudgmental, on the other hand, means not rushing to form strong negative opinions.
When we practice mindfulness, aiming to be nonjudgmental can go smoothly when we feel focused and relaxed. However, it can quickly become problematic when we feel scattered or agitated. Striving to be nonjudgmental during meditation can create a minefield of unrealistic expectations, which is entirely contrary to the quality of attention we aim to cultivate.
Noticing distraction, sadness, or confusion is evidence of mindful awareness. Similarly, it’s essential to understand that noticing something unpleasant, such as an itch or fatigue, is not a judgmental act. When we engage in focus-building mindfulness exercises, it’s important to distinguish between the specific sensation being observed and the quality of the awareness itself.
Noticing that the specific sensation is unpleasant isn’t being judgmental; it’s evidence of being mindful. Some sensations hurt. Some feelings are challenging. Some sounds signal danger. It’s not only okay to observe these kinds of distinctions, but it’s essential to the attentional skill of perceptual clarity. Being able to make subtle and obvious sensory distinctions helps make ordinary circumstances feel more alive.
The quality of awareness we bring to it is difficult to describe, but it’s closer to neutral than nonjudgmental. When a sensation is unpleasant, we instinctively resist it. When it is pleasant, we try to hold onto it or even enhance it. Practicing mindfulness involves observing with a bit of counter-instinctual distance.
Rather than collecting evidence of a personality trait (judgmental, gracious), we are developing a relationship skill aimed at changing the ways we typically relate to both pleasant and unpleasant sensations. This involves training ourselves to observe these sensations briefly without being overly concerned about their comfort level, even though we are fully aware of how comfortable or uncomfortable they actually feel.
A good analogy is caring for an infant. How would you hold a peaceful, sleeping baby? How would you hold a distressed, crying baby? Recognizing that the baby in your care is crying doesn’t make you judgmental or less loving. The only thing you can do is offer comfort and reassurance. You might rock your body a little, speak in soothing tones, or even sing.
It’s possible to cherish a sleeping child and provide comfort to a restless one without affecting the underlying love and commitment we have for them. Similarly, we can experience both pleasant and unpleasant sensations with a sense of neutrality, demonstrating openness and grace toward our own complex, resilient, and vulnerable humanity.
I once had a visceral experience that vividly illustrates this during a lengthy meditation session at a silent retreat. As soon as the session began, I started to feel pain in one of my knees. There seemed to be nothing I could do to relieve it, so I had to improvise based on the options available to me.
One knee ached, while the other felt fine. I found myself switching my focus between the two, trying to imagine how I might hold each of them if they were fussy and content babies. I became immersed in savoring the comfortable knee, then in trying to hold the screaming knee in the same way, acknowledging the pain while observing it as if it were something I loved. It felt less like problem-solving and more like an internal calibration process. As my need for the pain to disappear gradually diminished, my awareness transformed and began to feel more like love.
The pain didn’t magically disappear, but the degree of misery I felt significantly subsided. At one point, I was stunned to notice that both knees felt nearly the same. The pain hadn’t gone away, but the interpretation had faded entirely.
The experience taught me that my relationship with what I see, hear, and feel affects how I experience those sensations. It’s easy to overlook most of the time. Additionally, the experience showed me that taking the time to appreciate comfortable situations helps me adjust my responses to more uncomfortable ones.
These are lessons I continue to learn and apply, and I don’t think it’s judgmental to say that I’ll need to continue working on them for the rest of my life.
Exercise
This exercise explores contrasting bodily sensations to sharpen sensory clarity and strengthen equanimity.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
taking a break from worrying
taking a break from working
taking a break from wanting
