Five Treasures

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Five Treasures with Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 01, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Five Treasures

Good evening and welcome, everybody. Nice to see you all.

When I first started a meditation practice a number of years ago, I so often had this idea like, "Wow, everybody else must be on the brink of enlightenment, or they're enlightened, and I am so awful as a meditator."

I actually learned how to meditate on a meditation retreat, and it was incomprehensible. I just could not understand how the person sitting in front of me was still for 45 minutes. I didn't even know how that was possible. I was in so much pain and non-stop squirming, and it was quite something. I was saying to myself, "Why did I ever think this was a good idea?"

But as I learned more and more about meditation, it really touched my heart in a way that I couldn't even describe or explain. Something was pulling me. But I still couldn't do it very well; I couldn't sit still, and my mind was all over the place.

It wasn't until I had been meditating for quite some time before I ever heard of these things called the hindrances, and that was a game changer for me. Some of you may be familiar with this—it's a common teaching. For whatever reason, maybe I was just absent on those days when they were being talked about, but I had never heard about them, and it made such a big difference.

The Hindrances

What are the hindrances? These are something preserved in the teachings from early Buddhism, attributed to the Buddha. Thousands of years ago, people were talking about this same thing. I love this idea: thousands of years ago, they were talking about what I'm experiencing today. That somehow makes it less personal, right? Countless numbers of people have had these same problems and issues that I'm having. So it normalized my meditation experience and the difficulties.

The Pali word is Nīvaraṇa^[1], which often gets translated as "hindrances," but we might also think of these as obstructions, impediments, or obstacles to the mind and body settling down—things that are getting in the way. Typically, there is a list of five. All the things that ever happened to us while we're trying to meditate, they boiled down to five. There are other lists that are more fleshed out, but I'm going to stick with these five.

I'm not going to talk at length about the hindrances themselves, but I'll briefly mention them. I'm going to talk more about our relationship to them, flesh out what they are as a group, how we might work with them in different settings, and what it means for us as meditators.

What are these five hindrances? The first two are about this sense of pushing or pulling. "Pushing" is, "I don't want it, get it away from me." "Pulling" is, "I want more of this, please don't leave." Pushing would be aversion, and pulling is sense desire. Typically, they go in the other direction: sense desire and aversion.

The next two have to do with the amount of energy that's present. I think we all have this experience that there's just too much energy. We feel agitated and fidgety. It's either with the body or with the mind—the mind is racing and trying to solve problems obsessively in a loop, or feeling like we have to scratch, itch, or shift. So, too much energy: restlessness.

Or, not enough energy: this odd expression "sloth and torpor," which was never part of my vocabulary before I started practicing Buddhism. That's when there isn't enough energy, kind of like falling asleep or feeling like you're going in that direction.

The fifth one is actually one I think is the most interesting. I'm not going to talk a lot about it today—I was thinking that maybe I'll do some Dharma talks on it. It gets called doubt, but it's really about vacillation or hesitation. "Okay, well maybe I'm going to sit and I'll do some loving-kindness practice. I thought that was good: 'May you be happy.' But maybe I should do some mindfulness practice because this thing on my knee is bothering me. Well, maybe I should do some concentration practice because I heard that's really good. No, maybe I should do mettā^[2] practice because that helps with the concentration practice. I think I'm just going to go and defrost the freezer." It's this bouncing around and not really settling. It often has to do with: "What should I be doing? What's the right practice? Does this practice really work? Do those teachers really know what they're talking about? How do we even know what the Buddha said?" This vacillation or hesitation is doubt.

Part of what makes these hindrances so interesting and powerful to work with is that we notice them in our meditation practice when we're trying to settle down, but they are there whether we are aware of them or not. They are there in all aspects of our lives: work, creative projects we'd like to do, service projects, volunteering, and long-term relationships. These "hindrances" don't just hinder the mind settling; they get in the way of our doing what's important to us. They get in the way of expressing our values in so many different ways.

Sometimes I like to lump things together. If you were to do a big lumping together, we could say all meditation practice is one of two kinds: one is a really deep meditative state (like samādhi^[3] or jhāna^[4]), and the other is working with the hindrances. That's it. Because the hindrances are always there unless we're in really deep meditative states.

In some way, they are like seeds that blossom, bloom, or grow. When they are growing, they have these hooks that like to hang on to things, or they're looking for things to hang on to. Then they fuel whatever it is they get connected to.

For example, a story I have is from a really long retreat. I had been in it for months, and the mind was really settled. But in this one sit in particular, there was some of this desire. There were these fantasies—now I don't remember what it was, but fantasies of something good that I wanted, maybe like a more comfortable cushion. Then I noticed, "Oh, okay. This is just a hindrance, the hindrance of desire." There are a number of ways we can work with this, and I was working with it. The desire was going away, it was abating, and the mind was finally settling down.

By the end of the meditation period, I felt like, "Oh, finally settled down. Phew. Okay, feels good." The bell goes off at the end of the session, and I thought, "You know what? I finally got settled. I'm just going to stay. I don't have to jump up right when the bell rings." So I sat for some minutes more, then decided, "Okay, it's time to get up, and it's lunchtime, so I'll go have lunch."

Those of you who know about meditation retreats know it's just like a buffet line where you get your plates and serve yourself. I go to the dining hall, wash my hands, get my plate, and go up to whatever the first thing is. "Oh my gosh, this looks so good. Okay, I'm going to put some of this on. Wow, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. I'm going to put this on, or maybe I should get two. Wow, look at this, they also have this! I'm going to get this." I had so much food on my plate, there was no way I was going to be able to eat this.

What I saw was that the desire had just gotten a little bit more subtle, and it found this hook when I went to lunch. It just got expressed as piling all the food I could onto this one plate. So there's this way that they get expressed, and sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's really subtle.

The Spectrum of Hindrances

That's a little bit what I want to talk about today: how the hindrances exist on a spectrum. It's not like they're simply present or absent; there can be really obvious forms or really subtle forms, and we can work with them in all these different ways.

However we work with them, there's a way that we might consider them. I'm influenced by Rob Burbea^[5], a wonderful Dharma teacher, who describes hindrances as "hidden treasures." Part of the reason why he says this is the recognition that they are showing up in our life all over the place.

Even if we go on a meditation retreat and spend days, weeks, or months on retreat, or if we just come to a 45-minute sit, or do a day-long—whatever it is—if nothing happens during that meditation endeavor except working with desire, working with ill will, working with restlessness, working with drowsiness, or working with doubt ("Should I even be doing this? I'm so awful at this"), if the mind and the body never settle but we learn something about these hindrances, we learn our habits. We learn the patterns of our minds and the patterns of our bodies.

When we have something we'd like to do and there are difficulties, obstructions, and obstacles that get in the way, if the only thing we ever do is notice, "Oh yeah, when there is desire, I notice how my body leans forward. I can't stop all these fantasies; they're colorful and provocative, and the mind just doesn't ever want to come back. It's just lost in fantasies, and then I kind of forget what it was I was trying to do." If we have nothing but those experiences, but we've learned something about ourselves, that might be more transformative than having settled meditations.

That might be what really changes our lives. Having a settled meditation is pleasant, and it helps us to see some of the more subtle things that are going on in our minds. But learning about the hindrances and shifting our relationship to them can change your life.

Instead of reacting like, "Dang it, this again," shifting it to, "Okay, this is what's here. How can I work with it? How can I be with it? This is what's happening. I might as well learn something. I might as well practice some skills. I might as well get curious about it."

It helps us when we're having difficult conversations, or when somebody we love has a difficult diagnosis and we notice, "Oh yeah, I don't want to hear that. This is the worst thing I'd ever want to know." But if we know the pattern of our reaction with aversion, this helps us be present for difficult things, and this can change our life. Maybe we don't shut down or yell back when our boss or a co-worker does something untoward. So Rob Burbea calls these hindrances "hidden treasures."

I actually really love this. Is there a way that we can learn to view them so that they lose their power, so that they lose their authority? They're still there, they're still happening, but maybe we're not as caught up in them. Maybe we're not believing the stories that they spin, or we're not so swayed by the direction they're pointing to. They still show up as seeds, but maybe the blooming and the blossoming aren't quite as much.

One thing that can help with this is to get a little bit curious. To notice or get curious about how the hindrances exist on a spectrum—from really obvious to really subtle. When they're present, we can sometimes feel a little bit demoralized or dejected. "Oh, again, all this desire." When I started my meditation practice, I discovered how much desire plays a role in my life. I'm always thinking about things I'm going to buy, things that I want that I don't have.

But if we notice that they are on a spectrum, then rather than it just being "they're there" or "not there," we can notice, "Oh, okay, there's desire here, but maybe there's also a little bit of settledness. We're not completely consumed by the desire." Or maybe there is a time when we are pretty settled—maybe more than usual—and yet we start to sense this wish for even more settledness. We notice that even though the more obvious type isn't there, the more subtle type of desire might be. I'll talk about how to work with some of the hindrances here in a moment, but I want to start by talking about the spectrum in regards to energy.

Working With Energy

One of the hindrances is restlessness. It turns out that the Buddha actually talked about this in some of these not-as-well-known suttas^[6] and lists. There are different levels of intensity to this "too much energy." One is what is typically called the hindrance, which may be described as agitation, excitement, distraction, or flurry—this busyness.

This could be in the body. It feels like energy is pulsing through, and there's a sense to fidget. There's also this agitated vulnerability, as if we've had too much caffeine. It can also show up in the mind as scattered or persistent thinking, an inability to focus, or the mind just resisting being directed anywhere—it's just doing whatever it wants to do.

So that's one type of too much energy, what we typically call the hindrance. But then the Buddha also talked about an excessive efforting, which is a little bit too much exertion in the practice. There's a certain amount of settledness, but there's a straining. "I definitely have to do more. I need more. I want more. I'm just trying so hard." This can make things feel really tight: "I gotta get this." In Pali, this is accāraddha vīriya^[7]. There's a very simple simile offered: a person holding a quail. If you hold it too tightly, you can crush it. In the same way, if we hold our effort in practice too tightly, it crushes it, resulting in this straining. That's another type of too much energy, translated into too much effort.

Then there's an even more subtle type. Often Dharma teachers call this "drifting." I haven't seen this anywhere in any Buddhist texts; this is something that Dharma teachers have come up with, but I find it's a good description and can be helpful. This is when the mind is settled. It's not agitated, it's settled, but it just kind of slides from one object to the next. It's not sluggish, it's just moving slowly. It doesn't have the quality of agitation, but it also doesn't have the quality of just staying with the object. Instead, it's like: "The sensation in my knee. Breath. Thinking about dinner. Breath. Other knee."

Sometimes it gets described as a monkey in slow motion swinging from one tree to the next. They have one thing, but they're already reaching for the next, letting go, and grabbing the next. The mind is settled, but it doesn't quite land, so there's this tendency for it to drift off the object. There are just a bit more thoughts and images in the mind than there would be if the mind were more completely settled.

And then maybe a fourth layer, even more subtle. Let's say the mind has settled on an object. It's just right here with the object—let's say the sensation of the breath. Just being with the breath, noticing the breath. And you think, "Wow, the mind isn't thinking." (Oh, that's actually thinking! But because we didn't notice it, it just doesn't get really seen.) There's this subtle way in which thoughts kind of intrude: "Whoa, it's so still!" And you realize, "Oh, that was a thought," and you come back. That's also a little bit of excess energy.

Working with these different levels of energy—too much or too little—is definitely the art of practice. Recognizing that they're on a spectrum. We went from the most energetic form of too much energy down to the most subtle.

Now, if you don't have any energy at all, the most obvious form is when you're about to fall asleep, which is, of course, not an uncommon thing for meditators. This is where the body feels heavy, lethargic, and weary, and the mind is dull, cloudy, and sluggish. When it's strong, we don't even know it's there; we're just nodding off.

This hindrance is distinct from physical or mental tiredness. It's not that there isn't any energy available; it's that we're not accessing it. Often this is due to a sense of resistance. We don't actually want to be present for what's there, so there's a type of shutting down, discouragement, hopelessness, frustration, or boredom. When these things are present, the whole energy just kind of drains out.

That's the most obvious form. But there's also a more subtle form, which the Buddha called atilīna vīriya^[8]. This is when there's not enough effort; it's a certain amount of complacency. The simile is the same as with holding the quail: instead of holding it too tightly, now you hold it too loosely, and the quail just flies away. "Okay, yeah, I'm with the object, but not with a lot of energy." The mind kind of drifts away, maybe comes back a little bit, and then drifts away again. It's a deficiency of effort. There isn't a lot of emphasis on coming back to the object.

This also shows up as inertia. It's kind of like letting the momentum of practice unfold, but then the momentum runs out, and we just do whatever our habits and patterns are. It's not uncommon—especially for long-time meditators—to sit down on the cushion and just do what they've been doing for the past five or ten years, without really a sense of freshness, brightness, or curiosity. "Yeah, this is what I do in the morning: I sit," without a sense of it going somewhere or wanting it to be a support for one's life.

And then an even more subtle version of that is what we call "sinking mind." This again is not anything that you'll find in the ancient Buddhist teachings, but something that Dharma teachers talk about. I was so happy when I learned about this, because come to find out, I used to spend a lot of time doing this unknowingly.

It's a state in which the mind and body are settled, and you're in this nice, cushy, comfy, cottony, fluffy, dull space. It feels like the outside world is a little bit away. It starts off maybe feeling nice because things aren't bothering you, but the energy is slowly draining. By the end of the sit, you feel awful. You feel like, "Oh, I'm so tired, and the world is meaningless, and I kind of hate everything." It starts off comfy and secluded, but it ends up feeling awful.

It takes some real effort to get out of this. It can be a habit for a lot of people: they get into this comfy, cottony, fluffy place and stay there. They think this is their practice, and in some way it is, but they don't have a brightness to their mind. There isn't uplift, clarity, or vitality. You're in this comfy place, but the vitality is draining out, and you end up with no vitality. That's not a good feeling.

Working With the Hindrances

So there are all these different ways in which the hindrances show up. I was just talking about energy levels, from the most obvious to the most subtle. But of course, we want to know how to work with them. Here's something that I think is helpful to consider: how we respond to the hindrances depends on what kind of practice we're doing and what our intention is for that meditation period. Specifically, if you're doing mindfulness practice, you'll work with them in one way; if you're doing concentration practice, you'll work with them in a different way.

You might ask, "What's the difference between mindfulness and concentration?" I can describe this along with how one would work with them in mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness practice is a practice of noticing what's actually happening here in the present moment. We often start by being mindful of the sensations of breathing: noticing how an inhale feels, how an exhale feels, and the transitions between inhales and exhales. When I'm doing guided meditations for mindfulness of breathing, I'll include noticing some of the changing aspects of the breath.

When the mind settles a little bit, we turn to what's compelling: discomfort in the body, emotional states, lots of thoughts, sounds, whatever it is. Something's compelling, so we turn our mindfulness over to it. If there's pain or discomfort in the knee, we turn to that. When that's no longer compelling, we come back to the breath. If a dog starts barking, we notice the sound, then come back to the breath.

When hindrances come up, they are just one more thing to notice. "Here's the breath. Oh, here's the sensation of too much energy." Feel into that; be with that. It's no longer an obstacle to mindfulness; it's the object of mindfulness.

However, with concentration practices, we want to be a little bit more proactive with the hindrances. We don't just want to be aware of them; we want to apply antidotes to work with the energy.

If we feel like there's too much energy, we can shift our practice to start doing body scans, going from the head down to the toes. This gives the mind something a little bit extra to do. Rather than trying to keep your attention in one place, you can move it: sensations in the head, shoulders, back, chest, belly, seat, etc. Giving the mind something to do is a little bit easier for a restless mind.

Something else you might do with concentration, but wouldn't do with mindfulness, is to extend the exhale just a little bit. Due to human physiology, extended exhales are calming. We do this out of habit when we sigh ("Ah"), but you can intentionally and simply extend the exhales a little bit to work with too much energy.

Another way is to find a way of breathing that feels soothing, which might mean bringing in a little bit of imagination. I've heard a Dharma teacher suggest that when the mind is quiet and pretty settled, but there's still some restlessness, you can notice the feeling of breathing in your back. The muscles between our ribs move a little bit when we breathe. When the mind is quiet, you can feel that, and you might imagine the sensation is like a loved one soothingly stroking your back. That bringing in of a little bit of imagination connected to the sensations of breathing can help the restlessness settle. When it has settled more, we can come back to more conventional concentration practices.

But what if you have too little energy and you want to be doing concentration practices? It turns out doing body scans is another way to do it. Body scans work with both too much energy and too little energy. The rate at which you're doing the scan can help bring the energy up or down.

To bring up the energy, you can try slightly longer inhales to energize the system, the body, and the mind. Another thing we might do if there's not enough energy is open our awareness really wide. This is hard to describe if you don't have experience with it, but it's similar to mindfulness of sounds, where you open up and listen to sounds in different places. When we're really tired, there's a kind of collapsing into a dark little experience. My body often naturally leans forward. If you want to bring in more energy, bring up your posture and open your awareness to be really big. It's something to play around and explore with.

Micro-Negativity

There's a lot I could say here, but I want to point to a few things. I talked about how being aware of and working with the hindrances can really be a support for our life. Part of that is shifting our relationship to them: acknowledging that they exist on a wide range from obvious to subtle, and that we can work with them using mindfulness or concentration. With mindfulness, we can bring what we learn about the hindrances into our daily life.

There's something else to notice that shows up as a hindrance, which sometimes we don't even consider to be a hindrance in our meditation practice. No matter what degree of settledness or collectedness we have, let's say we feel pretty good: "Okay, yeah, it feels okay." And then there's this voice that says, "Yeah, but it was better that other time."

There's this little negativity that shows up. I love the way that Rob Burbea describes this: he calls this habit of the mind a "micro-negativity." He offers a simile of a potter throwing clay on a spinning wheel. You have a lump of clay in the middle, and you want to make a bowl, a vase, or a cup. You're working with your hands, and if there's just this little negativity—"Yeah, it was better before. This is pretty good, but..."—that's like a little bit of pressure. That slight pressure gets put on the clay, and the shape starts to change. It's really subtle, but it starts to change the experience of what's being made.

Is there a way that we can notice this feeling of, "Yes, it was better," and do a little bit of a course correction? Can we lean into any sense of well-being, contentment, pleasure, or happiness? Just attune to any sense of okayness.

Tuning into any sense of well-being, even if it's not your predominant experience, turns out to always be a way forward. Tuning into a sense of well-being, okayness, happiness, or contentment is always a way forward in meditation practice. Tuning into what's not okay and what's kind of awful turns out to be a dead end. We have to discover this for ourselves; I'm telling you this, but it's not until you go down that dead end a hundred quadrillion bazillion times that you start to really believe it! [Laughter]

I want to offer this encouragement: sometimes we feel like meditation practice is this dull, dreary thing we're supposed to do. To be sure, sometimes it is hard, difficulties arise, and it's decidedly unpleasant and sometimes awful. But even if we could have a sense of okayness—like, "Oh yeah, this really is awful. I wish it weren't like this. But it is like this."—if we can attune to any sense of okayness, that's the way forward.

Conclusion

I'll end with an encouragement: these hindrances have a wide range, and there are different ways to work with them. One way is to not take them personally. They've been described for thousands of years; this is just what human beings do. This is what it means to be human: pushing and pulling, having too much energy, not enough energy, or being unsure and vacillating. We tend to make up stories that because this is happening, "I'm a bad meditator." But because it's happening, it just means you're human.

Is there a way that we can shift our relationship to the hindrances? "Yep, okay, here it is. The hindrance has this flavor at this time, but this is just what's happening." Can we attune to that sentiment? That'll be part of the way forward.

I did a lot of talking there, but I appreciate your attention. We're at the top of the hour, so I won't open it up to questions and answers in general, but I'm more than happy to chat if you'd like to come up here. Otherwise, I wish you a nice evening and safe travels home. Thank you.