Question

Yesterday in the talk about the Satipattana Sutta you said something like "to an unpleasant worldly feeling we cultivate an unpleasant spiritual feeling".

Answer

No, I didn't say that. I said, "in order to let go of an attachment to an unpleasant worldly feeling, we cultivate an unpleasant spiritual feeling." Unpleasant worldly feeling is the unpleasant Vedana arising from the senses. Unpleasant spiritual feeling is often moral shame, remorse, and the feeling or understanding that there is more to do. That is also unpleasant and the understanding that we are not perfect.

However, these types of unpleasant spiritual feeling can help us to grow and get more insight into cause and effect, so we can have more compassion to ourselves and understand our responsibilities. We can then take more responsibility for our actions, speech and thoughts. Unpleasant spiritual feelings therefore help us to grow in the practice, so even though there is more to do we keep on practicing. It is helpful at those times to look at how far we have come and to not focus only on those times when we are having difficulties in the practice. If we just focus on day by day, we may think, "Oh, I haven't come very far, I am not developing any more." However, if we compare ourselves now to the understanding we had at the beginning of the practice, we may see ok, it is not always like this, and it will be easier to see the impermanence of these feelings. I know that was very helpful for a back problem I had, whilst going through treatment they said it would go like that, and it did. It got better and then it got worse. Ok, but I didn't go that far down when it was bad, and it got better and then got worse. And the "better" was higher than the last "better". So it is like the practice. We keep on growing, right?

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.