This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video From Hindrance to Harmony ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
It’s an interesting thing that if we come and have a meditation practice, we have this intention that maybe there’ll be some calmness that shows up, maybe some well-being, maybe some mindfulness, maybe some settledness, whatever it might be. It’s interesting that if we come to meditate and we kind of have this orientation or this direction we’re going, it requires that we go through the territory of non-calm, non-mindfulness, non-settledness, non-well-being. It’s part of the practice.
And yet, so often when we sit down and close our eyes perhaps for meditation, we kind of have this idea like, “Well, where is it? You know, where is this calmness or well-being that I’m looking for?” And forgetting, or at least I certainly in the early parts of my practice really kind of forgot, that no, it requires—it’s part of the practice, it’s inherent in it—that we work with everything that’s not what we’re oriented towards. So it’s not a failing, it’s not that we’re doing something wrong when there’s a lot of agitation or a lot of unease or something like this.
There’s this analogy that the Buddha speaks about, and I’m going to tweak it a little bit here. It’s an analogy that I like a lot. It’s this idea of when it rains up on the mountain, and then there’s a rivulet that gets made, that gets created as the water’s going down the mountain. And it turns into streams, and then it turns into a creek, and then streams, or you know, bigger and bigger, whatever words we want to use, as it goes down eventually to the ocean. But it never just goes straight down, boom, you know, there into the ocean. Of course not. Instead, there are boulders, there are banks, there are trees, there’s all these what we might call obstacles, maybe. But it’s not a problem. I mean, the water just comes up against it and goes around it, goes over it, or goes a different direction. It’s not like there aren’t ever any of these big boulders or obstructions.
And it’s the same way with practice. Part of the reason why I like this analogy, there’s a few. One is the stream, as it’s coming down, this water as it’s coming down, it has intimate contact with the boulder, the tree, the bank, the river, whatever it is. It’s not like it sees, “Oh, there’s a boulder, okay, I’m going to go around it.” No, it like runs right into it, experiences it. In the same way, our practice is too. We experience these boulders. That’s how practice is. This is a part of practice.
The second thing that I like about this idea of this analogy, metaphor, simile, whatever way we want to describe it, is that it’s not a straight line. It’s meandering, right? And even if we see streams that are in deserts or something, they’re never straight, right? There’s some way in which the hydrodynamics make it curve around a bit. That’s the way practice is too. It’s never what we think might be the most efficient or straightforward way. It has this quality sometimes of meandering, or maybe sometimes there’s rapids and going fast, and sometimes it’s going slow. So much this is how practice unfolds. This could be over a lifetime or maybe just one meditation sit as well. Maybe there’s a lot of boulders and restlessness and the mind is kind of going all over the place, but maybe eventually it kind of settles down and has some momentum and starts to go towards more and more settling.
So there are these ways that the Buddha identified thousands of years ago about what we might call mind states, or maybe just energies or patterns or phenomena. There’s all these kind of vague words we could use to point to these five types of experiences that sometimes might be considered boulders but are really an integral part of practice. And it’s actually not possible to practice without them. If you’re not experiencing these, you’re not meditating, or you’re not alive, I would say probably. Or you’re a completely awakened Buddha. So one or the other.
There’s something about them, these are very human experiences. Every human has them, whether they are a meditator or not. So these—and I’ll describe them in a moment here—but these, I’m using this language, energies, mind states, patterns, they affect everybody pretty much almost all the time. Anytime there’s been any occasion in which you haven’t just gone straight to do precisely what you wanted, there’s one of these that are at play. With meditation, we see them, because maybe in a more clear way, we have this intention maybe to get settled or calm, and then we can notice all the ways in which we are not calm. Maybe we don’t see them so clearly in our lives, but they are there. They’re showing up in all aspects of our lives.
And these are often called the hindrances. It’s often that nīvaraṇa1 and how it gets translated as hindrances. We could say in meditation they hinder some calmness, maybe they hinder some brightness in the mind, or maybe they hinder a sense of well-being in the mind, or maybe whatever your objectives are for a sitting meditation. There’s a way in which meditation doesn’t always turn out the way we would like, and it’s because one of these five is showing up.
So this list is in a particular order in which they’re often given.
Sensual desire: This craving for pleasant experiences in such a way that it distracts us from our life, from our experience. I heard this expression recently that I thought, “Oh, maybe this is a modern-day way to write about this: this addiction to comfort.” This way in which we don’t want any discomfort. We don’t want to be bored, we don’t want to wait, we don’t want any discomfort. And when I look at my life, all the objects I have in my living space, you know, just to be comfortable: soft blankets, things to cook, food that I like in the way that I like, refrigerators. It’s just fascinating how we just surround ourselves just to try to assure that we could have comfort. But life is not always comfortable. And if we’re always chasing after comfort, then we’re not looking maybe deeply at our life or experiencing our life deeply. Instead, we’re just chasing after the next pleasant experience. So that’s the first one. It’s commonly said as sensual desire. I kind of like this idea, addiction to comfort.
Aversion or ill will: This feeling of hostility or maybe some resentment or maybe anger. But it also can be really subtle. It can be like, “No, thank you. Nope, nope, nope, no, no, no.” And this also can be related to this addiction to comfort too. Like, “No, no, no, I don’t want this. I don’t want this person that’s driving in front of me going less than the speed limit and I’m stuck behind them.” You know, there’s this way in which we kind of feel like, “Don’t they know I want to get somewhere or do something?” So this aversion can be towards other people, it could be towards a situation, it can be towards oneself. This inner critic often has this flavor of aversion. It’s amazing the types of things that we say to ourselves that we would never say to anybody else, but we say to ourselves. So ill will or aversion is the second one.
Sloth and torpor: This is the common translation. These words were not in my vocabulary until I started studying this Buddhist practice. This is a sense of tiredness. And we could say the reason why there’s two words here, sloth and torpor, is one is kind of like a dullness or a fogginess in the mind, and one is with the body just feeling it doesn’t have energy. And in the traditional way that we understand sloth and torpor, it’s not that there isn’t any energy, it’s that you don’t have access to the energy. Because when there’s sloth and torpor, often what happens is that, you know, after the bell rings, for example, when you’re meditating, and maybe during the meditation you’re doing a lot of this, you know, this kind of thing, falling asleep. The bell rings, you’re like, “Oh, okay, great, I made it through. Now I got to go do the shopping and I’m going to go pick up this or I’m going to do that, I’m going to do this.” You know, then all of a sudden the energy just shows up again. So sloth and torpor is this kind of just the energy draining out while meditating. This turns out to be really common. And sometimes it’s just physical tiredness. That wouldn’t be sloth and torpor, that would just be physical tiredness from lack of sleep. But a second is often because people want to avoid something. They’re not ready to experience something, and this is a way in which the mind and the body are avoiding, just kind of tuning out, just shutting down.
Restlessness and worry: It’s kind of the opposite. It’s this, “Oh my gosh, when is that bell going to ring? I can’t wait.” Sometimes when I have restlessness, I feel it in my legs or my arms. There’s this feeling like I just want to go and do something. But it also can be having a lot of worry, and this rumination and getting stuck going around and around it again is a part of restlessness and worry as well.
Doubt: It’s this hesitation, uncertainty. “I’m not sure, is this the right practice? Should I be doing this? Do those teachers really know what they’re talking about? What is this Buddha guy, does he know what he was talking about?” So just kind of this uncertainty about it.
So these five hindrances, and as I was pointing to before, part of practice is to actually practice with the hindrances, to work with them. Sometimes when we’re doing mindfulness, just maybe some in-depth mindfulness, we will just be mindful of the hindrance. But there’s a way in which that also itself is a way of working with it.
There’s this way that meditation kind of highlights these hindrances, and it can make such a big difference in our lives. So even if we feel like our meditation is just a hindrance attack and it’s nothing but one hindrance after the other, but somehow we’re gaining some facility or some a little bit more ease or familiarity with them so that they’re not as problematic, we shouldn’t underestimate how this can transform our lives. Really, to be able to work with some of these subtle, small obstacles as well as really big obstacles, because of course these happen in our lives as well.
So there’s this way that we don’t sometimes, we might think, “Okay, I just have to sit it out, we just have to wait for it to end.” But we don’t have to just passively experience them or maybe even passively observe them or witness them. There are some ways in which we can work with them. And this, I would say, is part of the art of practice. If you’re meditating or in daily life and you notice, for example, “Here’s restlessness, I am so restless sitting in the car, can’t wait to get to where you’re going and the other cars are driving too slowly,” or something like this.
Some of you that are familiar with Buddhist teachings, you’ll be familiar with this idea of these four right efforts—right being most helpful, not moralistically right, but just the most helpful. And part of these are to cultivate what is helpful, cultivate what is beautiful, cultivate calmness and mindfulness and loving kindness or whatever your practice is. But these right efforts—I’m using the word right, that’s how I learned them, we could think of them maybe as wise effort—is also about abandoning what’s not helpful. So we could say working with the hindrances is part of the wise way, part of to apply our energy with a practice is to help abandon these unhelpful experiences.
So here’s an overview of how we can work with them, and then I’ll talk about a few in particular.
One thing about the hindrances, and part of the way why they hinder, part of their effectiveness is we don’t see them. We just think, “Oh, this is just, I don’t know, it’s just how it is.” And we’re just bouncing off of them or we’re getting pushed around by them or something like this. Using restlessness again as an example, it can be enormously helpful to just name it: “Oh, this is just restlessness.” And there’s a way to just name it, it feels it has less of this compulsion that we have to do something and get up and make things go faster or run away or whatever it is the restlessness is asking us to do. Just to name it, “Oh, this is just restlessness. I’ve had restlessness before, I’ve felt like this before. It’s uncomfortable. That’s okay, I can be with this kind of discomfort.”
So one thing that we can do just in general is to just recognize what’s happening. We might imagine, if you’re in a maze, let’s say that the hedges are really tall and you can’t see where you’re going and you’re just trying to find your way out of a maze. There’s a way in which recognizing, “Oh, it’s just sloth and torpor here, just the energy is drained out, this feels uncomfortable, it’s not the end of the world,” to just name it is kind of like being up high and looking down on the maze instead of being in the maze where you’re trying to just find your way. When we name it, it kind of helps us to see the big overview. It doesn’t necessarily make it go away that you’re no longer in the maze, but now you can see, “Oh yeah, there is a way out, it’s possible,” instead of just frantically trying to find your way through the doubt or sensual desire, aversion, whatever it might be.
And actually, when we do say, “Oh, this is restlessness, this is doubt,” there can be a small little blip of delight of this recognition. Because there can be a way in which there’s a certain amount of frustration or irritation or something building up as we’re trying to find our way through, and then we recognize, “Ah, it’s just restlessness.” There can be a little like, “Oh, okay, it’s just restlessness,” and there’s this little bit of uplift with this recognition. There’s these moments of clarity that can really support us in our practice, even though it’s subtle and perhaps short-lived. We shouldn’t underestimate because it interrupts the momentum of, “I got to figure this out, I got to make this go away.” It interrupts the momentum.
So the first thing: recognize what is happening if you can. Sensual desire, aversion, restlessness and worry, sloth and torpor, and doubt—these five hindrances. And then can we allow it to be there as best we can? This sometimes is the hardest. Can we just allow it to be there? Don’t have to fix it, don’t have to make it go away. It is uncomfortable, but we don’t have to all of a sudden try to do some big giant changes to make it go away. Not only do we not have to make it go away, we don’t have to create a story. “Oh my gosh, I’m always restless, I’m just a restless person, I’ll never be able to meditate, not like those other people over there that I saw on the internet or here in the room or whatever it is.” It’s amazing how the stories start getting made, and often there’s some comparing mind. We compare ourselves to how we were before or how we want to be or how other people are, and it just lends to more and more dukkha2, more and more suffering, more and more discomfort. So can we just recognize it and then just allow it to be there as best we can? I’m saying as best we can because it’s not easy. This isn’t easy. But is there a way that we can dial down some of the story-making, some of the self-evaluation? It’s like, “Yeah, this shows that I’m human and that I’m alive and that I’m having this experience.” It doesn’t have to make a story about your value as a meditator or your aptitude for meditation or your likelihood for freedom or anything like this. It doesn’t mean that at all.
And then, how to be with it. So allowing it’s not so easy. So how can we be with it to, in a way that’s more comfortable and diminishes the discomfort or diminishes the intensity and allows this hindrance to kind of fade away? One is to, we could say, widen the field of mindfulness. One way to think about this is if it’s an experience of, I’m using this expression of restlessness because I had this not too long ago, being stuck behind a driver that was going really slow, and I noticed how I had this little flare-up of, “Come on, come on, you know, the speed limit is quite higher than what you’re doing here.” And I thought, “Oh, look at that.” So there’s a way that what I mean by widen our mindfulness is that if you’re experiencing it primarily in the mind, thoughts and thinking, widen your mindfulness to the body, to the bodily experience. If you’re experiencing it primarily in the body, like this restlessness, sometimes like I said, I feel it in my arms and legs, this feeling like I really want to move, then maybe to include the mind and notice what the mind is doing. So to widen the mindfulness to include more than what you’re experiencing. Because one of the ways that the hindrances, how they hinder, I would say probably all difficulties do this, is they kind of collapse our awareness. We kind of collapse into whatever is being uncomfortable or difficult. There’s a way in which we kind of forget about everything else as we’re trying to find our way out of the maze or something. So this idea to broaden, to widen, to include more of our experience really takes some of the compelling nature out of that hindrance.
And then the last thing, and sometimes this might not happen during meditation but might happen outside of meditation, is to investigate. So what are some of the things to investigate? What underlying beliefs do you have that are supporting this? What underlying beliefs? “I should be comfortable at all times,” or “If I feel discomfort, I’m failing,” or “I will never be happy unless I have perfect meditation sessions.” You know, these are exaggerations, but often these underlying beliefs are buried pretty deep. These aren’t something that you would hear yourself saying out loud, but it can be really fruitful to have some curiosity like, “What’s driving this? What’s fueling this? What is allowing this hindrance to persist here? Why is it here?”
Because there’s one way we can consider them is kind of like seeds that humans have, and then when the seeds germinate, there’s a way in which there’s hooks on them, and the hooks grab onto something. I’ve told this story a number of times; for me, it’s a good example. I was sitting in a retreat this was some time ago, and I noticed how much desire I was having during the meditation. Just all these things, like I was going to buy things, and I was just imagining things I was going to buy. I don’t remember all the details now exactly, but just a lot of like, all these things I wanted. This was a long retreat, and I just wanted to be done with it also, with this feeling like, “I just want to go outside,” and all this stuff. But I felt like, “Okay, I could work with that,” and the desire kind of calmed down. And then it came up again for something else. I’m like, “Oh, okay, okay, I can work with this, be mindful, experience it in the body,” and it calmed down. And then this was the meditation session before lunch. So that bell rang at the end. I’m like, “Oh, okay, I made it through. Phew.” And I’m like, “Okay, I did all right. You know, I had all that desire, I worked with it.” And then I went to the lunch line, which is a buffet on retreats. I put so much food on my plate, way more than anybody could eat. It was just kind of showing up like, “Oh, I want this. Oh, I want that. Oh, wow, I should have some of this. Oh, this would be good for me.” You know, just put all this stuff on.
And this is how the hindrances work. There’s kind of like this hook, and they attach to things. So in this little story, and this was my experience, and I’m sure if you look, you’ll see this experience as well, that it’s just desire, and then it starts to, “Oh, I want this, and then this, and then this.” So often with desire, we’re focused on the objects and not noticing how there’s just this desire that’s getting placed on all kinds of things. There’s a reason like when you’re searching for the internet, when you click on this, then you click on that, and then click on this and click on that, often there’s a sense of like, “I want to eat something,” or “I want something more,” or you end up buying something. It’s because surfing the internet feeds this sense of desire, and then the desire just gets placed on different things.
So there’s this way in which can we just be with the experience? Can we be with the experience rather than trying to solve it or make it go away? Can we be with it and then investigate what’s underneath this? What are some of the underlying beliefs? Or we could also investigate, “If I weren’t experiencing this hindrance, what would I be experiencing?” Because there’s a way in which these things arise to distract us also. There’s a way in which the mind and the body don’t want to experience something that there’s been a glimpse of, and so they make big giant problems as something to solve and to kind of pull our attention away. So this could be a second thing to be curious about, to investigate: if I weren’t experiencing this, what would I be experiencing?
So maybe I’ll give a little bit of an example for working with aversion. If there’s a little bit of hostility in the mix, we would say aversion is ill will, and it has this huge spectrum, right? Just mild irritation to boiling anger. And there’s this way in which if there’s this boiling anger, and maybe it’s like some hatred and hostility in there, there can be this swirl of the story of, “I can’t believe they said this! Don’t they know who I am?” You know, kind of like the hands on the hips, this righteous indignation. It shows up when we’re so angry. “How dare they treat me that way with so disrespectfully? Wait until I…” you know, this type of thing. So there’s a lot of stuff happening in the mind, and it might be, when we have this type of anger, it’s probably the whole constellation of emotions: some hurt, maybe some embarrassment or some frustration. There’s a whole bunch of things kind of there together that are fueling this aversion.
So maybe that’s one way we might experience it, just a lot of anger towards institutions, individuals, oneself maybe. And then there can often just be this mild aversion to other people, some of our co-workers, some of the people that we encounter that we don’t really know. There can be this way in which we’re projecting onto them like, “Why are they doing that? They’re so inconsiderate,” or something like this. Some version of this, maybe we’re complaining about a coworker that’s just too noisy or talking all the time or stealing your ideas or whatever it might be. But there’s this way in which we have this idea about that person, and “I don’t like that person because of X, Y, and Z.” But the truth is, we know so little about other people in general. We don’t know what’s happening in their home life for a lot of people. Some people we do know, we live with them, we do have a better sense. But we don’t know some individuals. Maybe they’ve gotten some news recently, they have some diagnosis or something, or maybe they have a history of some terrible, awful things happening to them when they were younger and they are still trying to work through it or find their way. Or there’s all these ways in which people, maybe they didn’t have an upbringing in which they felt like they were loved and cared for, and they’re trying to find their way with that. And so there’s all this way that we’re maybe quick to jump to conclusions and to maybe just have this ill will towards other people, thinking that they’re inconsiderate or inadequate in some kind of way.
Then I will also say this aversion also shows up, boiling anger towards other people, and I’ll just give another example, is to our experience. It’s amazing if you really wanted to look at it, how often there’s this slight little, “No, thank you, I don’t want that,” to whatever is arising. Like, “Can it be better? Yeah, it should be more like that.” We’re so long living our life with this really subtle—this is what the Buddha was pointing to, called dukkha—the sense of, “Yeah, it’s just not quite right.” And I would say working with this is life-changing. If we can work with the way that we’re saying no in so many different ways, can we say yes to our experience? I’m not saying we have to like it. I am not saying we have to be passive. I am not saying that there isn’t a lot of awfulness happening. There is a lot of awfulness happening. But there’s a way that if we can settle into our experience and maybe tune into or be attuned to the way in which we’re saying no, then the no can soften. And then there can be some wisdom or some clarity or some openness that becomes available that’s not available if there’s this quiet “no, no, no, no, no” going on. And when there’s this openness and clarity and wisdom that arises, then we can meet the awfulness in a way that is powerful, instead of just fueling this aversion that we have.
So to practice with it, with these different types of aversion, is maybe to, I’ll say specifically, recognize, “Oh, this is aversion.” Maybe to widen the mindfulness experience is to ask, “What does aversion feel like?” I notice that when I’m talking about it, I’m doing this with my hands and I’m going forward a little bit, kind of like pushing. So there can be a way that’s kind of mentally or even physically, there’s a clenching the teeth or maybe your stance is with your feet planted, you know, that kind of a stance or something like this. So just get familiar. What does this aversion, not wanting, feel like in the mind and in the body? And maybe notice all these different things: anger, just aversion, annoyance, frustration with people, or just the way in which we’re in a subtle way so often saying “no thank you” to our experience. And then how does that feel in the body? Because there’s a way in which we are projecting all the problem on something out there: the person, the situation.
Have you tried changing everything in the world? Have you tried changing everybody? It doesn’t work, right? It doesn’t work. But to bring the attention back here and to be with the experience, there’s this way of just repeatedly redirecting the experience to the body and mind, feeling the aversion. Just repeatedly doing it, because the mind, you will not want to do this. I’ll just say, you will have aversion to aversion, and then aversion to the aversion to the aversion. You will not want to do this. But if you can, there’s this way in which the mind and the body just start to relax and become a little bit more supple and a little bit more easeful. And there’s not this big “no.” There starts to open up a sense of “yes” that allows understanding things in a new way, or a new idea or creativity comes from this place, from this kind of place of “yes” that allows us to solve problems and to show up in the world in a different way. And people notice, of course, right? If we’re showing up from a place of “no” versus a place of “yes.”
And then you can do this a little bit of investigation. Is it covering something? Is there frustrated desire? Is there boredom? Is there embarrassment? Is there something underneath it that’s fueling it? And maybe it’s serving another purpose. Maybe this ill will is serving a purpose. It’s holding up an identity you have. “Yeah, I’m a member of this group, and because I’m a member of this group, we hate that group over there. So I just have ill will because you’re in that group, I’m in this group, and that’s why we just kind of fall into this.” So there might be a way in which we are doing it because we want to be part of an identity or something or part of a group. And there’s so many different ways that gets played out. It doesn’t have to get played out this way.
So I talked about hindrances. All humans have them. They show up in our meditation as well as they show up in our daily life. To work with them, I would say, is such a big part of practice. Of course it is. If we’re going to work towards something, we work with whatever is getting in the way, whether this is meditation or whether it’s our life.
And one is to recognize it, and I’m using this word like widen or broaden the mindfulness, the awareness of it. If it was primarily in the mind, bring the awareness into the body. That’s usually how hindrances show up; they’re usually a mind thing. And then bring them into the body. And to allow them, and then investigate. And maybe investigation happens during meditation or maybe it happens later. Is this covering something? Is there an underlying belief? Is there a purpose that this hindrance is serving right now?
So with that, I’ve talked about one out of five hindrances. I’ve talked about other ones in other settings. I’ll see if I’ll talk about some of the other ones perhaps in later talks. But the hindrances are such an integral part of practice. And maybe I’ll just say that for me, it was very helpful personally when I discovered these, like, “Oh, these are just what it means to be a human. That’s all. That’s all, just what it means to be a human.”
So thank you. Thank you. And with that, I’d like to open it up and see if there’s some questions or comments.
Yeah, we don’t have to talk. I feel like if I let you out early, it’s like you get to go, you know, when you were a kid and you get to go to recess early or something like this. Why don’t we just end a few minutes early? Thank you. Thank you. Wishing you a wonderful rest of the evening. If you’d like to come talk to me here afterwards, you’re welcome to, but otherwise, safe travels home. Bye-bye.
Nīvaraṇa: A Pali word for the five mental hindrances that obstruct meditation and wisdom. The speaker pronounces it as “neva.” ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unease and dissatisfaction inherent in conditioned existence. ↩