Guided Meditation: (4 of 5) Meditation Essentials: The Five Hindrances - Restlessness; Dharmette: (4 of 5) Meditation Essentials: The Five Hindrances - Restlessness

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video (4 of 5) Meditation Essentials: The Five Hindrances - Restlessness - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 29, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: (4 of 5) Meditation Essentials: The Five Hindrances - Restlessness

Well, good morning everyone. My name is Mei Elliott, and this is day four of our five-day series on the five hindrances. The hindrances are known for clouding over or obscuring the clarity of the mind. So if we want to be able to stay with the breath or stay present for our life, getting to know what obscures that present is really important. What is it that keeps us from being here and now?

Today we'll zoom in on the fourth hindrance of restlessness, and the antidote to restlessness is calm. So in the meditation today, we'll invite in some calming factors. If you're ever having a hard time being present with restlessness, or it's too overwhelming, inviting in calm can be really helpful.

Let's begin. Go ahead and find your meditation posture. That could be sitting, standing, lying down—whatever posture works for you.

Rather than go straight to our meditation anchor this morning, sometimes it can be nice to just take stock of what's happening in the mind, the heart, and in the body. So that's how we'll begin today. To start, let's just take an inventory of what the body feels like, maybe starting with a global sense of the body and its posture right now. Just seeing what you notice.

You might notice that certain areas are tighter than others, others more relaxed or spacious. You might notice different temperatures or movement in the body. Just meeting what you find with a non-judgmental, curious attitude.

And having acknowledged what it's like in the body in this moment, let's shift our attention to the heart. So what's happening in the heart this morning? Is there a particular emotion present? Maybe just a background mood. It's okay if you don't have a perfect name to describe what you're feeling right now; just sensing what it's like is enough.

Sometimes people say, "Oh, there's nothing happening right now. There's no emotion, there's no mood." And if that's the case for you, you might check a little closer, because sometimes that means that there's just a little light sense of calm that's present. So you might see if that's true for you.

Then shifting to notice what's happening in the mind. What sorts of thoughts might be present? Are there a lot of thoughts flurrying around? Are they few and far between? Are they loud and captivating, or maybe soft and wispy? Just take a moment to see what's happening in the thinking muscle. We're not actually going looking for any thoughts. We're going to practice staying here in the body, being still, and maybe no thoughts will arise at all. But if one moves through, then we'll notice it as a phenomenon in the present moment, not getting captured by its story, but seeing that it's occurring, and then we can let it go.

As we explore the present moment, we're just meeting things as they are without being in conflict with them. And now that we've taken some time to recognize things as they are, we can invite in some settledness. Bring attention to your anchor. Maybe the breath, feeling the breath where you sense it most predominantly—maybe in the nose, the chest, or the belly. Or your anchor might be the soundscape, or a global sense of the body.

We're allowing the attention to connect with the anchor, and then to sustain attention with that anchor, we're creating continuous attention and engaging in a samatha^[1] practice. Like this, where we tune into our anchor, this is one of the traditional ways of bringing forth calm. Samatha sometimes translates as "calm abiding." This is a calm abiding practice: to allow the mind to rest on an anchor and return to it again and again. While all anchors will do, the breath is particularly helpful as a tool for relaxation.

If the breath is your anchor, you might try relaxing a little bit every time you exhale. Just inviting the mind, heart, and body to relax on each exhale. We'll sit in silence together now for some time just doing this practice, allowing the mind and heart to learn to rest.

And when the mind wanders, we gently and kindly bring the mind back to our anchor. Sliding back to our anchor. No need to wince or judge ourselves for thinking. It's a natural outcome of the mind to produce thoughts. Instead, when we notice it has happened, we slide right back to the anchor. Back to the breath, back to the soundscape, back to the body.

As we begin to settle, we'll now turn the attention towards any calmness that might be present. This doesn't need to be an all-pervading tranquility. There might be parts of the experience that aren't tranquil, that aren't calm, and that's okay. But as we bring awareness to our experience, we might see whether there's any tranquility or calm that's present. So the mind might not be calm, but the body might be. Or the mind and body might not be calm, but the space around you, the room you're sitting in, might have a sort of tranquility to it. We can lean on whatever tranquility is present. Whatever is not tranquil, whatever is not calm, can slide into the background, can shift into the background. And we can allow our attention to recognize any tranquility that's present. Whatever tranquility we find, we can allow ourselves to be nourished by that.

Go ahead and take some time to sense now how it is for you. Often the mind is anxious and racing, and we don't really realize, "Oh, the body's actually tranquil right now." Okay, let's find some peace resting in the body. Or if you're in a quiet room, allowing the mind to attune to the space around you: "Well, there's something that feels settled in the space I'm in." Attuning to the tranquility that's around you. Sometimes we feel this if we're ever sitting meditation in nature, so we can lean on that tranquility.

Take some time discovering now where you might sense into calm, where you might find calm in your experience right now, and allowing yourself to really be present for that. The Buddha's guidance is to be present for wholesome states, to really take them in, to be mindful of them. Allow that to register. If you come in contact with calm, really let that in, be present for it.

And at any time, if it's supportive for you, you can return to your anchor, allowing the mind to settle there, and remembering that that practice is a calm abiding practice. Inviting in relaxation. Softening. Allowing yourself to be soothed by the breath.

If you're having a hard time connecting with the practices that I'm offering this morning, you might check to see what else is going on. It might be that one of the other hindrances is present. So you might check to see if sense desire is present, or ill will, aversion, or sloth and torpor, sleepiness. And if so, you can do one of the practices that I shared on the other days, maybe recognizing and feeling what's going on.

May the beneficial energy of our practice together today benefit all beings so they may be happy, healthy, safe, and completely free from suffering.

Dharmette: (4 of 5) Meditation Essentials: The Five Hindrances - Restlessness

All right, welcome back everyone. Here we are again, resuming our study of the five hindrances, these habits of mind that inhibit clarity.

I'd like to start by emphasizing that the hindrances are no small matter. The Buddha compared the experience of having hindrances to a variety of very severe circumstances. He said that the experience of the hindrances is comparable to being imprisoned. He said they're comparable to being enslaved. He compared them to being on a dangerous journey, to having a severe illness, or to be saddled by having a great debt. And perhaps more striking, he says that when the hindrances abate, when we're free from hindrance, this is as good as being cured from illness, or being freed from prison, or being released from slavery, or having finally paid off a great debt, or making it to safety on a dangerous journey.

You can imagine there's a tremendous amount of relief when any of these things would happen. Connecting with the relief of making it to safety after a dangerous journey, or the sense of freedom of being released from prison or slavery, or the joy of recovering from illness—like, these are really dramatic. Most, if not all of us, are afflicted by the hindrances with frequency. So hearing these descriptions for what is possible when we're free from hindrance is pretty incentivizing. This practice can really allow for a tremendous amount of freedom if we can really study the hindrances. If we can really get to know them and learn how they operate in us, we can learn to see through the veil of the hindrances. So much freedom can be possible.

Today we'll talk about restlessness. Yesterday we discussed the third hindrance, sloth and torpor. The third and fourth hindrance have a strong energetic quality, with sloth and torpor being low energy and restlessness often high energy. It's often an overabundance of energy. Sometimes this hindrance of restlessness is referred to as "worry and flurry," where the mental representation of the hindrance is worry and the physical representation is flurry. And so it does manifest in these two different ways: physically or mentally.

The physical manifestation might manifest as an inability to sit still in meditation, or we keep fidgeting or shifting or itching. Physical restlessness can also arise as the desire to bolt, rush out of the meditation hall or off of our cushion. In daily life, that physical restlessness might come forth as needing to keep doing things, getting home from work and racing around the house because we just can't drop the momentum of our workday. In all of these, you may be sensing, there can be a compulsive quality.

The mental manifestation for restlessness is a mind that's agitated, a mind that's scattered. Lots of scattered thinking where the mind just won't settle, where thinking is really persistent. While restlessness isn't always based in fear, often restlessness can involve anxiety or worrying. We might see this anxious form of restlessness when we're rehearsing what we're going to say in a conversation—you may have noticed that happening in meditation—or when we're engaging in excessive planning or imagining the worst. It might be ruminating over a concern about one's self-image. So all of these can have a restless quality to them. While restlessness can be fueled by fear, it can also come forth as a product of a kind of stuck or frustrated desire or constrained aversion.

When we meet restlessness, we can do our typical one-size-fits-all approach to the hindrances where we recognize the restlessness. Restlessness is present, so we know, "Oh, this is restlessness and scattered thinking, agitation, anxious thinking." And then we feel what that restlessness is like in the body. We feel the compulsion to move, the agitation, the high energy. So this is a classic way to work with restlessness.

Additionally, one of the traditional approaches to restlessness is to notice what caused it, what triggered the restlessness. Often when we're lost in thought in meditation, there can be some form of restlessness present. If we discover that we're restless, we recognize, "Oh, this is restlessness." We can then ask, "What's underneath this? What am I feeling right now?" As in, what emotion is present right now? And this can be part of our two-part practice where we recognize, then we feel the hindrance. So first we recognize the restlessness, and then we might ask, "Okay, what's going on here? What am I feeling?" to recognize what's below the restlessness.

If we are able to identify what's causing it, what's triggering the restlessness, then we can practice mindfulness of the underlying emotion. Whatever we discover below the restlessness, say anxiety, then we can really take care of that anxiety. We can feel it fully. Sometimes practicing mindfulness of the underlying emotion can actually be even more skillful than just staying with the restlessness itself.

I happened to sit a two-month meditation retreat just prior to my wedding many years ago. Just before the retreat, I came across a meme with a caption: "The happiest moment of my wedding was realizing the planning is over." If you've ever planned a wedding, you might be able to relate to that. I certainly could. Understandably, one of my top ten hits during the retreat involved wedding planning thoughts. So I would be rethinking details, the expense, the invitation list, what type of cake, which dress—you know, all of the logistics. I found myself caught in these extended bouts of thinking many times during the meditation on this retreat before doing that first step of recognizing that restlessness was at play. Eventually I was like, "Oh, this is just restlessness."

And even once I saw that, it took a while before I learned to ask, "What's beneath all this thinking? Like, okay, this is restlessness, but what am I feeling right now? What's beneath all of this thinking?" Asking this allowed for an even deeper recognition. Often these repetitive storylines are fueled by an underlying emotion or physical experience. As Gil^[2] would say, it's as though there's a factory deep in the body, and it's the factory that's the source of anxiety, and it's the anxiety that's pumping out the thoughts. It's the factory that's the source of the underlying emotion, and it's that emotion that's pumping out the thoughts. So the thoughts are just the off-gassing from the deeper source.

We could keep sweeping the thoughts away from now until eternity, but the underlying emotion is going to keep churning them out until we give it the attention it's asking for. So to give it the attention it's asking for, to actually address the thinking, we actually need to go to the source. We need to go down into the factory. And to go down into the factory, that means actually feeling what's happening in the body. We release the thoughts, we go down to the factory, we feel the constriction in the body, the way that worry or anxiety tightens the heart, maybe sensing the raised shoulders or whatever other sensations might be present.

When we return to this practice, recognize and feel, when we go down to the factory, this is when we engage the step of feeling our experience. Going down into the factory, we sense what's happening through somatic sense. This allows us to address the felt experience at the source rather than just sweeping away the thoughts over and over again, which, you know, they're just like smoke coming out of the smokestacks. So we go to the source. We recognize, and then we go to the source, go down to the factory, and we feel what's happening.

As I mentioned earlier, restlessness can come from a variety of sources, which is one of the reasons it's helpful to ask those questions of, "What am I feeling right now? What's underneath this?" With that said, it is really common that the source is worry and anxiety fueling the factory. Knowing this, it can be helpful to remember that fear is such a natural part of being human. We've been deeply conditioned to feel fear, and we don't need to be hard on ourselves about being fearful. The Dharma teacher and author Marc Lesser^[3] reminds us that we're the descendants of the nervous apes. All the chilled-out apes got eaten. So it's the nervous apes that survived and made baby apes. Anxiety is deeply conditioned in us. We've inherited a survival strategy, this capacity to feel fear, which keeps us safe.

So if we're experiencing a fear-based restlessness, it can help to do this with an attitude of gentleness. Just to help bring forth that attitude of gentleness, we might take a moment just to imagine what it's like to see a scared dog. It might be shaking, its little ears are drooped way back, the tail's tucked, the posture might be cowering. Now, if this was your dog and you knew that you could comfort it, how would you be with that animal? How would you greet it? How would you take care of it? You might be gentle or loving. You might hold it and keep it warm, ensuring it feels safe. So if you notice restlessness and discover that below the restlessness there's some fear in the heart, there's some anxiety, can you bring that same gentle, loving attention to the anxiety? Bringing that same care, that same compassion you'd bring to a little animal that's having a hard time. Ultimately, can you help the fear feel safe?

Okay, so now I want to talk about a slightly different and more subtle manifestation of restlessness. We've already talked about how restlessness can manifest physically and how it can appear as mental and emotional activity and agitation. I want to talk about how restlessness also points to a much deeper habit of mind: the simple habit of where the mind is just moving out of the present at all. Ajahn Amaro and Ajahn Pasanno^[4] explain it like this, and this quote is from The Island^[5], which is an excellent book I highly recommend. It goes like this:

"Of the ten obstacles or fetters that stand in the way of enlightenment, the penultimate is restlessness. The restlessness to which this refers is not the fidgeting of the uncomfortable meditator. It is the subtlest of feelings that there might be something better over there or just in the future; a feeling that that which is out of reach might have more value in some way than this. It is the ever so insidious addiction to time and its promises."

As one nears full enlightenment, restlessness is one of the last fetters to be uprooted. It's so deeply conditioned in us to lean towards some better moment, ever so slightly, even just that forward lean. And I love that line: "the ever so insidious addiction to time and its promises."

So we can think of restlessness as manifesting at different levels of subtlety. On a coarser level, there's a physical restlessness. And then maybe a little more subtle than that, mental and emotional restlessness and agitation. And on an even more subtle level than that, there's this ongoing sense that there might be something just a little better, just out of reach.

If restlessness arises, our go-to practice is the mindfulness practice of recognizing and feeling. But as I said in the meditation this morning, you can apply an antidote, and that antidote is calming or tranquility. So if you feel restlessness, you can return to your meditation anchor and do samatha, that calm abiding practice. And what we're doing here is we're just allowing, in that calm abiding practice, we're allowing the mind to gravitate around something that's simple, and that simple object can be a refuge for the mind that's racing around and tangled up in all sorts of complex, anxiety-producing storylines.

If, however, focusing on the anchor of meditation actually tightens the mind or increases the energy, you can give the mind a wider pasture to open up the attention. For example, opening the attention to sounds in a really nice wide way, and that can bring in some calm. You can make the field of attention all wide so the restless energy can just kind of pinball around in the mind or body, but we're not being jerked around by it because we're in this large field.

As I mentioned in the meditation, another way to connect with calm is just to notice where there's already calm that's present. So for me, it's not uncommon that I'll be mentally restless, but there might be an area of the body that's relaxed. So I'll rest in that part of the body, I'll allow that part of the body to be soothing to the mind. In a meditation hall, or in nature, or in a quiet room, these spaces can bring forth calm as well, to tune into the calm that's around us.

So today, see if you can identify a moment of restlessness, maybe it's physical or maybe it's a mental feeling. And rather than acting out on the restlessness externally, see if you can just recognize the restlessness as restlessness. Like, "Oh, this is worry and flurry." And then get to know it. Let yourself feel it, bringing that same kindness and care that you'd bring to an anxious animal, a little puppy or whatever it is that brings forth some sense of gentleness and compassion.

So I hope you have a lovely day today and that you're able to stay connected to your practice. Thank you for being here. Thanks.