Think about the last time you felt slightly at odds with your own behavior - maybe finding yourself on your phone when you'd meant to start work, or continuing to eat past the point of satisfaction. You might notice that there are actually two distinct things happening:
First, you may notice the raw feeling of the experience itself. How does phone use actually feel in your body? There might be a mild pleasure, a sense of relief, or perhaps a subtle emptiness. With eating past satisfaction, there's the immediate enjoyment of the food, then maybe a fullness or discomfort.
Then there's a second layer — how we feel about having that experience. The guilt about "wasting time" on our phone, the shame about "lacking discipline" with food. This second layer isn't about the experience itself — it's about our judgment of it.
When we're practicing observation, it's this first layer we're trying to notice. But the second layer often shows up so quickly and loudly that it can be hard to even realize there are two separate experiences happening. It's like trying to taste subtle flavors while someone is shouting about whether you should or shouldn't be eating — the commentary drowns out the actual experience.
This two-layer pattern shows up with both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. When we don't do something that matters to us, there's first a genuine feeling — a kind of sadness or disappointment that comes from having turned away from what we really wanted to do. But this natural feedback signal often gets quickly buried under a wave of self-judgment: "I'm so lazy," "I never follow through," "What's wrong with me?" This second layer of feeling — the guilt and shame — actually disconnects us from the useful information in that initial feeling of disappointment.
Similarly with achievements, there's the simple satisfaction of having done something that matters to us. But this can get overshadowed by a different kind of feeling good — the relieved 'Finally, I'm worth something!' that comes from temporarily relieving our underlying insecurities. It's like a sugar rush — intensely pleasurable but ultimately unsustaining because it's based on an unstable foundation of proving our worth rather than expressing what matters to us.
Consider someone starting to meditate. There's a vast difference between simply noticing "my mind feels scattered today" (first layer) versus concluding "I'm terrible at meditation" (second layer). The first observation contains useful information that could guide gentle adjustments. The second may be a story about our worth or capacity that leads to either giving up or forcing ourselves to continue from a place of self-criticism and obligation.
This pattern creates a vicious cycle: feeling bad about feeling bad often leads to more behaviors we feel bad about. We get caught in waves of judgment that push us further from the clear signals our feelings are trying to send. It's like trying to hear a quiet voice while a loud argument is happening — the drama of self-judgment drowns out the subtle but important messages of our direct experience.
Most of us have learned to relate to our experiences primarily through this second layer. We're constantly interpreting, evaluating, and judging rather than simply noticing what is. This isn't our fault — it's how we were conditioned to relate to our experiences. But it does create a fundamental obstacle to enjoying existence: how can we truly enjoy life when we're constantly judging our experience?
When practicing observation, you might notice this second layer arising — the judgments, the shoulds and shouldn'ts, the stories about what your experience means about you. That's perfectly normal. Just recognize these as the second layer, and see if you can gently return your attention to the direct experience itself: What does this actually feel like in your body? What sensations, emotions, or energies are present before the commentary begins?
The solution isn't to eliminate this second layer — that's neither possible nor desirable. What we can do is learn to recognize both layers while staying in contact with the original experience. The first layer of feeling contains genuine information that can help us tune our behavior naturally. The second layer often creates noise (a second layer of feeling) that makes that tuning difficult. Learning to distinguish between these layers is the first step toward being able to notice clearly.
This clear contact with direct experience becomes essential as we learn to tune our actions toward what feels good in Part 2: Feel-Good Tuning.