As we have explored the first three of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, and Mindfulness of Mind - the greater weight of the instructions has been simply to be aware of these aspects of our experience. Does our body have pain? Pleasant sensations? Wants or needs? Are we attracted or repelled by some experience that arose? When we are upset, calm, excited, fearful, engaged, can we bring awareness to the mind (read here mind/heart) that is having the experience as well as the object that triggered our reactions? Mindfulness of our experience in all of these different arenas has been our objective. There has been no need to do anything, change anything, alter our experience. Simply being present has been what is asked of us in mindfulness.
And in that presence, we are asked to look inside our minds and know when a wholesome feeling or state is present and when it is absent, when an unwholesome feeling or state is present and when it is absent. We begin to see what is in our minds and what is not.
With the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Dharmas/Dhammas or Mindfulness of the Way Things Are - we move into the territory of discerning what it in our minds, whether it is wholesome or unwholesome, and whether it would be skillful to take action to change what is in our minds. We do this already with the loving kindness practice. When we say the loving kindness phrases, we are substituting the phrases of well-wishing for whatever else is in our minds whether it be jealousy or anger, worry, rumination, or desire.
But to back up a bit, Mindfulness of Dhammas (the Pali spelling), has a number of categories - The Five Hindrances, The Five Aggregates of Clinging, The Six Sense Spheres, The Seven Enlightenment Factors, and the Four Noble Truths which includes the Noble Eight-fold Path. Taken together they lay out the path to enlightenment. We will explore these in the coming weeks.
The First of these categories, the Five Hindrances, we have touched on before. These five hindrances are the most common obstacles that arise for all meditators. When the hindrances are present, they obscure mindfulness. In the quote above, mindfulness of breathing is peaceful and sublime - a state of happiness in which we can abide. The Buddha practiced mindfulness of breathing through out his life and, in fact, chose to practice mindfulness of breathing when he died. It is only peaceful and sublime, however, when the hindrances are absent. Our task as meditators is to look into our minds and hearts to see if any constriction or disturbance is present, to identify which hindrance might be there, and to apply skillful means to keep the hindrance at bay.
And we can do this. We can all have periods in our meditations when the hindrances are at bay. We strengthen our ability to abide in their absence when we see clearly when a hindrance is present and when it is absent.
The hindrances are sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. In their simplest form, they are wanting, not wanting, too much energy, too little energy, and doubt.
As you think about your practice, can you identify periods when wanting was present? The desire for something? To get up or eat something? To know what a noise outside was? To take a nap? To have a better meditation?
Not wanting can be a reaction to pain in the body, can express as anger or irritation (“stewing" for instance), can arise in reaction to a horror fantasy or the memory of a passage in a novel or scene in a movie. Anytime we want something else to be happening other than what is, we are either in desire/wanting or aversion/not wanting.
Too much energy, agitation, restlessness can make it hard to settle down, to bring our attention back to our chosen object, to restrain our minds from wandering, fantasizing, getting distracted.
Too little energy can take the form of sleepiness, dullness, apathy, a sinking but pleasant comfort without a lot of clarity. Sometimes we may simply be tired, other times we may be “bored”, but sometimes we may be resisting a difficult feeling such as grief or fear.
Some of us are familiar with doubt off the cushion as well as on - doubt in ourselves and our ability to practice, doubt in the teachers and their ability to communicate the dharma, doubt in the teachings themselves.
The first step in working with any of these hindrances is recognizing that they are present or not, but this is especially true for doubt. Doubt is sometimes simply the choice to believe a certain thought that arose. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” “I’m no good at this.” “Look how much better others are.” “These instructions are impossible to follow.” These are all doubting thoughts that may arise - and we may choose to take on these thoughts in a split second without even being fully aware that we have done so.
There are specific antidotes to each hindrance given in the teachings but two of the main ones are mindfulness, clearly seeing the hindrance, and the practices of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
All meditators cycle through the hindrances but one of the key understandings is that resisting or ignoring the hindrance is sure to increase it. Accepting that the hindrance is present is a critical step. A further step is to see that the path we are traveling is not around, over, or under the hindrance, but through it. The hindrance is not something that shouldn’t be there, but a state that arose through causes and conditions. Can we explore the hindrance and the causes and conditions that support them, can we see how they arise in our daily lives and pull our attention into the alleyways of our minds, can we understand how these hindrances are telling us something about our lives, our understanding, our hearts? The hindrances, as annoying and challenging as they are, are the fodder for our awakening.