(return to the 2002 Retreat Report)
Hindrances
[The following is a talk on the hindrances given by meditation teacher Susan O'Brien at the Boston Contemplative Law Weekend from March 22 - 24, 2002. Susan's talk on Saturday evening followed a day of yoga, sitting and walking meditation, contemplative writing, silent eating, and small group discussions among 40 lawyers, law professors, judges and others from the Boston area gathered together to explore the intersection between law and contemplative awareness.]
I'd like to share a passage from the introduction to a book of essays about activism by Alice Walker called Anything We Love Can Be Saved. She says:
There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman, exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed who, fearing an unknown freedom, looked longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all.
To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence, is to know that what is human is linked by a daring compassion to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world, I have seen fear turn into courage, sorrow into joy, funerals into celebrations, because whatever the consequences, people standing side by side have expressed who they really are and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that. This is the foundation of activism.
I find that passage very powerful, particularly the idea of a transcendent presence linked with a daring compassion. It's taught that this tradition, this particular meditation practice, there are two wings to it, like the two wings of a great bird, and those two wings are wisdom and compassion. So, it's very much the same as what Walker was talking about in that introduction, because a presence that is quite pure transcends the distractions of mind, the distractions of clear seeing, of wisdom. So it makes perfect sense to me that a book on activism would be introduced partly by speaking about this kind of presence, because really we can't begin to act in this world unless we're fully able to face what's happening in our lives and around us.
So, it points to the incredible power in that ability to face the truth wholeheartedly, awake, alive, vivid. Those are the qualities that we embody when we're able to be fully present. The Buddha taught that the mind is naturally clear, lucid, unobstructed, and that it is only because of visiting forces that we suffer. The natural state of the mind is to know what is arising.
So, tonight, I wanted to talk about some of the most common visitors that come calling in our meditation practice and also in our lives. No doubt you've all seen that when we sit down to meditate, distractions of all kinds arise and pull us away from the object of meditation, from that clarity, that lucidity, that clear seeing. And, there's a group of the most common - some of the most common energies that fuel those distractions, better called the hindrances. And, they're called hindrances because they distract us from being able to be quite steady, quite concentrated, to be fully present in the moment.
So, there are five hindrances, and no doubt, some of you, if not all of you, know of them. They're desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt. The great power of meditation is that we begin to look at these forces in the mind, take a very close look at them in our own experience, and come to understand them. Once we understand them, once we see them quite clearly, they no longer have the power to rule our actions. They no longer have power over us, which isn't to say they no longer arise. They weaken. Also, as we become more and more familiar with these forces inside of ourselves, as I said earlier today, it unites us with all beings, because these forces are at work in all of us. So, we're not separate from anyone or any action that anyone is capable of, because their roots are the same in each of our experience.
So, the first two, desire and aversion, are really flip sides of the same coin. This is the tendency of mind to try to hold onto what we like, and try to resist or avoid what we don't like. Now, when we think about desire, desire doesn't necessarily in and of itself, doesn't need to be unwholesome. You know, the simple desire to meet our basic needs for food and shelter is not necessarily unwholesome. Desire can be just the simple motivation to act in the world.
But the desire that we're talking about as a hindrance is the tendency to cling. The desire to go after pleasurable experience, and to try to hold onto it. So, pleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all kinds of sense desires, and the attachment that we can have to them. This is a hindrance.
The Buddha spoke of what he called one wholesome desire, and this is the desire for freedom, and I believe that that desire, that wholesome desire, may be at the root of all of our desires underneath, but that it is misdirected. We're looking for that ultimate satisfaction for freedom from desire, the fulfillment. Liberation from that desire. But we go after it in all of the ways that cannot provide a lasting happiness or satisfaction. And, it is said that actually the Buddha saw this when he became awakened in his own practice, that we all have this very strong desire for happiness but we're seeking it in all the wrong ways, and it was out of great compassion that he decided to teach. So, often you'll find desire manifesting as the "if only" mind. How many of us can recognize the belief that if only we had more money, or maybe more time, or better health, or better relationship, more satisfying work, then we would be happy? When, really, our happiness does not depend on external conditions.
Desire and attachment can manifest in very subtle ways in our practice. Subtle and not so subtle, where we get attached to pleasant states, and I think I mentioned this at some point today. If we're holding on, trying to hold onto a state of calm or quiet, any state, in meditation, it's a setup for suffering, because what we see as we look at experience is, it's constantly changing. We can't hold on. It's like trying to hold onto a beautiful sunset as it's changing.
Desire is endless. We get something and we want something else. It's the nature of desire to want. It's insatiable. So, how do we work with it in meditation practice? It's not useful to try to suppress it, nor is it useful to act it out, to give energy to it. Rather, to use it as we use anything that arises in our experience for - in the service of wisdom, understanding, clear seeing, and ultimately, liberation, freedom from suffering. So, it's important to remember with any of these states, the hindrances, or any difficulties that arise in our practice. When they arrive, they are the place of practice. They are the very fuel for our practice in that moment.
So, how do we do that? It's the same instruction that I've been suggesting all day today. First of all, recognizing that it's happening. Desire is present. Accepting it rather than resisting it. Taking an interest in it. Coming to know it in our own experience. We make it the object of our awareness. Naming it can help. Simply giving it a name, desire, or craving, or wanting, or longing - whatever it is, can help to give us a little space around it, so that we're not so closely hooked into the story of it. Not so closely identified. We start to see it as this arriving and passing mental, emotional, physical state. And when we pay attention to it, what we see, is that desire itself is impermanent. It's changing. It's not solid. It's not who we are.
As we see this over and over again in our practice, we begin to see the selfless nature of it. It's a cluster of arising and passing mental and physical phenomena. These are very important insights. These are important things to see. When we see it clearly, any difficult state, we're not lost in it.
The antidote to desire in practice is steadiness of mind, or one-pointedness. The nature of desire is to jump from one thing to another, continually looking for the next pleasant hit of experience, so recognizing that, and really focusing the mind, making yourself quite steady in your presence and your awareness. This is often described as sitting like a mountain, so that we're able to let the waves of desire wash over us, crash over us, and yet we stay steady, like a mountain.
In these teachings, the Buddhist teachings, desire is described in three ways, and I find it interesting to just reflect on these ways, because it's an avenue into seeing it more clearly in our own experience. So, there's the craving for experience, which I've already described, craving for sense pleasures.
There's also what's called craving for continued existence, and this is when we're longing for something else, something other than what's happening right now. So, you can see that we're creating a future in that moment, projecting our desire out into the future.
The third way is - the third description is craving nonexistence, and this is resisting what's happening in our experience, resisting what's happening right now, in this present moment. It's the opposite of desire; it's aversion. So that in the moment when something's arising that we don't like, that we don't want, we're wanting it to end. So that in that sense, in a very immediate way, it's wanting this existence to come to an end. Even if it's just this very present moment's experience, or just this sitting, or maybe this retreat. I know, there have been some retreats that I've been on, when I've really been craving the end of it. Just not able to be with my experience.
So whenever we're longing for what is not happening, or we're resisting what is happening, we suffer. Satisfying the desire provides a temporary relief and a deeper relief is only found in the abandonment of craving. And again, this doesn't necessarily mean that it won't arise in the next moment, but the abandonment of it is that recognition and letting go, unhooking from it, not feeding it.
We learn to abandon craving by beginning to be able to be with the full range of our experience, pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. So, this is an interesting place that you can play with in your meditation practice, just noticing those qualities when they are clear, when they come up, or in your life. Noticing sometimes when things are going quite well, just tuning into the pleasantness, and being with it quite fully. But when we tune into the pleasantness, it helps us to break that chain of craving, that so automatically arises around pleasant experience. And, likewise, with unpleasant experience. Recognizing that it's unpleasant can help us to sidestep that automatic conditioned response of aversion, or avoidance.
There's a simile in the teachings that illustrates these forces of the hindrances in the mind, so imagine a pond of clear water, the clear water of the mind. Sense desire is like the water becoming colored with beautiful dyes. We become entranced with the colors and the beauty of them. We can no longer penetrate. We can no longer see to the bottom. Our minds are like that clear pond. So often we become distracted or entranced by some pleasant experience, and we lose that ability to deeply penetrate what's actually happening. We get caught up in the surface experience, the surface pleasantness.
So one very useful way to work with desire is to actually reflect on the impermanence of things, that all conditioned things arise and pass. This can help us to loosen our grip when we recognize that what we're trying to hold onto is fleeting, is transitory. Also, when we take on the reflection of our lives being impermanent, it can provide a sense of perspective, aligning us with what's most important. How do we want to move through this world, in this life? Freely, or bound?
So, it's not that we practice letting go from a place of thinking that it's something that we should do. It's rather we begin to tune into the suffering that comes when we hold on. And, from that place of recognizing that we're suffering, it's so much easier to let go. It's like we're holding that hot coal and we realize we're burning. So we let go. It's not hard in that moment. And this is where the difficulties that arise in our practice, the painful experiences are great teachers. Quite often, the most fruitful times can come out of a place of some difficulty, where we see where we're caught, and we learn how to let go. How to free ourselves in that moment.
Aversion, the second of the hindrances, the opposite of desire. In the same simile of the mind being like clear water, with aversion the mind - the water in the pond is boiling. It's very turbulent. And again, we can't see to the bottom. The agitation of aversion is an obstacle to our clear seeing, and we all know this experience in our lives. If we're angry, caught up in some anger, are we able to make wise choices in that moment? Are we able to see clearly? Probably not.
The outward manifestations of this turbulence are irritation, annoyance, anger, rage. These are all expressions of the condemning mind, the mind that's pushing away what is happening. It can't be with it. It refuses to be with it. When aversion is present, we want to get rid of whatever is happening, whether it's the pain in our knee or a difficult emotion. Or, even, aversion itself. I remember on one retreat that I was doing where a lot of aversion was coming up, and I thought I was being aware of it. I certainly was aware that I was suffering, and yet, when I went into an interview to report to my teacher, the first thing out of my mouth was, "I hate aversion." She just kind of laughed, you know, it's like, yeah, you're in it.
So we find ourselves in that cycle of even hating the hating. So, we have to start wherever we realize we are. Aversion manifests inwardly as fear, guilt, depression, judgment, self-judgment, boredom. These are all states of resistance and it's really difficult to continue to meditate if we're lost in them. It's difficult to be fully present and effective in our lives if we're lost in them.
The energy of aversion is transformed by interest, and you can see how this would be true because, with aversion, we're not willing to be with what's happening. It's that sense of holding back or pushing away, and interest is the opposite energy. To be interested in something, we have to draw near to it, look closely at it. So when aversion arises in your meditation practice or in your life, if you have the space to try this in your life, see if you can get interested in what's happening in that moment. And, as I've been saying today, one way to do this is to just tune into what you're feeling in your body, because it helps us to get out of the story. You know, with these difficult states of mind, quite often we're totally lost in the stories that accompany them. You know, the self-righteous anger story. So, to just drop in that moment into the body, the experience in the body. And in my experience, at times, I can actually just feel the contraction. Often for me, it feels like in the heart area. But you might experience it in your shoulders or neck or jaw or belly, where we're just tight, holding back - you know, pushing away whatever's happening, resisting.
And in that moment of just tuning into that energy in the body, sometimes it's easy to just relax that energy. Regardless of the story, stepping out of the story and just relaxing the contraction in the body. It can help to unhook us from the cycle.
So, again, recognition is key. Until we know that it's happening, it's ruling us. When we see it, although at first, it might be really painful to start to see these patterns in our lives, and in our practice. It's so important. Really, it's the first step to freeing ourselves.
And again, we see that aversion is not solid. It also is changing. It's made up of these different experiences, physical and emotional. And again, we also see the suffering inherent in it, and that suffering can inspire us to work with it skillfully. To learn about it. One of the things that I remember when it's coming up for me is this old folk song I used to know, and the refrain of it is, "the only way out is through."
And sometimes with difficult states, we just want to be done with it as soon as possible. But in this practice, we actually open into it. "The only way out is through." We come to know it from the inside and deeply going into it, it opens up from within. It's humbling to do this practice of opening to these difficult states.
Someone was talking today about the idea that wouldn't it be nice to be able to have one's partner join one on a meditation retreat, and the story I'm about to tell you is from a three-month long retreat that I was sitting and so was my partner. So on this retreat, it was a silent retreat for three months, and we were well into it, at this point. And on a long retreat, as you might imagine, one gets accustomed to one's routines, if not attached, and I was accustomed to taking a walk, in the evening after tea time, up this particular road near the center. And it was a dirt road and there was never anybody else on the road when I went for my, My walk. And that was just the way I liked it. It was perfect.
And on this particular day, I think that there had been some aversion or difficulty inside, some tension inside brewing that I was not aware of. And I was going for that walk with a particular need on that day, and as I got to the front door of the center, there was my partner heading out the door right in front of me, and I knew immediately, he was going to go on my road. And it really upset me.
The other thing you need to go about long retreats, if you haven't done them, is that there's this phenomenon that we call "yogi mind," where one becomes very sensitive. You know, you've been quiet for weeks, and the simplest things can really take on quite a lot of importance. So, this is an example of yogi mind. But, I did know that he was headed for my road.
So, I made this great effort to look mindful and yet try to cut him off at the pass. Where he was going down the main road, and I stayed on the property, on this woods trail, to get to the dirt road, and sure enough, I walked as fast as I could without running, or not looking mindful, and when I got to the dirt road, there he was, just a step ahead of me, headed up my road.
And the rage inside of me just exploded. It was unbelievable. I mean, out of the blue, seemingly. I was furious that he was in my way. And, it was incredibly humbling. It was so painful. I actually stood at the bottom of that road and as he obliviously, or mindfully, walked up that road, oblivious to my experience, mindful of his, hopefully. As he walked up that road, I was screaming profanities at him in my mind. And it was shocking. And, actually before that moment, I didn't think of myself as an angry person. So, it was really humbling. It kind of stopped me in my tracks, literally. I just stood there, and I eventually just opened to that pain, of that anger, that resistance to what was happening.
What happened was that actually, the experience passed in just a few moments, at that point of really fully opening to it, really fully feeling it, and feeling the suffering of it so deeply. And what followed was a welling up of compassion for people who spend a lot of time in states of anger, or aversion. I felt like I understood it for the first time in a very deep way.
And the other thing that happened was actually a reaffirmation of my commitment to this practice. It was like, okay, whatever it takes to be free of this kind of suffering. And this is actually the power of a meditation retreat, is that things like this happen. And it's...you're like under the microscope, so you really see these experiences quite clearly. They're very transformative. So again, the difficult energies that arise in the mind are teachers if we open to them. If we're willing actually feel them, be present with it, pay attention to what's happening.
The third and fourth of the hindrances are expressions of energetic imbalance in our experience, and they're very common in meditation practice, and I wanted to touch on them, particularly because so many of you mentioned the desire to have a daily practice and what might prevent us from doing that. And I think sometimes what prevents us from doing it is that we have this idea of what it should be like, this ideal. And when it doesn't live up to that and in fact, what we deal with are the hindrances, mostly, we feel discouraged, and, like, what's the point?
So, these next two hindrances are sleepiness and restlessness. When sleepiness is present, which is called in the texts "sloth and torpor," there's a feeling of heaviness or dullness in the mind. To continue with the simile, the pond is covered with a slimy moss, and lots of water plants. It's stagnant, we can't see through it.
So in meditation practice, there can be a few different reasons for this arising. And one, which no doubt you are all familiar with is, is that you're actually exhausted, and when you stop, which is probably a rare thing in many of your lives, you feel it. And you fall asleep. Your body says, "Yippee, we're stopped. Let's go to sleep." So, not to judge it. It happens.
But it can also come, this energetic imbalance, from having too many of what are called the tranquilizing qualities of mind, where we're calm and concentrated but we're not alert and interested. So we need to balance these energies. It's a constant balancing act in meditation practice.
Sleepiness can also come up as a form of avoidance. And in our lives, although we might not experience it as sleepiness, pay attention to the times when you feel just dull and disconnected, because sometimes it can be a manifestation of this avoidance. It might be that there is something coming up internally, especially on meditation retreat, it might be that some deep emotion or something is coming up. And the mind-body wisdom says that's enough, and so we go to sleep. And actually, it is wisdom sometimes. In practice, when difficulties come up, then we need to - it's a kind of self-regulating mechanism. So sometimes we can trust that, and ultimately we can't do much about it anyway, so we have to learn to accept it. So there's a kind of trust in just accepting that it's there.
I think for many of us, even for myself who seemingly had such a quiet existence compared to what I hear at the dinner table from you, we can be intensity junkies. You know, it's addictive, the fast pace of life. And so, sometimes just sitting down, slowing down, we don't know how to connect. And this may be partly connecting with neutral experience in our lives. You know, we're used to feeling alive and awake and interested, when something that we like is going on, or when something that we don't like is going on, when things are difficult, it's still - we're alive, we're awake to it. It's intense and we can feel it.
But when things are quiet, when things are relatively neutral, for a lot of us, we tend to just space out or fall asleep. So, again, to invite you to pay attention to those times, because actually they can be very sweet times. I've come to gain a great appreciation of neutral experience in my life, because it's peaceful.
So, I've talked about different ways to work with sleepiness in practice, in terms of standing up and opening your eyes, you know, taking brisk walks. It's said in the teachings that sleepiness is transformed by right aim, by not letting the attention become too diffuse. So work with pointing the attention quite directly at just this moment of this breath. So, sometimes really focusing in a kind of more microscopic close way to really noticing the beginnings and endings of the breath. You know, each inhalation, each exhalation.
When the attention gets too dispersed, we lose focus. The energy disperses. So in a way, bringing the attention in quite close, focusing the attention, gathers the energy, collects the energy. And we're - the energy comes together and we're awake. We're empowered.
The opposite energetic imbalance to sleepiness is restlessness, and this is when they're too many of the energizing qualities in our meditation and not enough of the tranquilizing qualities. So, with restlessness, there's a lot of alertness and energy and interest but not enough calm, concentration, peace. This is when the pond is stirred up by the wind blowing across it. And again, we can't see because of the waves and the turbulence on the surface.
Sometimes in meditation practice, we experience this physically in the body, and it can be excruciating at times. And it may be that this is a common experience if you're not falling asleep, when you try to practice at home. That there's just all this energy moving, because you're used to moving so fast. We sit down, and it's almost unbearable to sit with all that energy in the body.
So, sometimes it's physical. Other times, it's mental, emotional. We experience it as worry, insecurity, obsessive planning, the mind racing. Usually, with restlessness, it's not so helpful to have a microscopic attention, although it varies for people, so you'll have to experiment.
In my experience, what helps more with restlessness is to really open up the field of awareness, to make the awareness as though it was as big as the room, or as big as the sky, to get a sense of that spaciousness. And sometimes shifting the attention to sounds from the breath can provide that sense of a larger container for the awareness. In that way, the mind or the awareness is like this vast open sky and the restlessness is a storm passing through it. It's like there's enough space to hold it, to let it move through.
It's said that restlessness is transformed by happiness or comfort of mind. And this is a little paradoxical because we can't quite cause happiness of mind to happen. We can't necessarily generate it. But what we can do is to pay attention to what's obscuring that comfort of mind, and perhaps let go of what's obscuring it. When there's a sense of acceptance in our practice, that whatever is arising is okay, the mind feels peaceful, so it doesn't matter whether pleasant or unpleasant experience is happening. There's this sense of peacefulness. The mind is undisturbed. That's the comfort that can transform the quality of restlessness.
The last of the hindrances is doubt. When doubt is present, the mind is all over the place. We're considering possibilities, we're looking for answers, we're trying to figure things out. Doubt is like a person standing at a crossroads, unable to decide which way to go. It's an inability to make a commitment, a commitment even to just this moment's experience, to being present in this moment. The pond is muddy and darkened when doubt is present.
Now of course, there's an aspect to the doubting mind that's useful in a spiritual practice, and that's not to be gullible, not to take things on someone else's word for it, but to really look for ourselves to see what's true in our own experience, to test things, to find out for ourselves. But the doubt that's a hindrance to our practice is skeptical doubt - when we're so indecisive, so unable to commit, that we can't find out, we can't commit to making that effort to seeing for ourselves what's true. So we don't sink in to our experience. We become paralyzed, frozen with doubt.
Doubt manifests in different ways. It might be doubting ourselves, doubting the practice, all the different voices of doubt. The mind can't settle. The thing about doubt is that it's very compelling. It masquerades as wisdom. And so, we get quite caught up in these internal arguments.
When we recognize that this quality of doubt is present in our meditation practice and we're unable to connect with what's happening, it's helpful to disengage from those internal arguments. It's helpful to get really simple in that moment, to just make a commitment to be with one breath, to be with the sensations in your body, because when we're present on that level, what is there to doubt? And again, it's important to take those steps of recognizing it, naming it, seeing it, because usually we're very caught up in those arguments, those stories, and it's hard to see it clearly.
Doubt is transformed by a sustained attention. This is what I was just saying about connecting with something. A sustained attention in the moment. When the mind is doubting, it's jumping from one thing to another, unable to sink in. So, if we can just connect with something very directly in our experience, that we know, doubt is transformed in that moment.
With all of these states, it's not that we're doing something wrong when they arise. They're very, very deep root forces in the mind, but we can learn to recognize them. We can learn to work with them. As I said, they can be fuel for our practice. And quite often, there's a lot of energy tied up in them, these states, and that energy can be transformed in a moment if we work with them, into the energy of clear seeing, of presence.
I wanted to just give you - review these few points of mindfulness. There's an acronym that I've used over the years that I was taught by one of my teachers that's very helpful for me, and that's RAIN. So, the "R" is Recognition. The "A" is Acceptance. The "I" is interest. And, the "N" in Non-identification. In any moment of mindfulness, these factors are present. We're recognizing what's happening. We're not fighting it, we're accepting it. We're being with it. We're interested in it. And through those processes, non-identification happens on its own. We don't have to force that peace, because as we take an interest in these states, we see them for what they are. We unhook from that identification with them, thinking that this is me, and I'm in trouble. So, if you can remember that, you'll find it very useful in terms of working with any difficulties that come up in practice. Seeing the impersonality of this experience.
So, again, the bottom line is it's not important what's happening in our meditation practice. Try to remember this when you sit down to meditate at home. It's how we relate to what's happening, that's key.