Feeling Tone with Noah Levine

Feeling Tone with Noah Levine

How can compelling narratives motivate and inspire others? In this talk from Against The Stream, Buddhist teacher Noah Levine takes a very down‑to‑earth look at how every moment of life gets filtered through a simple question: does this feel pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? Rather than talking about emotions like happy or sad, Noah breaks down the Buddhist teaching of *vedanā* – "feeling tone" – as the basic flavour beneath every experience.

Sitting in traffic, hearing leaf blowers, getting out of bed, even brushing your teeth – he points out how much unnecessary stress comes from fighting these everyday "small pains in the arse" instead of meeting them with acceptance.

As he puts it, "It's not what's happening, it's how we're relating to what's happening." You’ll hear him use personal stories – like gently roasting his mum’s hatred of traffic or joking that he hopes everyone gets uncomfortable on the dodgy old chairs – to show how mindfulness can help you stay with discomfort instead of automatically trying to escape it.

That includes the bigger picture too: he links our culture’s craving for constant pleasure to addictions of all kinds, from substances to "dopamine scrolling". Noah also guides a meditation on feeling tone, inviting people to notice how the breath, body sensations, sounds, thoughts and emotions each register as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. From there, he emphasises two key skills: compassion for pain and non‑attachment to pleasure.

He suggests "faking it till you make it" with phrases like, "May I learn to be at ease with this" and even saying to the body, "I forgive you for being uncomfortable." This is an episode for anyone who’s tired of being thrown around by cravings and aversions and wants practical Buddhist tools to relate more wisely to pain, pleasure and all the boring neutral stuff in between.

Where in your day could you start simply noticing, "pleasant, unpleasant, neutral" and see what changes?