name that tune: using mental labels with the hindrances (week 2)

 Working with the hindrances–week two.

“You are going to run into problems in your meditation. Everybody does. Problems come in all shapes and sizes, and the only thing you can be absolutely certain about is that you will have some…  Difficulties are an integral part of your practice. They aren’t something to be avoided… They provide invaluable opportunities for learning.

The reason we are all stuck in life’s mud is that we ceaselessly run from our problems and after our desires. Meditation provides us with a laboratory situation in which we can examine this syndrome and devise strategies for dealing with it. The various snags and hassles that arise during meditation are grist for the mill. They are the material on which we work.”

Opening lines of Chapter 10 of the hands-on meditation manual “Mindfulness in Plain English” by Ven.  Gunaratana

We may have seen this week in our practice and our life how so much of our mental/ emotional life is operating out of pure knee-jerk conditioning. Very often before we have become aware of a disturbance in our meditation we have already traveled far along a well worn path of liking/ disliking. This “seeing” is a beginning to a process that unfolds into very deep, permanently transformative areas we call “insight”. This is how this practice came to be known in South Asia as “vipassana”, or insight meditation (the Pali word vipassana has been translated as “to see clearly”).

By the way the Pali word for hindrance is Nivarana (not Nirvana), which means covering. So we could consider the hindrances as mental or emotional coverings or perhaps (in light of so many recent political goings-on) as cover-ups. This implies that the mind and heart are naturally peaceful and open but that they get covered up, or covered over, by these hindrances. This may help us see why there is so much emphasis on being gentle in working with this material, because the mind, we could say, wants to open if only we allow it to, and not further mess it up. This helps us appreciate the later teachings found in the Mahayana sutras describing original, or intrinsic, enlightenment .

As we get more accustomed to making meditation a daily habit, we inevitably begin to settle down more and more in the actual practice of contacting the breath, spending more and more moments hanging out with the breath, and calming the mind. We need to examine how to begin to fine-tune our work with the hindrances so we can mine them for optimal benefit.

This week, consider these new assignments:

1. Try to devote all your meditation sessions to working with the breath as the focus (rather than body sensations or sounds).

2. Go over in your mind the list of the names of the five hindrances. Get to know their names. I like this practice because to me it feels that I am participating in line of meditators going back nearly three thousand years who learned the subtleties of the practice through memorization. I do feel that if you know their names by heart that you may be more able to name them as they spin their web in the quiet space of meditation practice.

a. Sense-desire, lust or greed

b. Hatred, anger, aversion or fear

c. Sloth and torpor or sleepiness and sluggishness

d. Restlessness and worry or agitation in the mind and body

e. Doubt or uncertainty           

3. Get to know how they present themselves within your practice. This is a lifetime’s work. This is where your journal comes in handy.

Last week we learned of a four step process to recognizing the hindrances which is summarized in the acronym RAIN (recognition, acceptance, investigation, and non-attachment). What I find so amazing about this process of meditation and working with the hindrances is that the process is conceptually simple yet has the capacity for a lifetime of refinement.

This week I wanted to address the first step in this process-recognition.

As a general rule, try to keep yourself settled on the moment by moment process of knowing the breath-feeling it, settling onto it. The core skill this week is learning when to dismiss a hindrance vs engaging it.

Perhaps a thousand times in any given period of meditation we may find ourselves distracted by a wandering mind that is seemingly activated by memories or sounds or body sensation or smells. We begin to know intuitively which kinds of distractions are genuinely mildly bothersome and need to be gently disregarded and which do need our attention.  Many of our initial experience of the hindrances can be effectively and wisely disregarded. We do strive to keep the breath in the foreground and all the flotsam and jetsam of the mind in the background.

If something keeps coming back after you redirect your attention away from it, or if has emotional overtones, we do need to progress to using the RAIN model.

4. Start to use the technique of mental labeling. When you feel intuitively that a hindrance is not just a fleeting piece of mental fog and has emotional overtones, or is not easily appeased through gentle ignorance, begin the process of recognition by labeling what is happening. If it is just a minor storm of undifferentiated thought you could use the generic label “thinking.” If there is a predominant emotional tone, simply use the best word that comes to mind to describe it (don’t obsess about the choice of labels! - a soft whispered “sadness,” “anger,” is all that is called for). They key to working with the labeling technique is to use it gently. You don’t want to use the label as a club to knock the hindrance unconscious. An easy, relaxed labeling of the an emotion or other mind (”joy,”, “frustration,” “car sound, “happiness”, “gecko”, “boredom,” “desire,” etc) helps us immensely to stay awake and alert in the present moment.  

5. Please continue to use the suggestions for integrating your mindfulness practice in your daily life in the category “mindfulness in daily life” to your right. See if you can find a tie in from your work with the hindrances in meditation and in your daily life–for example, if you have been dealing with a lot of distractions in your meditation, you my want to see if there are any triggers to distraction(both in and out of meditation).  Do you have patternsin the kinds of feelings of thoughts that may be triggers to becoming lost in in them? As you notice the patterns, does the noticing of them  change how easily you get pulled into their gravitational field?

I would like to offer these two short excerpts from two contemporary meditation teachers about this power of mindful awareness we are working to develop.

“Mindfulness itself does not condemn or condone any particular emotional reaction. Rather, it is the practice of honestly being aware of what happens to us and how we react to it. The more aware and familiar we are with our reactions, the easier it will be to have, for example, uncomplicated grief or straightforward joy, not mixed up guilt, anger, remorse, embarrassment, or judgement. Emotional maturity comes, not from the absence of emotions, but from seeing them clearly. Mindfulness helps us to be as we are without further complications. If we can be accepting of ourselves in this way, then it is much easier to know how to respond appropriately with choice rather than habit.”

~ Gil Fronsdal.

“When you are having a bad time, examine the badness, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.”

Ven. Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English.