chapter 3
Difficulties in Meditation—and Life
Several years ago, I decided to spend four days alone with nature, meditating and fasting, so I went off to a wilderness area with some friends who wanted to do the same thing. We had planned to go out for an hour the first morning so that each of us could find our individual sacred spot, where we would spend these days alone. Unfortunately for me, the area my friends had chosen was heavily forested. I’m someone who loves open space, and I feel crowded and even imprisoned in forests. I could not imagine spending the whole four days deep in the woods. The first day I got up at dawn—I did not take any food or, foolishly, water—to try to find open space somewhere. I walked frantically, here and there, uphill and down, but had no luck. My mind was full of thoughts such as “I am not going to find what I’m looking for. This is awful.” I was feeling really attached to discovering the perfect place and at the same time feeling certain that I was going to fail. I had awakened with a fever that morning, and I could feel my body both sweating and shivering. It was time to go back. I turned around, deeply disappointed, thirsty, and fatigued, and started going to where I thought “back” was. Each tree looked familiar and I thought I recognized the path, but no, that wasn’t it. I turned and tried another direction but never found our base camp. Hours later it dawned on me that I was completely lost and that my life was in jeopardy. In that moment I understood I had to surrender—my doubts, my anger, my attachment to finding the perfect place, even to finding the path out. I lay down on a rock by a river I had come to and totally let go. I felt the cold hardness of the rock underneath me and heard the gurgling sounds of moving water. A deep peace grew inside me. And then a bolt of clear directed energy pulsed through me, saying without words: Get up and go this way. I turned to the west and walked mindfully, feeling each foot stepping on the ground as if drawn along magnetically at each turning. Eventually I got to a road and a cabin, whose owners drove me the long distance back to the base camp.
I ended up having four wonderful days because I had come to understand the gift of letting go of my attachments and doubts and of surrendering into the moment as it is.
—AW
SPENDING TIME ALONE provides a remarkable opportunity to experience the skillful and unskillful qualities of mind introduced in chapters 1 and 2. Both the enriching and the difficult mental energies also can arise dramatically during our meditation practice. This chapter looks at five specific unskillful qualities traditionally called the hindrances: desire (for some particular experience), ill will (toward the pain in our leg, for example), sloth and torpor (drowsiness), restlessness (perhaps for the meditation to be over), and doubt (about doing the wrong kind of spiritual practice, for instance). They are called hindrances because they interfere with our ability to come to insight, and sometimes they all come at once in what is known as a multiple-hindrance attack.
We are often seduced by the hindrances into believing that if we follow these energies, they will bring us happiness—for example, the attachment to open space as the only possibility for a satisfying four days in nature. Our possibility for transformation comes not in repressing these energies or creating a split between “ourselves” and “them,” as in the story of Cinderella and her sisters, but in acknowledging them without identifying with or believing in them. Grappling with the hindrances is not a reason to judge ourselves but rather an opportunity to investigate the energies to see if they lead us toward or away from strengthening our meditation practice and the conditions for happiness.
We need to recognize that the hindrances arise in all of us until we are totally free. Our spiritual path is a developmental process—and it is not necessarily neatly linear. It is a journey of purification and cleansing that often causes feelings to become intense, especially the negative ones. Such experiences do not mean that we are doing the practice incorrectly. Our practice is actually going quite well when mindfulness illuminates experiences so that they feel stronger than in the normal rhythm of life. Just because meditating may be difficult at home or on a retreat does not mean that we are not on the right path. Rather, the common difficulties that many of us experience in the beginning—feeling extremely restless and not being able to sit still for a minute, being attacked by doubt, being attacked by pain, feeling very sleepy, having strong feelings of desire or aversion—can be invitations to a spiritual practice.
SENSUAL DESIRE
Sensual desire resembles grasping a sticky object. It is as though our world is coated with Crazy Glue and everything we touch clings to us. In our meditation practice, we often become stuck on pleasant physical sensations or experiences. Desire persuades us that if only we have a pleasant breath or if only we have that spacious feeling we had earlier, then we would be happy. But desire is insatiable. As soon as we get the object or experience we have been longing for, we move on to another desire, because the more we pursue desire, the more desire we experience. Desire can never satisfy desire—a fact that turns upside down our cultural “understanding” that we will be happy only if we fulfill sensual desire for pleasant experiences: food, sex, cars, clothes, homes, and on and on.
It is probably accurate to say that we have spent much of our lives pursuing our desires in the hope that once we have obtained them we will be happy. If this expectation was realistic, then we might expect to find ourselves ecstatically happy much of the time. But it is not, and we are not. Desire blinds us from the truth the Buddha observed, that desire can never bring us lasting happiness. When we explore the nature of desire, we find that it brings contraction rather than spaciousness, separation rather than connection. It shuts down our hearts rather than opening them. We may even experience such strong desire that we do not care if we hurt someone in the process of fulfilling it.
Desire not only brings contraction and separation but also is impossible to always satisfy. We cannot always get the job or house we want. Our children, wives, husbands, partners, parents, and friends are not always what we would like them to be. To live our lives pursuing the dreams of desires can only bring us suffering.
When I was young, I drove very old, not particularly attractive cars. I wasn’t interested in and didn’t notice other cars on the road. While I was a university student in my thirties, my little Honda Civic died. Because I was so short of funds the only way I could get another car was to buy a new one with no down payment and at an outrageous interest rate. So I bought a new Toyota Tercel. I liked the design of the car and thought it was pretty cool. Some weeks later, driving down the freeway to class, I noticed I was looking longingly at a Toyota Camry (a much more expensive car). Now that I had a new car, I already wanted a better version!
—AW
In our meditation practice, through awareness we can separate desire from its object and examine desire itself. If we desire soft, easy, smooth breaths, we can turn our attention to the wanting of desire and see how it takes us out of the present moment and into the future. We can feel the contraction and pulling of it and can see how it can bring restlessness or doubt and all kinds of thoughts associated with it. We can also see how desire sees just the attractive qualities of the breath we imagine we want, divorced from the reality of our breathing—which is sometimes tight and sometimes smooth, and always is changing. This examination can give us exceptional insight as to how desire operates in our life—how it adheres to its object, how it makes its object more attractive than it really is and makes us blind to unattractive aspects. We can examine how insatiable it is.
When we feel desire, we do not have to judge ourselves. The nature of the untrained mind is to experience desire. Our role is to recognize it, acknowledge it, and let it go through one of the techniques described below.
Concentration, aiming the mind at the breath or another object of meditation such as lovingkindness, is one antidote to desire. When the mind is steadily connected to the object of our meditation, there is no space for desire to arise. Even if we are not meditating, when we notice desire, we can try to let it go by switching our attention to something else such as our posture or what we are hearing or seeing, or just thinking of something else.
Several other practices can help us work with desire. Contemplating unattractive aspects of the desired object is effective but challenging because we typically see only the attractive qualities of whatever we want. We also can give ourselves little talks, such as “It’s okay. Desire is just an experience. It is like eating cotton candy—so insubstantial, afterward there’s just an empty feeling.”
Faced with desire, we can also contemplate impermanence, the overriding characteristic of life. Failure to acknowledge the truth of change is the greatest source of our suffering, and desire is based on the assumption that things do not change. Most of us have had a moment during meditation when the mind felt open, the breath moved with ease, and there was great concentration. We thought we had finally “gotten it,” and this was the way our practice would be. But then our experience changed, and the next meditations were awful. We spent weeks trying to hold on to or recreate that wonderful moment. It was an impossible quest.
In our daily life we can clearly see the interaction of desire and impermanence in our long-term relationships. We meet someone, are filled with desire, and think, “I’ve found my life partner, and we are the perfect match. This is it.” At least we feel this way when we first meet the person and perhaps for the first six months or year. But if we stay together for five, ten, or fifteen years, then we increasingly know that intimate relationships are a blend of some blessings and some difficulties, many unpleasant. During the difficult times we might even come to the conclusion that “This person has changed and is not the right person for me.”
When we experience desire as just another passing experience, we can acknowledge it with words such as “Desire, welcome. I see you have come to visit. I know you well. You are a frequent guest. But I am not entering into a conversation with you or getting involved in any of your stories. So you are free to leave at any time.” There is no need to struggle.
Powerful desire may be a cover for difficult emotions that we have not acknowledged. When we are caught in a net of desire, it may therefore be helpful to investigate what is going on in our emotional world. It is important to let go of all the thoughts or stories we have about the desire and drop down underneath the conceptual level. If we can let go of agendas such as “I am getting rid of desire by looking at my emotions,” our exploration can have an open, listening, kind energy. Try to experience a difficult emotion without identifying with it or becoming lost in it. See if you can hold it with awareness and experience it with spaciousness rather than being lost in the middle of it. Our mind has a strong tendency to go into a story line—“I have to have this,” or “This happened and ...”—but letting go of our stories and coming back to awareness and investigation can bring us into balance and harmony. We then can see the overriding desire for what it is. When we can open to and allow these underlying emotions, we create the conditions for coming back to balance and harmony. With this balance, the strength of the desires begins to evaporate and we feel released from their grip.
ILL WILL
Ill will, or aversion, arises when our experiences are unpleasant. It is the opposite of desire. Instead of grasping for something, ill will—including anger, hatred, and fear—pushes it away. When we are meditating, we sometimes find we do not like our breath—it is too short, too shallow, or too rough—or our body feels too hard and heavy, or we feel a horrible pain in our knee and we become critical of what is going on. We become angry—with ourselves because our minds are not calm, with ourselves because we are trying so hard to meditate and cannot, or with the pain in our knee, which seems to be messing up our meditation. We often think that unpleasant experiences are an expression of some way we have failed or that they are an indication that something wrong has to be fixed. So we keep pushing away or rejecting unpleasant experiences with our ill will.
Can we separate our aversion from what feels like its cause—for example, the pain in our back—and examine it with nonreactive awareness? What is the actual experience of aversion? How does it feel in our body? Is it open or contracted? Does it bring ease or tension? When awareness is strong, just seeing aversion often frees us of its hold—an important function of awareness. If we bring awareness to aversion but find ourselves reacting to it, we can then come back to the breath or to some experience where aversion does not arise. We might, for example, open up to a general sense of our whole body sitting or to sound and allow our mind to rest here for a while.
Another classic antidote to ill will is to cultivate an interest in the experience that has triggered it. See if you can separate the unpleasant quality of the experience from the actual physical experience. What is pain? What are its characteristics?
The healing of this spiritual path happens through our cultivating the qualities of mind that allow us to have an experience without judging it. We are in training to be all right no matter what our experience is. This is not to say that there will not be countless times when we will judge the pain in our back or our breath—that is the nature of a wobbly mind—but we will increasingly see clearly that we do not want to go down this route.
The Buddha said in the
Dhammapada, a collection of his verses (see page 213):
In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
Lovingkindness thus is one of the main antidotes to ill will because it has the capacity to soften the hardness and release the contraction of aversion. We can call forth kindness to meet difficult experiences with thoughts such as “May this pain be held with kindness.” Or we can meet the aversion with kindness as well: “May I hold this aversion with kindness.” If we are caught up in anger toward another person, we can call forth kindness to that person or direct the formal lovingkindness meditation toward him or her (see pages 127-35).
Because it is often difficult to summon lovingkindness when we are feeling ill will, the Buddha suggested that we contemplate the positive qualities of the object or experience.
I sometimes find myself irritated while doing household chores. I think: “How come I am doing these chores again? I don’t find it particularly pleasant to vacuum. I don’t like the dust. The vacuum cleaner is heavy and always turns over and gets entangled in the furniture.” It is easy in this unpleasantness to start becoming irritated with others in my household for not vacuuming more often. When I notice these thoughts, they are familiar intruders. But then I think of all the other activities my partner has done: built a desk for me, fixed light bulbs, taken the sink apart when it leaked, and all the other things I never do. I also think about the pleasure of having a vacuum cleaner, because I used to live without one and it was really hard to keep the house free of dust.—AW
Cultivating joy is another direct antidote to ill will. If pain in our body has brought up strong aversion, sometimes it is helpful to contemplate the blessings of having a body or a knee, leg, or shoulder that functions. We can spend some time in this contemplation and every now and again touch those painful sensations lightly with awareness. If aversion to the pain is still there, we can continue to contemplate the blessings of having a body and other blessings in our life. To practice with this kind of patience and perseverance is a tremendous gift to ourselves.
If we are caught up in a story about someone and ill will is the related emotion, it is helpful to let go of the story line and come back to the body. Instead of repeatedly “rehearsing” in our minds “what they did to me,” we can begin to explore the contraction in our chest, the burning sensation in our throat, the tension in our jaw. We know “our stories” inside out and backward, and thinking about them again does not teach us anything or lead to happiness. If it did, we would all be extremely happy because we spend so much time indulging our stories. We can call on our resources as spiritual warriors to bring forth the energy to drop—and keep dropping—our stories. The healing that happens through letting go of our stories over and over again and coming back to a neutral object such as the breath is profound. Coming back to awareness of a neutral object strengthens awareness, the very quality that can help us to resolve difficult situations.
In dealing with ill will, the Buddha also bid us contemplate his teaching that unskillful actions sow only the seeds of suffering through cause and effect, or karma (pages 72-75).
SLOTH AND TORPOR
In meditation, drowsiness, feeling heavy, and falling asleep—charmingly referred to in the Buddha’s discourses as sloth and torpor—are very common experiences. This state is a dullness of mind, a lack of driving power, in which we feel as though all our energy is dispelled. It has a sinking quality to it. Again, as with desire and ill will, we acknowledge that this is our experience. It is not bad; it is just the experience.
Several antidotes are helpful when you start to feel drowsy:
• In the beginning, after you have acknowledged drowsiness, do not use it as an object of attention; rather, find a different object.
• Mentally scan different touch points in the body, such as your shoulders, knees, buttocks, and feet, and for a moment allow your mind to alight at each place. Feel the sensations at each place if they are accessible; if not, just know where your attention is, then continue to move to the other points. Keep doing this until you feel more alert.
• Open your eyes and stay either with scanning the body or with the breath.
• Count your breaths to help stay present. One technique is to count each inhalation up to 5, 7, or 10. You usually will not get all the way up to 5, much less to 10—you will have to keep going back to 1 because you have forgotten to count and have begun thinking. But just bringing in the extra effort of counting is useful.
• Stand up if you are really falling asleep. Some people have even stood on their heads at the beginning of their meditation in order to change the energy so that they do not sleep.
• Go for a fast walk.
• Repeat to yourself what you know of the teachings of the Buddha or your understanding of what brings about your happiness.
Awakening energy by exerting effort to connect with a chosen object such as one on this list is the direct antidote to heavy drowsiness.
RESTLESSNESS
One morning I sat down to meditate on my bed in a little cabin in the California redwoods. I had just come back from a retreat and was very inspired to sit every day. As I sat, I realized I hadn’t set my alarm clock to let me know when twenty minutes was up. I got up, set my alarm, and started to sit again. Then I remembered I had not switched off the phone. I was sure the phone would disturb me, so I’d better turn it off. I jumped off the bed and turned off the phone. When I got back onto the bed, I discovered that I had messed up the particular configuration of pillows that was comfortable, so I had to turn around and get my pillows “right.”
I sat down again. I probably felt one breath, then I started to think about some problems at work. In that moment, I thought I had come up with a brilliant solution to a really difficult problem, and if I didn’t write it down that very minute I was going to forget it. So I got up again and wrote down what I thought was the solution. Then I started to think about all the other problems at work. Guess what happened next? The twenty minutes was over and my alarm went off.
As restless as I was that time, it was nothing compared to my first meditation experiences, when I was like a jumping bean. I could not sit still for a moment. My face was itchy and I had to scratch, and my back was in agony and I had to keep shifting position. My mind was all over the place.
—AW
Restlessness may be agitation of the body and/or the mind. Mental restlessness—which often takes the form of compulsive planning—is the opposite of a quiet mind. It makes the mind unsteady and we feel in turmoil, like water whipped by the wind.
When we can, we greatly help our practice by persevering in our commitment to sit and by refraining from jumping up to write something down, to switch the alarm clock on or the telephone off, or to leap onto whatever train of thought has arrived to entice us into leaving our meditation. We often feel as though a situation justifies being agitated—for example, worrying about a traffic delay when we have to catch a plane. Restlessness seduces us into thinking that if we are restless enough we will somehow make things better. It never occurs to us that being agitated or worried contributes nothing at all to improving the situation. Agitation just breeds more agitation.
As with the other hindrances, the invitation is to separate the anxiety from what we are anxious about and to see it as the hindrance restlessness. We learn to trust that if we let go and direct our minds back to our breath or the posture of our bodies, such as sitting or standing, we become much more effective because we develop steadiness of mind, which sees clearly what needs to be done. This steadiness of mind can also bring happiness, which is a classical antidote to restlessness.
A common attribute of restlessness is monkey mind, the characteristic of the mind to jump from one thought to another to another. Insight Meditation stresses that we strengthen our practice by returning from thinking, not by not thinking. The dazzling solutions and plans that arise during meditation came up the first time and will come up again; we can write them down after our meditation time. It is helpful to understand that cultivating mindfulness in a moment-to-moment, ongoing way creates transformative insight, something our thoughts cannot do.
Restlessness may also take the form of physical agitation. It is not bad to move during meditation, but we can try not to be mindlessly reactive to physical experiences such as pain or itching. We can recognize them, acknowledge them, see what they feel like (often, for example, itching involves a sensation of heat), then intentionally adjust our posture with as much awareness as we have been giving to our breath.
It is easy to forget that we are training our mind and that, just like learning to play an instrument or perfect a sport, the process is not instantaneous. If we were learning how to ski, we would fall down repeatedly until we slowly, very slowly, got a sense of it. The same thing is true in learning to meditate. We forget; we come back. We forget; we come back. And we keep doing that. The forgetting happens a little less frequently as we become more skilled, just as we fall down less often when we have been skiing for a while. But even Olympic skiers still fall, and deeply realized meditators still forget. That is the nature of the mind we are training.
DOUBT
Doubt—thinking that what we are doing is not right and is not working—is one of the most insidious difficulties we encounter, because it is tricky to recognize. It is that little voice inside that says, “You’re the only person who isn’t doing it right,” or “This is the wrong practice [or teacher or retreat] for you. What are you doing here?” Doubt often has the effect of draining away our determination, our energy, and our faith. Doubt feels as if we have pulled the plug in our spiritual bath and all our resolve has gone down the drain.
There may be extreme discomfort during our early meditation days because meditation can highlight difficulties in our life—and such experiences often precipitate doubt. It is similar to washing filthy clothes and seeing all the dirt and scum come to the surface. When that happens, strong energies arise—anger, desire, the comparing mind. We feel as if we are experiencing the darkest part of ourselves. It is easy to lose faith in the process because we feel as though teachers or books are talking about our Buddha-nature and the possibility of liberation, but we are further away from it than before we started meditating.
Down on the cushion. One leg up, other leg up, wrap the blanket around me.
Set the timer: 45:00, 44:59, 44:58. Okay, it’s working.
Close eyes; take a deep breath.
Rising, falling, rising, falling. Oh, I’m getting hungry; contraction; rumbling. What do I have to eat for breakfast? Oooh, I think I’ll have one of the great vegan oatmeal chocolate chip muffins from Bread & Circus. Those are so scrumptious! The ones from Gwen and Deb’s are really good too, but I really shouldn’t be eating them because they aren’t vegan and I’m trying to keep that commitment. I wish they would get some good vegan muffins. But maybe it’s not too horrible to have one once in a while—nobody’s perfect. I really like their raspberry mocha ones. Oh, wanting, thinking.
Rising, falling, rising. Oh, no! Here comes the leg pain! I hate that tension, burning, tightness.
Rising, falling. Oh, it’s getting worse. Why do I have to sit through this pain, what good is it to torture myself? But I’m such a wimp. Why can’t I just watch the sensations? It’s just a little pain. I’ll never be able to be a good meditator if I can’t sit through some pain. This is nothing. What about all of those monks and nuns being tortured by the Chinese in Tibet? What if I get cancer or something horrible? How will I be able to practice then? I can’t even sit through a little pain in my legs. Oh, it’s getting worse. I hate this!
—Cynthia, a student
This student was beset by wave after wave of doubt, which often assails us when we have a specific idea of how things—especially our practice—should be: It should be less difficult or we should be having a different kind of experience. Doubt is especially challenging because it creates all kinds of story lines that seduce us into thinking that the doubts are true—we are inadequate or the path is inadequate or circumstances are too difficult and it is just impossible.
As we see in chapter 10, doubt was the last difficulty that assailed Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be. As Siddhartha meditated under a tree, determined to become enlightened, Mara, the personification of all the hindrances, said to him, “Who do you think you are, sitting here, trying to become enlightened?” Siddhartha, unshaken by Mara, touched the earth and asked the earth to witness his clear intention, through his many lives, to purify himself and to become a buddha (“awakened one”). After this invocation, he continued practicing. He, like we, found that one of the best antidotes to doubt is anchoring the mind through concentration and cultivating continuous mindfulness to the chosen object in meditation.
When we experience doubt, we can turn for guidance to the Buddha’s criteria for determining what is true and what is not true about our thoughts. He asked, “Are our thoughts skillful? Do our thoughts bring happiness? Are they a contribution to our well-being?” In contrast, the doubting mind jumps here and there with a feeling of dis-ease and often ill will or aversion.
Sometimes it is also very helpful to talk to others, especially teachers, on this spiritual path. The value of such sharing was affirmed by the Buddha when he said to his attendant, Ananda: “The whole of this path is associating with friends and people who are wise and steeped in this practice, who are free of delusion and ignorance.”
If remorse for actions in the past causes doubt to arise, it is comforting to look at the story of Angulimala, a sadistic serial killer who went on vicious, murderous rampages in the Buddha’s time. Wherever he went, wearing a garland made of the fingers of his victims, terrified people ran away and hid. One day after doing his alms round, the Buddha began to walk along a road to where Angulimala was lurking. Monks, herders, and farmers urgently warned him not to go ahead, but he ignored them and continued alone when they ran away. Angulimala, who was as well known for his fearlessness as for his cruelty, saw the Buddha coming and was quite perplexed by his calmness and lack of fear. Angulimala watched him pass, then stepped out onto the path to follow him. Although the Buddha appeared to be walking at a normal rate, Angulimala could not catch up with him no matter how fast he walked. To find out who this robed stranger was, Angulimala called out, “Stop.” The Buddha replied, “I have stopped, but you have not. I abstain from violence toward all beings, but you have no restraint toward anything that lives. That is why I say I have stopped and you have not.” Angulimala was profoundly struck by the Buddha’s words, threw away his weapons, and asked to be taken on as a disciple right then. The Buddha accepted him. For years afterward, people threw rocks and rotten food at Angulimala, but he understood that this was the natural consequence of his previous actions and accepted this treatment without reaction. Angulimala went on to practice diligently, even performing miracles such as healing a deformed infant, and reached the stage of arahantship, being free of all impurities of the heart and mind. Whenever we feel the doubt of self-negation, we can remember the story of Angulimala. If such a being could be transformed, so can we.
The hindrances are an expression of our untrained minds. We never deserve judgment or criticism for experiencing them. In the same way that we bring forth infinite patience and perseverance in training our children or pets to know what is safe and what is not, the invitation in Insight Meditation is to call forth the same kind of patient effort for ourselves. We do not repress or reject the hindrances but rather cultivate a relationship to them with awareness, lovingkindness, and perseverance. Creating this right relationship is how transformation begins.
EXERCISE
THE HINDRANCES
Explore each of the hindrances for a day or for a week.
• Notice your relationship to each one. Use any of the suggested antidotes and observe what happens.
• Think through what your day would have been like if you had not thought that some of it should have been different (for example, “The boss should have been congratulating me instead of complaining about the mail-room”; “I wish I had Sensodyne toothpaste”; “Why didn’t my partner hug me when I came home?”; “I wanted to meditate, but I was too tired”).
• Keep a journal or take some moments before you fall asleep to reflect on your day and what you learned about the hindrances.
• Appreciate your efforts.