the slippery slopes of sleepiness and doubt (five hindrances, week 4)

Traditionally this group of hindrances has been called “sloth and torpor.” While greed, aversion and restlessness are rather loud visitors, this group tends to slip in when no one is watching. Everyone experiences these mental states in one form or another-guaranteed. The problem with this group is that if their presence is not recognized in short order, it quickly becomes too late for any mindfulness as we become seduced by lethargy. Our mind becomes dull and we are effectively “asleep at the wheel” — and unable to even recognize we’ve fallen into a somnolent slumber.

As with all of these obstructing forces, as we get to know them intimately, we begin to see how they work, how they sneak in, and we get better and better at staying awake and alert. The best way to work with sloth and torpor is so catch them just as they are staring to creep into the field of our awareness and nip them in the bud. If simple awareness of their presence doesn’t send them packing, then you may have to rub your face, take a 30 second stretch break, or get up and have a sip of tea. A great way to combat sleepiness in meditation is to do a few minutes of standing or walking meditation.

The most devastating hindrance of all, though, is often doubt. This is a mind state which simply implores “why are you doing this ?!” This is why for many folks it is important to stay motivated by meditating with a group. Other possibilities are to listen to inspiring audio talks and to read articles, books or teachings by respected teachers.

We turn our attention now in week four to beginning a structured approach to anapanasati–mindfulness of breathing (please click in the “anapanasati” category to your right).

Questioning the story-teller (five hindrances, week 3)

The practice this week has been to see how these five categories of forces within the mind keep us spellbound in their narrative. The key to working with the hindrances is the simple understanding that a hindrance is only a hindrance when we are caught by it, when we believe the story the story-teller is telling.

The past two weeks we have begun to survey the landscape of our minds to see how these seductive mind states work. When we look at them, investigate them, and bring them into our practice, they become the object of meditation. As objects of meditation we can then observe them impartially. The tools for doing this are contained in our handy meditator’s toolkit and are summarize by the acronym: R A I N (see previous posts).

Believing the story the hindrances tell us is a universal stumbling block to the development of a settled mind (let’s use the Pali term for this -samatha). We’ve already discussed the importance of the first step in the process -R for recognition. We absolutely have to known when they are operating, as otherwise we can spend an entire session lost in their delusional web.

As we become familiar with these inner forces, we prepare to bring greater acceptance to meet them. Acceptance is a crucial step in working with a hindrance because we cannot come to understand what desire is, or what fear is, if we are constantly pushing it away or holding it so tightly that we won’t let it express itself within us.

If we won’t let them be what they are we will not be able to experientially know the  obstacles for what the are. Until we begin to do this skillfully, we will remain to some degree caught in holding on to them (which is itself a form of desire) or pushing them away (a form of the flip side of this force–aversion).

Most of us will go through periods of remaining stuck in relating to a hindrance until we work through the sticky unconscious energy which still keeps the mental force in play. This takes patience and great tenderness. It’s simply to be aware of the material, stay engaged impartially, and to hang in there and see how it dances its dance. The skill here is to stay engaged with what I like to call benevolent indifference.

It is very important to understand that acceptance doesn’t mean acquiescence, nor does it imply resignation or submission. Acceptance in this sense really means fully opening, being with, whatever is happening without talking sides, with a kind of dispassionate curiosity that is also active and not at all passive. The activity of acceptance is simply the bubbling nature of the heart that feels what it feels and is alive and free to feel.

The next aspect of the basic process is I for investigation. This is simply another way of describing the activity of mindfulness. It is the quality of seeing something just as it is. It is the quality of allowing this to reveal itself just as it is.

We’re not really describing different steps in a linear process, rather we are describing levels of engagement within the activity of the practice of mindful awareness.

We could say that acceptance is allowing the hindrance into awareness. Investigation of the hindrance is seeing how it works on us. But at the same time it is not a process of self-analysis, as in a psychological skill. This awareness is always bare of added inner commentary or story-telling about the hindrance. We refrain from telling a story about the story teller, and simply know on a pre-verbal level that what is happening is a ruse, a smokescreen, and we ride it out tenderly and patiently.

Investigative mindfulness is simply a curiosity about what is being experienced at this moment. Investigation allows us to see what the hindrance is and to truly come to understand for ourselves: This is what sense-desire, or any other hindrance, is. This is how I am now experiencing it in my body and mind right now. And this is how it is affecting me right now.  These are the conditioned thought trains that are habitually spun out by an aversive mind state, for example. This skill has huge implications for how we recognize and deal with mind states outside of formal sessions of meditation, as you can imagine. 

Homework for this week

Continue your formal sessions of meditation.

We will be introducing more and more aspects of the classic samatha practice -anapanasati over the next few weeks. For this week, see if you discover what the process for breathing in and breathing out feels like for you in the area of the nostrils or upper lip (find for yourself where you may feel the sensations of the breath most clearly in the region of the nose).

When you recognize the presence of a hindrance and allow it into awareness, and begin to investigate it with the bare sustained attention of mindfulness, allow yourself to silently question whether this mind state is permanent or whether it is changing. If you determine it to be changing, try to see how it is changing-are there sensations associated with it that are changing moment to moment, for example. Investigate in what other ways it may or may not be changing as it is happening in the moment.

See if you can detect any feeling-tones in the body associated with the hindrances. For example, what feeling-tones in the body are associated with your experience of aversive mind states? With desirous mind states? With tired or sleepy mind states? With confused mind states?

Inquire furher–how does awareness of the feeling-tones affect the stability of the hindrance?

Reinforce the core skill of knowing when to simply ignore insignificant mental chatter and when to use your tool kit (RAIN) to investigate and work through the sticky mind states that we need to regard as our five inner treasures (the so-called hindrances), as it is through the skillful working through of these gifts that we can proceed into the deeper, uncharted waters of joy, ease, tranquility and insights into the ultimate nature of our mind and the world.

Have a great week.

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.

intro to the five hindrances (week 1)

Supplemental readings and listening for the Five Hindrances topic

CD: The Five Hindrances, a talk by Eugene Cash available at the weekly meetings. 

Reading: The following chapters from Mindfulness in Plain English:

Chapter 10 –Dealing with Problems.

Chapters 11 and 12 –Dealing with Distractions,

Introduction to the Five Hindrances

The five hindrances are an important topic. I chose it as the first topic of this study period as understanding the hindrances and learning how to skillfully work with them opens doors to understanding the fundamental topics we will consider later on. The door that opens is the door of the settled mind. The five hindrances are common obstacles nearly everone encounters in their mediation practice, at one time or another.

The five hindrances, as taught by the Buddha, are:

1. Sense-desire, lust or greed

2. Hatred, anger, aversion or fear

3. Sloth and torpor or sleepiness and sluggishness

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

5. Doubt or uncertainty

As we will see, the process of mindfulness meditation empowers us to identify them when as they arise, and gives us strategies to work with them, so we can let them go and go on to deepen our meditation practice.

We can also see the five hindrances as familiar states of mind that come up all the time, not just when we are meditating, and temporarily block our expression of love and compassion for ourselves and for others.

In the Pali language of ancient India, in which are preserved the teachings of the historical Buddha, the term for these five hindrances is nivarana. The meaning of nivarana is a covering. We could say that the hindrances are mental or emotional coverings of the natural state of the heart and mind, which in one early text the Buddha said was luminous, free and immensely peaceful and serene.

This gives a clue as to how to practice with the hindrances: what we need to do is carefully and gently uncover the natural luminous peace of the mind.

The magic of mindfulness is that we learn to gently turn our non-judgmental awareness toward whatever is most prominent in the mind. When ill will, for example, becomes predominant, we simply turn our meditative attention towards it, so the feeling of anger or ill-will becomes the object of meditation. As we do this with gentleness and patience, anger ceases to be a hindrance, and it slowly evaporates, revealing a deeper aspect of the mind and heart as it does so.

A hindrance is only a hindrance when we are caught by it, when we fall into the trap it creates for us into believing the story it tells us. When we are caught up in them, they interfere with the development of a settled mind.

How to work with the hindrances

As we read the above chapters in Ven. Gunaratana’s book and as we listen to Eugene Cash’s talk, it becomes clear that the primary instruction fro dealing with each hindrance is essentially the same. There are subtle differences we encounter as we get into to each one. Here is the elegance of the primary instructions:

First to recognize it, then to meet it with acceptance, nonjudgmental investigative mindfulness, and the quality of unbiased curiosity or nonattachment.

One way to remember this process is through the acronym RAIN. This wonderful teaching tool has found its way into wide usage and was first articulated by the contemporary vipassana teacher Michele Macdonald.

R stands for recognition

A stands for acceptance

I stands for nonjudgmental investigative mindfulness

N stands for unbiased curiosity or nonattachment.

When we relax into our practice of meditation, all these four qualities are naturally present in the innate quality of mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply the quality of allowing our present moment’s experience to reveal itself to us just as it is.

We don’t do mindfulness, rather we allow mindfulness. It a simple receptivity to what is.

Homework for this week:

Begin a routine of regular sitting meditation. Start out modestly. You can use a timer and set it for 15 minutes, then work up incrementally so you can sit 25 minutes (or more, if you like) in a session. Using a timer relieves you of the bad habit of checking the clock.

At the beginning, aim to sit more days than not in a week (4 out of 7 days). Try to see this as a good hygienic habit, like brushing your teeth (mental hygiene).

If you are new to meditation I  would suggest you use the CD of 3 twenty-minte guided meditations by Jon Kabat-Zinn. You might want to experiment alternating the guided meditations or simply picking one and staying with it for the whole week.

As you progress in sitting meditation, try to make the your meditation your own, by dropping the crutch of a guided mediation on CD and starting to set off on your own independent practice. Do follow the general instructions for mindfulness meditation,  but without the aid of a CD. This will be very helpful as we begin to develop our faculty of concentration in the Anapanasati practice.

Please look over the practices in the “Mindfulness in Daily Life” category on this blog and pick one or two activities described there for extending your mindfulness outward from your sitting cushion or chair.