Introduction to Mindfulness - Dean Amory

are attempting to cultivate in our practice of The Path of Mindfulness
and MMT.
Present Felt Sense
The term “Present Felt Sense” of an emotional complex is the general
quality of feeling that surrounds the emotion. An emotion is different
than a feeling, because it has form. An emotion is a constellation of
thinking, physical sensations, actions and speech. If you think of
anger as an example, to be angry requires changes in facial expression,
tightening in various muscle groups throughout the body, an increase
in heart rate and changes in behavior. These actions are aggregated
around a collage of different feelings, beliefs and patterns of thinking.
All of these components are part of the emotional reaction we call
anger.
A feeling does not have form, but is a property in the same way that
the color yellow is a property of a lemon. An emotion has a certain
felt sense, a certain quality of feeling energy, called vedana. In
Buddhist terms, this general undifferentiated feeling energy can be
positive, negative or neutral. The negative form is called
dukkhavedana and is the feeling sense that accompanies dukkha or
emotional suffering and agitation.
What the Buddha discovered over 2500 years ago, is that this very
process of listening with mindfulness and opening to the unfolding
orchestra of our own experience, including the experience of
emotional suffering, or dukkha, creates the right conditions for
transformation. All emotional suffering is comprised of psychological
feeling energy, vedana that has become locked into specific mental
formations, sankharas that take the form of an emotional reaction, a
behavioral reaction or even a bodily reaction.
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