Working with the Hindrances

Insight
Written By Kodo Conlin

Meeting the mind's obstacles as the path itself

Each of us knows something of what it is to love, to benefit others, to be present, and we know all too well how it is when forces in the mind get in the way of this, obstructing our more beautiful capacities. The Buddha singled out five of these obstructing forces as the ones that most consistently hinder meditation, and called them the five hindrances: sense desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and doubt.

This page is a set of teachings on those five hindrances. These teachings come through the Theravāda Insight tradition, and they are the natural next step once you have a meditation practice underway, whether through the Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation path or through Zazen. (If you practice Zazen, this particular approach to the hindrances is fully compatible with just sitting.)

My suggestion is to meditate simply for a month or so first, to get familiar with your own mind, its tendencies, and the hindrances that might be most common for you. Then, explore these instructions. I suggest working through this material in order, but linger longer with whichever hindrance challenges you most. The write-up below is deliberately brief; the linked talk and guided meditation for each hindrance carry the fuller teaching and practice.

The radiant mind

"The mind, monks, is radiant. But it is corrupted by passing corruptions... The mind, monks, is radiant. And it is freed from passing corruptions." – Aṅguttara Nikāya 1.49–50

The hindrances, however unpleasant they may be, are not identified with the mind itself. They are passing obstructions, like weather moving through, rather than the sky. One ancient analogy (AN 5.23) is gold: mixed with impurities, gold grows brittle and dull; freed of them it is pliant, workable, and bright, so that whatever "ornament one wishes to make from it" is possible. So the hindrances aren't permanent, personal flaws. On the path to a mature, loving heart we are sure to meet these hindrances, and this is not an error. It's the path.

Still, the hindrances are to be taken seriously. The Buddha taught (AN 5.51) that when the mind is overcome by the hindrances, "it is not possible to know [one's] own good, the good of others, or the good of both."

Five hindrances, one approach

All five hindrances share some common features, so before we take them one by one, a few words about how we can meet all of them. The approach here is awareness, mindfulness, and the principle is expressed in something Gil Fronsdal teaches: if we are aware of desire "desire-ingly," desire grows; but if we are aware of desire mindfully, mindfulness grows. So, when we meet a hindrance with clear, simple, non-reactive attention, we stop feeding the hindrance and feed awareness instead.

Two things help. First, every hindrance tends to show up in two registers, as sensations in the body and as a story in the mind. Our practice meets both. Second, we can tune into the hindrance through the same five aspects of experience we already use to cultivate mindfulness: the breath, the body, the emotions, thinking, and attention itself.

One simple frame for working with any hindrance is RAFT: Recognize the hindrance, Accept that it's here, Feel it as sensation, Tease apart the raw experience from the story, and Trust the practice. Below, find some additional detail about how each hindrance is met with this same approach.

1. Sense desire (kāmacchanda)

This hindrance is not to be confused with wholesome desire; the wish to practice or to do good is no problem. In contrast, this hindrance is a compulsive, sense-driven wanting in which, as one might say, the desire is the boss. The classic image (SN 46.55) is a bowl of water tinted with dye: lean over it to see your reflection and you can't see it. Just so, a mind overcome by desire can't see its own good or others'. The hindrance of sense desire often presents itself as non-negotiable. One helpful skillful means is to add a question mark: when desire's insistence comes with an exclamation point, meet it with mindful curiosity.

2. Ill will (byāpāda)

Ill will is a whole family of aversive states, from irritation and impatience to anger, fear, grief, or despair. Its story is often a demand: "this isn't good enough," "who did this," "I'll be satisfied only once this is gone." Ill will occludes our own goodness, and the classic image is a bowl of boiling water, too churned to give back a clear reflection. As you get familiar with how ill will moves in you, you may be able to catch it early, when it's still a light breeze rather than a gusty storm. Whether intense or mild, to meet ill will mindfully nourishes mindfulness. It can be helpful to remember, as the poet says, that "no feeling is final."

3. Dullness and drowsiness (thīna-middha)

This is the hindrance of collapsed, heavy energy, sometimes called sloth and torpor. The image is water overgrown with algae, too thick to see through. This and the next hindrance are a pair, both about energy, one from too little and one from too much. The teaching relevant to both is the lute of Soṇa (AN 6.55): a string too tight or too loose won't play in tune. With this teaching in mind, our practice with this hindrance isn't forceful; rather, we tune the energy to the right pitch. Sometimes the appropriate tuning is rest; and sometimes it is most skillful to apply ourselves or to bring curiosity to the felt sense of dullness as we are experiencing it.

4. Restlessness and remorse (uddhacca-kukkucca)

This hindrance is sometimes parsed in three ways: physical restlessness (compulsive energy, the urge to fidget or flee), mental restlessness (scattered thoughts, sometimes called monkey-mind), and remorse or worry about what we've done or left undone. The image is wind-churned water, giving back no steady reflection. Here, the body can be a refuge: imagine the body as a riverbed, broad and stable, wide enough to let everything pass through, and then apply RAFT: recognizing, allowing, feeling the sensations, and teasing the sensations apart from the story. One note on remorse, because in the Dharma there is a wholesome kind: unlike shame, which spirals, wholesome remorse recognizes harm and moves us to make amends. The Buddha called this "growth in the Dhamma."

5. Doubt (vicikicchā)

Doubt, as a hindrance, is a kind of paralysis at a fork in the road. As such, this hindrance is sometimes called "uncertainty": a covering over the mind that prevents clear seeing, so we can't choose. The ancient image is muddy water, clouded and stirred. Our antidote begins with presence here, now, in the body, because doubt fixates on an unknowable future while the body is always in the present. So when you notice it, name doubt as doubt, turn to the breath, and observe: what's it like, right now, to be in a body that's doubting? Simply recognizing the muddy water as muddy water is already the beginning of its clearing.

When the hindrances clear

The hindrances live on nutriment; they arise and persist based on conditions, and fade when those conditions aren't fed. So much of this practice is simply becoming sensitive to what feeds a hindrance and what feeds its wholesome alternative. Now and then we might catch a glimpse of the mind with these five coverings lifted, and even a first, temporary taste can be inspiring: "I didn't know the mind could be so still, so settled. This is a beautiful mind." One image the texts use for an unhindered mind is a river flowing down from the mountains (AN 5.51): close off the channels that drain away to either side, and the current gathers in the middle, undispersed and capable of traveling a long distance. A mind freed of the hindrances is like that. As we practice with the hindrances, the attitude, ideally, becomes warm-hearted. Perhaps we become a patient, curious student of them, and we recognize, each time one passes, the ease and radiance of a mind freed from its grip.

Further practice

© Kodo Conlin. This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Kodo Conlin
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