5 Obstacles to Mindfulness and How to Overcome Them: Part one
Everyone faces them. But few overcome them.
You know what it’s like.
You commit to spending the next five or ten minutes being completely present with your partner or kids or doing nothing but enjoying the sights and sounds as you walk through the park.
But just a few minutes in, you’ve already scrolled through Facebook twelve times and mentally planned Grandma’s 90th and lost pretty much all awareness of where you are and what you were meant to be doing.
It’s bad enough you’ve been lost in thought and indulging your trigger finger. But the disappointment of going against your intention to be mindful can be enough to make you want to mindfully explode.
Being mindful of what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, has become the new standard of conscious living. If you’re not constantly trying to be present and attempting to notice the feeling in your big toes at all hours or the beeping and screeching of the traffic outside, then you’re pretty much already dead.
This phony idea of what it means to be mindful has taken over the West. Likewise, there’s an image floating around of the ideal mindfulness practitioner as being someone who is happy and blissful and equanimous all the time. Rather than encouraging you to be more present, such ideas can not only move you further from reality, they can turn you off and make you feel like all this mindfulness stuff just isn’t for you.
Being mindful is not about constantly being ecstatic and noticing everything that’s going on around you. It’s about the gradual practice of recognizing and accepting the reality of what’s happening. And that by definition has to include how you’re a human being with a body and mind that are limited and affected by constantly changing conditions.
It’s when you become aware of such conditions and how they affect us, as opposed to trying to use brute force to will them away, that you can finally move past them and open up to previously unknown ways of being.
Thankfully, such impediments to a tranquil body and mind have been well documented. In particular, there are five major obstacles, known as the Five Hindrances, that have for millennia caused everyone from the average Joe to the expert yogi a whole lot of trouble.
It’s easy to see anything unwanted that arises in your experience, whether it be while you’re on the cushion or out in the world, as something that needs to be immediately eradicated because it says something negative about who you are.
But mindfulness gets you to see things a little differently. The Five Hindrances lays out five common negative mental states — sensual desire, anger, sloth and torpor, restlessness, and doubt — and suggests their presence is merely a natural part of being a human.
The teaching then explains how such mental states taint our experience and color our mental state to the point that, when they’re present, we literally can’t concentrate or be fully mindful—no matter how hard we try.
Through this, it shows how we can respond to them. Not by the familiar reaction of fighting or expressing them and unwittingly making them stronger, but instead learning to let them come, let them be, and let them go.
If we can learn to give space in our practices and lives to the Five Hindrances through honest examination, acceptance, and compassion, we can transform them from unwanted obstacles into opportunities for growth, openness, and mindfulness.
In the first part of this two-part series, we’re going to dive into how you can start working with the first two Hindrances: desire, and aversion and ill-will.
The first hindrance: Desire
We are designed to desire what we don’t have.
Friends, food, material possessions, lovers, chocolate, coffee, fame, money, the latest iPhone.
You name it, we desire it because we think that when we have whatever it is, our lives will be soooo much better.
They might even be just perfect.
We’re wired to think the solution to our problems lies somewhere out there—in the next thing we buy, the next relationship we have, the next whatever.
Always the next.
This way of being in the world can make us feel that we can never quite be content with what we have in the moment.
Life can seem to be lacking, empty, and without purpose. So, naturally, we can seek more ways to fill each moment with sensual pleasure and mental fantasies and scoops of double chocolate fudge ice cream.
Desire happens. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t even necessarily say anything about you at all.
The problem is, when we find ourselves caught up in the midst of desire for something or someone, our immediate reaction is to either indulge or suppress it.
We weave desire in as part of our ongoing story to help justify why we deserve or need something. And then we fuel negative ideas that support why we’re such a terrible person with an unruly mind for desiring.
But this is to consider desire as a personal affliction. We think the object of our desire holds some special significance to us, and that it will, if we get it, finally make us complete. It’s the soul mate that’ll make you feel whole, the pay rise that’ll finally allow you to be happy, or the ultimate doughnut that will bring you lasting satisfaction.
Desire can be so strong that it draws you away from yourself and keeps your attention turned outward. But instead of running to Krispy Creme or your lover’s house and expressing your longing, the way to deal with desire is to start taking away its fuel by first admitting you’re lost in desire for something.
Notice I didn’t say you’re obsessed with something. The something is never the problem. Desire is a natural activity of the outward-turned mind. Plus, when we pretend we don’t desire things that we only create more desire—the desire not to desire.
When you notice desire as it is in its raw state, not as a story about how you need some person or object but as an urge or longing for things to be better or somehow different, you allow it to drop away, or at least for its grip to loosen.
For ultimately, desire is a longing for things to be different than they are. Typically, when we are desiring something, we want to get away from our current situation because it involves some kind of discomfort or somehow doesn’t live up to our expectations. Thus ensues the continual quest for improvement and the ongoing search for fulfillment.
When we become aware that the source of our discontent is not that we don’t have X object or person, but that we are focusing all our attention outward, away from ourselves, and thus fuelling the endless cycle of lust and “what ifs” and imaginary scenarios of how things could or should be, we can come to accept desire as a natural part of our experience.
A potent antidote for strong desire, then, is gratitude. When I’m caught up in desire, I know I’m spending too much time on Instagram and focusing outward on what I don’t have, so by definition I’m not noticing what’s already here. Things I already have and for which I’m immensely grateful, like my relationships and food in the fridge and a functioning body that breaths in and out without me needing to do anything.
The second hindrance: Aversion & ill will
When faced with a situation we don’t like, we can often find ourselves caught between two reactions: lashing out or trying to force ourselves to remain calm.
The second, of course, is the better option of the two. But both reactions, no matter if they’re expressive or not, are forms of aversion and ill will.
Aversion is to want to get away from a certain experience. Ill will is all kinds of thoughts relating to rejection, hostility, hatred, and bitterness.
Even when we know it’s not right to express or suppress feelings of resistance or ill will, it can sometimes feel like the right — and the only — thing we can do.
But rather than being a reflection of how things are, more often this is due to a tendency to want to get rid of and avoid difficult and strong feelings.
For instance, when you’re angry about some injustice or misfortune, it can feel good to express that anger by dumping it all onto another person or a wall or your partner’s best set of bone china.
This initial catharsis, however, is often undone a few moments later, when your mind and body fill back up with anger—plus now with added guilt, regret, and resentment.
Shit happens. Life isn’t always comfortable. Outcomes of situations aren’t always what you hope for. People behave in strange and unexpected ways.
So rather than fight or indulge anger, ill will, or aversion when it arises, as they inevitably will, it’s much better to recognize when they’re happening — whether you like or agree with the fact they’re happening or not.
It’s simply not possible to think objectively when in the throes of strong emotion. We need space to think clearly, to see what’s really bothering us, and to decide what to do or whether we want to do anything at all.
In trying to avoid pain and difficulty, we build a fortress around ourselves and maintain an illusion of certainty, comfort, and permanence. This causes us to not only become disconnected from those around us, but also from ourselves.
Aversion and ill will almost always stem from some source of internal suffering. If someone is angry, they are suffering. If we are angry, we are suffering.
This is why the antidote to this Hindrance is compassion, especially toward yourself. As Thich Nhat Hanh explains in Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames:
“If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist.”
Self-compassion is like going straight to the source of a raging fire and splashing a much-needed dose of water on the flames. It deals with the problem at its root, and in doing so, helps you see things more clearly before you respond to the situation.
That’s it for part one! In part two, we’ll cover the final three Hindrances: sloth, torpor, and boredom, restlessness and worry, and doubt.
Part two is now published. Go to part two :)
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