5 Obstacles to Mindfulness and How to Overcome Them: Part Two

This is the second part of a two-part series on five common obstacles known as The Five Hindrances. The first part introduces the Hindrances and covers the first two: desire, and aversion and ill-will. I recommend checking it out first as each Hindrance tends to fuel the next. But if you just read this one on sloth & torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt, you’ll still get a lot out of it.

So let’s put all hindrances aside for a moment and dive straight in:

The third hindrance: Sloth & torpor

You finally have a quiet day to yourself and all you can see ahead of you is free time.

But at the thought of spending it on your own, twiddling your thumbs and actually having to think, you rush to fill it with activities and emails and talking to people you would normally make an effort to avoid.

When faced with nothing to do and no one to talk to, rather than being warmly welcomed as restorative alone time, many of us react by having a sort of mini-meltdown-slash-identity-crisis.

It can be so painful that some may keep themselves occupied at all times by doing things that aren’t even that enjoyable — like scrolling Facebook — and things that are clearly bad for them—like scrolling Facebook.

We take refuge in the familiar because it brings us a sense of comfort and belonging. Seeing what your old classmates are up to reminds us of who we aren’t and who we don’t want to be. Watching endless reruns of Friends means we don’t have to think about who we are and who we want to be.

We continually construct our sense of self based on the things we do in the world and our interactions and relationships with others.

And so, when deprived of our friends or family or our cult movie obsession, we can feel like we are nothing as there’s nothing left to define us. So we continually jump from activity to activity thinking we’re finding ourselves, but all the while lose ourselves and become less able to experience moments of doing nothing and being alone.

When constantly bombarded by external stimuli, boredom and loneliness become strong forces that keep us tied into an endless cycle of consumption and distraction.

Feelings of frustration, lethargy, discouragement, boredom, indifference, dullness, hopelessness, and emptiness are all forms of mental and physical resistance that come under the umbrella of sloth and torpor. In short, sloth is an absence of vitality in the body and torpor is a lack of mental energy.

Although they appear in many forms, what sloth and torpor comes down to is the fear of nothingness. When presented with the prospect of doing nothing and being nothing, we typically recoil and do anything possible to avoid the fear and discomfort. After all, without noise, busyness, people, and activity, we have nothing to compare ourselves to — nothing to tell us who we are.

We fear nothingness because we long to be somebody. We long to make something permanent in an impermanent world and avoid disappearing into the eternal abyss. But rather than having its roots in reality, this fear is rather born and strengthened by the constant striving to find and retain a solid sense of “me” out there among external and constantly changing conditions.

Fear leads to sloth and torpor which leads to distraction which leads to a sense of separation from yourself and the world. The more you recognize feelings like boredom, loneliness, and dullness not as inherent parts of your reality, but as symptoms of avoiding the fear of being no one and doing nothing, you can start to reclaim your energy and expand your sense of self beyond conditions.

The antidote to the Third Hindrance, therefore, comes from realizing that when sloth and torpor are present, it doesn’t mean they are the truth. Boredom and lethargy do not necessarily mean there is a lack of interest or energy. On the contrary, it can show that your attention is not actually on what is happening, but what could be happening, how you should be feeling, and how things should be happening.

A great way to notice this is everyday situations and meditation is to create a sense of urgency. The courage to confront the source of your problems usually arises out of desperation. So if you truly wish to be free of your difficulties and transform the Hindrance of sloth and torpor, you need to regularly remind yourself of your intentions, the impermanence of life, and the inherent emptiness of self and all things.

The fourth hindrance: Restlessness & worry

Ever get that feeling when, as soon as you’re in one place or with one person, you want to be somewhere else or with someone else?

We’re conditioned to seek happiness wherever we are not. If only we could be in a different place, or with a different person, then we’ll be happy.

Or so we think.

The reality is this idea creates a lot of restlessness that in itself stops us from enjoying the present and noticing that happiness is not in that next thing, but already on our doorstep.

If only we stopped trying so hard to find it.

No points for guessing where a lot of this restlessness and worry comes from. Social media is designed to fuel the desire to be somewhere else, including the sense there’s always someone cooler you could be with or something more interesting you could be doing.

This craving for something more or something “other” is a fundamental part of being human and a key mechanism for our survival. And so we could blame it on Silicon Valley and Justin Beiber’s Instagram feed, but this does nothing to help us become more present and actually understand and deal with it.

Typically, when we’re restless, we think we know why and what we need to do to resolve it. It’s because we’re not at the beach sipping a margarita but in an office in dreary London. It’s because our blood sugar is low. Or the guy next to us on the Tube smells like feet. It’s because our partners don’t have an eight-pack and six thousand followers on Instagram.

But more often than not, we don’t need any of these things. We need to be curious about the feelings behind these ideas. Thus, curiosity is one of the best antidotes to balancing out the Fourth Hindrance.

When you’re experiencing restlessness or worry, ask yourself:

Why do you feel restless? What are you really worried about? Would X really make things different and solve all your problems? Or is the source something deeper?

Uncertainty and discomfort are essential parts of the human experience. And yet, being able to compare your life to the perfected-snapshots of millions of other peoples’ can make you feel like any hint of insecurity or sadness is a sign you’re fundamentally flawed or broken.

It’s perfectly normal to experience worry. It’s perfectly normal to feel restless. It’s when we approach such natural experiences as defects we need to fix or illnesses to get rid of — when we worry about the worry and become restless about the restlessness — that they become persistent and harmful.

This is why another potent antidote to the Fourth Hindrance is getting directly in touch with bodily sensations.

As such feelings as restlessness and worry are often driven by the thoughts and ideas we have about things and not our direct experience, getting in touch with their underlying sensations can help us open up to the full entirety of the experience, so we can learn to be with it instead of trying to change or move away from it in any way.

Awareness is the first step. If not for the simple fact that bringing awareness to the body at the times when we’re experiencing difficult emotions is often the last thing we’re trying to do.

Being with your experience, thoughts, and feelings of discomfort without judging them is the next step. The nonjudgmental quality of mindfulness practice allows you to open up to the often pushed away states like worry, restlessness, and anxiety without needing to rush in and fix them or dampen them with distractions.

The fifth hindrance: Doubt

In a world where change is the only constant, you can guarantee that you’re going to experience doubt.

Doubt about what you’re doing with your life. Doubt in how good of a person you are. Doubt in your competency and skills. Doubt in your choice of pizza topping.

But although it may feel like it sometimes, doubt doesn’t need to play a leading role in your experience and everything you try and do.

Often too much doubt arises when we’re stuck in the habit of incessantly evaluating ourselves against others and unrealistic ideals, whether in our work and relationships or our meditation practice. The result is doubt can hold you back, hinder your growth, undermine your intuition, and prevent you from living in line with your values.

When doubt becomes debilitating it’s often because the criteria we’re using for success is out of whack. Whether it be grand expectations, imaginary ideas of perfection, or unfair comparisons, doubt is essentially a mismanagement of focus on unwholesome and fabricated ideals.

It’s easy to get discouraged when things aren’t going to plan and to find an endless number of reasons why you’re not good enough. But rather than give in to such endless cycles, when doubt arises, we need to be able to recognize it as what it is—doubt.

Doubt isn’t bad: it’s a natural part of our experience that has its uses, and, like everything else, arises and passes.

For this reason, one powerful antidote to doubt is, in fact, doubt. Usually, when doubt comes, we see it as a sign that it’s time to give in, that something needs to change, or that something is going or is about to go wrong.

The next thing you know you can have talked yourself out of what you wanted or were trying to do without even realising it. This is the power of doubt when we accept it, along with its judgements and ideas, as a concrete reflection of reality, as opposed to doubting the basis on which it stands.

Like all of the Five Hindrances, doubt loves it when you take its rhetoric on face value and forget that it is just another, perfectly normal aspect that’s arising within your experience.

So doubt is invaluable to overcoming them all. But in particular, it’s key to learn to always doubt the doubt. Doing so doesn’t mean you get rid of the sense of uncertainty and often uncomfortable feelings of not knowing, but it does allow you to give them much more space so you can move forward regardless of what the doubting mind is telling you.

There’s no shortage of obstacles to a calm and balanced mind. But also, through facing such obstacles as The Five Hindrances head-on, there’s also no shortage of potential for growth and transformation within them.

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