Chapter 10
The Lean
十
The Lean
Herbert Spencer Jennings adjusted the focus on his microscope. The year was 1906. On the glass slide beneath the lens: a single drop of pond water. And in that drop, an amoeba.
Not much to look at. A blob of translucent protoplasm, shapeless, about the size of a pinhead. No eyes, no brain, no nervous system. Just a single cell. The simplest form of animal life he could find.
Jennings watched it move. The amoeba extended a pseudopod—literally “false foot”—a temporary projection of its body reaching forward. The rest of the cell flowed into it. Slow, methodical movement across the glass.
Then Jennings introduced an irritant into the water. A tiny crystal of salt. A drop of acid. Something the amoeba couldn’t use, couldn’t metabolize. Harmful.
The response was immediate.
The amoeba stopped. The forward pseudopod retracted. The whole cell contracted slightly, pulling back. Then it extended a new pseudopod in a different direction—away from the irritant. And started moving again.
No decision happened. No thought. Just chemistry. The irritant triggered a change in the cell membrane’s permeability. Calcium ions shifted. The internal gel-like cytoplasm altered its state. The mechanical result: movement away from threat.
Jennings called it the “avoiding reaction.” He documented it hundreds of times. Always the same sequence. Stop. Pull back. Try a new direction. Automatic as a chemical equation.
This is what life does. At the most fundamental level, before brains, before nerves, before anything we’d recognize as consciousness—life leans. Toward what sustains it. Away from what threatens it.
The pattern shows up everywhere once you see it.
A potted plant on a windowsill. You turn it around, stem facing away from the light. Come back in a week and the stem has curved, bending back toward the window. No eyes to see the light. No nervous system to coordinate the response. Just cells on the light-side growing slower than cells on the shadow-side. The mechanical result: a curve toward the light.
Roots growing through soil find water the same way. Encounter a rock, they grow around it. No map, no plan. Just chemistry responding to chemistry. The universal pattern of life: lean toward what sustains, away from what threatens.
We do the same thing.
Someone asks what flavor ice cream you want. You don’t pull out a decision matrix. You think “vanilla” and notice—do I lean toward it? Feel a pull, or nothing? You think “pistachio” and check again.
The decision is already happening in your body before your conscious mind weighs in. You’re not choosing. You’re noticing which way you’re already leaning.
Walk into a room and your body knows before your thoughts catch up. Welcoming or uncomfortable. Toward or away. Meet someone new—the lean happens instantly, before you’ve consciously decided anything about them. Hear a song and your body responds while your mind is still processing the first few notes.
We like to think we make conscious, rational choices. But most of the time we’re like that amoeba. Responding to feeling tone. Noticing which way we’re already pulling, then constructing a story about why.
But if this is true—if we automatically lean away from unpleasant sensations—then explain coffee.
I’d offer my daughter a sip. She’d take it, grimace, push the cup back toward me. “How do you drink that? It’s terrible.”
Pure bitterness. That’s what she tasted. And she’s right—coffee is bitter. Objectively unpleasant on a chemical level. Bitter compounds evolved in plants as a defense mechanism, signaling “don’t eat this.” We’re wired to avoid bitter.
But I lean toward it. First thing every morning. I taste that same bitterness—the roast, the char—and somewhere in it, I taste something else. Mornings. Energy. The quiet before the house wakes up. The ritual of grinding beans, water heating, the first sip while the day is still mine.
The sensation hasn’t changed. The bitterness is identical. What changed is what I’ve layered on top of it.
Think about the first time you tried coffee. Or beer. Or olives, or spicy food, or any of the dozens of things adults consume that kids reject on contact. That first taste? Your body probably reacted like my daughter’s. Bitter. Wrong. Lean away. The avoiding reaction, same as the amoeba encountering salt.
But you tried it again. Social context, maybe. Wanting to be grown-up. Peer pressure. And gradually, the same bitter sensation started carrying different associations. Relaxation. Sophistication. Belonging. The bitterness didn’t change. Your relationship to it did.
Or cold plunge. There are people who pay money to subject themselves to ice water. Sit in it until their body screams to get out. That first plunge? Pure shock. Every nerve firing. The body yelling “threat, danger, get out now.” Natural, valid, chemical lean away.
Most people try it once and say “not for me.” Listen to that automatic response and never do it again. But some people stay with it. Not through gritting their teeth or overriding the sensation. They stay in the space between the shock and the story about the shock. And over time, that same cold water becomes something they seek out. The sensation didn’t change. The space between sensation and reaction—something shifted there.
Or vigorous exercise. The burn in your muscles. Your cardiovascular system pushed to its edge. Objectively: strain, stress, mild damage to muscle fibers. Not pleasant. Yet people build their lives around it. Wake early for it. Pay for the privilege.
These sensations—bitter, cold, burn—they’re objectively unpleasant. But we’ve learned to lean toward them.
So maybe the lean isn’t purely automatic, like the amoeba’s. Or maybe it is automatic—but it’s not responding to the raw sensation. It’s responding to our interpretation. Our story about what the sensation means. There’s a layer between what happens and how we relate to it.
A space where meaning gets assigned.
Buddhist psychology noticed this and gave it a name: vedana. Feeling tone.
Every stimulus that enters through the sense doors—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—arrives with a feeling tone. Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. That feeling tone triggers the lean. Pleasant → approach, grasp, want more. Unpleasant → avoid, push away, want it gone. Neutral → ignore, zone out.
This happens before conscious thought. It’s automatic. But as we’ve seen with coffee and cold water—the feeling tone isn’t just the raw sensation. It’s the sensation plus every association we’ve built around it. The feeling tone includes our interpretation, our story.
Not good or bad. Just the pattern of how consciousness works.
Contemplatives have been watching this pattern for thousands of years. They named it vedana because they recognized something crucial: this is where practice can actually happen. Not in stopping thoughts. Not in achieving some perfectly calm state. But in the space between stimulus and response. Between sensation and the story we tell about it.
Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz by finding meaning in the most brutal circumstances imaginable, wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
That space—we just saw it with coffee. With the cold plunge. With every acquired taste, every learned tolerance, every shift from “I hate this” to “I seek this out.”
Most of the time the space is invisible. Stimulus hits. Feeling tone arises. Reaction follows. Instant, automatic, like a chemical equation. Someone criticizes you—unpleasant feeling tone—defensive words come out of your mouth. The whole sequence feels like one thing. We think the criticism caused the defensiveness.
But there was a moment. An interpretation. A lean away from the unpleasant feeling tone. That happened before the defense kicked in. The space was there. We just moved through it too fast to notice.
The coffee drinker learned to stay in that space. Not by pretending bitter tastes sweet. Not by overriding their body’s initial response. But by seeing that there’s space between the sensation and the story about the sensation. And in that space, a different relationship became possible.
The cold plunger didn’t conquer the shock through willpower. They noticed the gap. Between “cold water touches skin” and “this is unbearable, I need to get out now”—there’s space. In that space, associations can shift. Meaning can change.
You’re doing this all the time. You’re always leaning. Toward or away, approach or avoid. Like riding a bike, you’re never perfectly upright. There’s always a slight lean one direction or another. And just like on the bike, you can’t force yourself into perfect balance. You can only notice the lean. See it happening. And in that noticing, respond.
The practice isn’t controlling the lean. Isn’t forcing yourself to like things you don’t like or avoid things you’re drawn to. The practice is simpler: Can you notice the lean itself? Can you see the interpretation happening before the reaction follows?
Not to stop it. Not even to change it. But to see there’s a gap. And in that gap—that’s where freedom lives.
What things do you lean toward that other people find unpleasant? What did you used to avoid that you now seek out?
That shift didn’t happen through willpower. It happened in the space between stimulus and response. Between sensation and story.
That space has always been there. You can notice it.
That’s the practice.