Meditation always sounds so easy. All you have to do is sit down and follow your breath - the inhalations and the exhalations. Simple, right? And sometimes it is. And for a brief time it is. But then something happens.
Suddenly the meditator becomes aware that they have not been following the breath but instead have been fantasizing about getting a cup of coffee or having a conversation with someone or tackling their to-do list.
What happened?
What happened is that the meditator sat down to meditate and expected to meditate - which translates into "expected the mind to do what was asked of it.” And the mind most certainly did not do that.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is not with the mind. The mind is the mind. Everyone has one. They behave in somewhat similar ways and also with infinite variety.
The problem was with the expectation. The conversation with the mind might go something like this: "I want to be peaceful. Being peaceful looks so nice. Meditation helps you be peaceful. OK, I’ll meditate. Meditation is sitting and paying attention to your breath. I’ll do that and then I’ll become peaceful.”
So the first insight is that the mind doesn’t stay put. Seeing the monkey mind is considered an achievement in meditation circles. So we learn that meditation is a training as well as a practice and that repetition is key to training the mind. We learn patience as we bring the mind back to the breath - over and over again.
A year passes or five or more. And we understand better this aspect of bringing the awareness back to the breath - over and over again. And over and over again. And over and over again.
Sometimes the mind calms down and stays with the breath for a while. And sometimes the mind bounces off the breath like a drop of water on a hot skillet. What’s going on? Why is the mind so settled one moment and so squirrelly the next?
And it seems like it’s always changing. One time we forgot to have tea before meditating and all we can think about is the tea. Another time the body just won’t settle down, won’t cooperate. The pain in the knee, back, side, neck, gets in the way of the meditation and we’re squirming. Or a really unpleasant situation in our lives keeps intruding during our meditation and we can’t make it stop. Sometimes we're jumpy and irritable and others we're falling asleep - repeatedly. And then we think this is no good, my mind is not like other people’s minds, the meditation book, teacher, app is wrong, this meditation thing is just not for me.
And yet every once in a while, we sit down and drop in - sitting for 15 minutes or half an hour is bliss with the mind calm and the body still and aligned.
How do we deal with all these different situations? How do we get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff?
The Buddha was a very smart man. He learned through his own practice what supports meditation and what gets in the way of meditation. And he made a list of five of the most common things that interfere with meditation.
And he also understood that underlying all of them was the basic fallacy that our happiness depends on our getting more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. To be fair, it is certainly more pleasant to be comfortable, peaceful, serene, content than to be uncomfortable, agitated, anxious and irritated. And sometimes we drop into some beautiful blissful states in our meditation.
But sometimes we don’t. Then what?
What the Buddha knew was that the attachment to being comfortable, peaceful, serene was going to be one of the major impediments to our being comfortable, peaceful, serene. And what he learned and taught was that lusting after pleasures of the senses was a hindrance to meditating. The term lusting is one useful term. Greed or craving are other ways of describing the mind state dominated by wanting things to be other than what they are. The word wanting or phrase the wanting mind have turned out to be good descriptors for our modern minds that evoke the sense of the state with perhaps less judgment than greed, lust, craving.
The Buddha realized there are five such mind states that interfere with meditation. The first is the wanting mind. The opposite of that is the mind filled with hate or disgust or revulsion. In short, aversion to anything - pain or discomfort, people, bad smells, memories of unpleasant events or conversations - distorts the mind and makes it difficult to concentrate or to sit peacefully. Restlessness and agitation is another mind state that interferes with meditation, as does sleepiness and torpor or sluggishness. The last one is perhaps the most insidious of all - doubt. When we begin to doubt our own capacity for mindfulness or perhaps doubt the teacher or the book or app we’ve been following or even doubt the wisdom of the teachings, mindfulness and meditation become almost impossible.
Meditation teacher Leigh Brassington who likes to bring both humor and brevity into the Buddha’s language shortens the list to this: wanting, not wanting, too much energy, too little energy, and doubt. These are the five hindrances and they occupy first place in the list of Mindfulness of Dharmas. The five hindrances are the five mind states that hinder mindfulness.
Here is what the Spirit Rock Meditation Center* has to say about them:
At most Spirit Rock retreats, usually on the second or third day, one of the teachers will give a “hindrance talk.” It is a standard feature for a reason—everyone encounters these difficult visitors at some point in their practice, and it’s imperative that we recognize them and have tools for working with them. The word “hindrance” suggests that they are blocking our path, but it can be more helpful to think of them as the landscape the path inevitably passes through, which is sometimes smooth and pleasant and other times difficult and uncomfortable. The hindrances are the painful but natural expressions of the heart and mind when it is suffering, and working with them is how we deepen on the path.
One traditional way to think about the hindrances is as obstacles to deepening in both mindfulness and meditative concentration, or samādhi. The concentrated mind is focused and relaxed, and the cultivation of samādhi depends more on being able to let go into calm, easeful presence than focusing the attention relentlessly on one thing. The hindrances obstruct concentration because they all are active in a way that’s not helpful for calm and clarity. They are signs that the body, heart, and mind are stirred up...
The first task of the meditator is to recognize these mind states when they are present. Sometimes the thrill of recognition can free the mind from that state temporarily. Basically, mindfulness is one possible antidote for these hindering mind states.
The Spirit Rock article goes on to say…
"The instructions for bringing mindfulness to the hindrances start with recognizing when a hindrance is present and when it is not. These are habitual energies, and can be so familiar that they feel like part of our personality, but in our practice we begin to see that they are sometimes present and sometimes not, depending on the conditions we find ourselves in. We are then encouraged to actively set up the conditions for the hindrances to diminish.
They understand how [the hindrance] arises; how, when it’s already arisen, it’s given up; and how, once it’s given up, it doesn’t arise again in the future. (MN 10)
Our practice asks us to be skillful in how we work with these energies so that instead of succumbing to their seductive power we learn to contain them, understand what is causing them, and set up the conditions for them to weaken and arise less and less.
I found this Spirit Rock article so clear and comprehensive that I have included it in its entirety below. If you go to the article itself, there will be recommended talks on the hindrances which are accessible for those who want a deeper dive.
*https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-five-hindrances
It’s interesting that they and I both began our articles with the idea that meditation is easy. And perhaps that’s the beauty of it. Would we have embarked on this journey if we truly understood how difficult it could be? I voiced this realization to one of my teachers once who simply pointed out the obvious - yes, but knowing what I know now, would I go back? This toothpaste will never go back into the toothpaste tube. Or put another way, human development moves toward knowledge and awareness and away from ignorance - present circumstances notwithstanding.