July 24, 2017, 7 – 8:30 pm
Prana Wellness Center, 1428 Commercial Street, Astoria, OR
The Second Foundation of Mindfulness helps us become more aware of subtle and not-so-subtle movements of body and mind as we respond to what feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral to us. It is built on the first foundation of mindfulness of the body, and relies on the stability we have gained by being fully present and embodied.
This foundation is not so much about emotions, but about how we respond to what we experience and what we feel about our experience. We spend much of our lives reacting. We move toward the things that feel pleasant and away from the things that feel unpleasant. When we don’t have a reaction to something, we often tune out or drift toward activities that can amuse us.
How we react to experience
- When everything is pleasant, we want the good feelings to last. We like something and want more of it. Our thoughts and sensations rapidly build as we go after the things that are pleasant and make us feel good. We want to feel good and don’t want the good feelings to end: “I want more sex . . . more candy . . . more winning this video game. . . .” It doesn’t matter what it is that feels pleasant to us, we move quickly toward wanting more of it.
- When things are unpleasant, we also move into reactivity. Thoughts and sensations begin spiraling and building, whether we are mad at someone or have a stomach ache. When things are unpleasant, we try to end the unpleasantness. We scare ourselves with thoughts about the terrible things might happen when we have a pain in our lower back or we’re throwing up. If we have unpleasant feelings about a person, we can make the person bad in our thoughts, and we often fantasize about how to end the cause of our feelings of unpleasantness.
- When we feel neutral, we may translate neutrality into boredom. We get restless. We want to fill the gaps. We want to experience something stronger. We can drift into daydreams, move toward our addictions, whether to technology or substances, to avoid feeling the simple state of non-reactivity. We are uncomfortable with the simplicity of neutrality, where silence, ease and quietude may emerge.
Our feelings help us explore what is primitive and sophisticated in us
The second foundation of mindfulness is powerful because it touches both primitive and sophisticated parts of us. On the primitive side, we are wired to move toward things that are pleasant and away from things that are unpleasant. This elementary movement is part of our survival instincts that are very deeply embedded in our physiology.
On the sophisticated side, our egos and ego structures are constructed around what we experience as pleasant or unpleasant. We spend much of our time trying to manipulate our experience so we’ll feel good. We change the thermostat, move in our chairs, change the channel, change life partners, have affairs. The possibilities for creating change and moving toward what we think will make us happy are endless.
The benefits of the 2nd foundation
When we explore this foundation of mindfulness, we learn a great deal about our reactivity. This helps us in several ways:
- We learn to keep our seat and stay stable and open when things are challenging.
- We learn to cut off the spiraling of thoughts and emotions, and stay present and calm whether things are tricky or complex, muddy or confusing.
- We learn to open to inner quietude and peace.
These just a few of the benefits of exploring feelings that are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.