The five hindrances are one of the most important teachings in all of Buddhism, and not just for meditation. These five obstacles, sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt, are not just problems on the cushion. They are problems in life. They're the reason we suffer, the reason we're distracted, the reason we can't be present with the people we love, and the reason we can't rest in the stillness that's already here.
My initial training and certification was through the Dhammakaya Foundation in Thailand in 2012. It was a 90-day meditation retreat, very difficult. I was a young, hungry, naive meditator. After Thailand, I went to Panditarama in Rangoon, Myanmar, in the Mahasi tradition. Most of my training has been in Thailand and Burma, and the hindrances were a central subject throughout all of it, because you can't not deal with them. They're the first thing you run into when you sit down and close your eyes.
Why the Buddha Listed These Five
The specific factors of concentration that arise from adequate stillness, from sustained mindfulness, from the power of mindfulness, are able to temporarily suppress and overcome the five hindrances. That's the first thing to understand. You don't eradicate the hindrances through ordinary meditation. To eradicate them completely, direct penetrating insight into the unconditioned, what Buddhism calls nirvana, is what's required. But for those of us who are not touching the unconditioned regularly in our daily lives, we can temporarily overcome the various hindrances through specific factors of concentration, at least in the context of practice.
So let's say you're doing a day of meditation. In the beginning of the day, you're with the meditation object, loving kindness, breathing, mantra, whatever. The first couple of hours, you're just being assailed by the five hindrances. You're being rocked by sleepiness. Once you get over the sleepiness, there's restlessness. Once you get over the restlessness, there's doubt. Once you get over the doubt, there's sensual desire. Once you get over the sensual desire, there's more doubt. On and on.
This means the hindrances are still so powerful that even though you're attempting to meditate, even though you're attempting to relax and let go, you're only able to experience that letting go for a few seconds at a time because the hindrances keep pulling your attention off the object. But over the course of the day, something shifts. The same thoughts that were pulling you around the first two hours are not affecting you as much by the fourth hour. That's because those small moments of mindfulness earlier in the day have accumulated and given rise to something more powerful and more grounded. That's what the tradition calls power mindfulness, and it's what suppresses the hindrances.
Sensual Desire: The First Hindrance
Sensual desire in Pali is kamacchanda. This is the first hindrance, and it's overcome by what the tradition calls applied attention or vitarka, which means repeatedly bringing the mind back to the meditation object again and again and again.
Our normal conditioned way of functioning in the world is to gratify the senses, to be engrossed in the senses, to constantly be on the lookout for sense data. We're used to looking outward and dealing with external circumstances. So when we practice meditation, we're inherently moving against that tendency. The mind is going to keep going outward, keep attaching to thoughts of sensuality, keep drifting.
Now, as you return to the meditation object again and again, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, eventually these impeding thoughts of sense desire are overcome and mindfulness begins to really become established with the object. An intimacy begins to grow with the breath or with the meditation object. The mind, your attention, doesn't want to leave. Clarity is beginning to arise. Stillness is beginning to arise. Maybe even peace is beginning to arise. The breath is starting to become pleasurable, and because of that pleasure, the mind actually wants to stay where it is.
For those with a particularly lustful temperament, a specific remedy from the tradition is the contemplation of repulsiveness, reflecting on the impermanent and decaying nature of the physical body. This sounds extreme, but the function of it is to help the mind detach from its fixation on form, to allow it to turn inward. Sensuality keeps taking up mental bandwidth. It keeps impeding attention and mindfulness. When that inclination is addressed, the mind can begin to settle.
Ill Will: The Second Hindrance
Ill will, vyapada in Pali, is the hindrance of resistance, aversion, and judgment. It shows up in meditation as thoughts of a specific nature that make you agitated, frustrated, or angry. Anger at a person, anger at a situation, even anger at yourself for not meditating well enough.
The sustained attention that begins to develop in practice, what the Pali tradition calls vicara, is what suppresses this hindrance. When your attention has its own momentum, when mindfulness is really staying with the object, the agitated or aversive thought loses its grip. The mind is able to turn away from it not by force, but because the meditation object is more interesting, more pleasurable, more stable.
It's also worth noting that aversion in all of its forms is itself a form of craving. Aversion is the craving for something to stop, the craving for something unpleasant to end or go away. That's the nature of aversion. So ill will and sensual desire are actually the same energy pointing in different directions. Both are the mind's inability to be with what is.
Sloth and Torpor: The Third Hindrance
Sloth and torpor in Pali is thina-middha. This is the hindrance of heaviness, sleepiness, and muddied attention. In meditation, sloth and torpor is a serious issue if it's not directly addressed. If a person makes sleepiness a habit in meditation, they're not meditating. They're sleeping. The sluggishness gives a kind of muddied perception when you try to apprehend the meditation object. It's like a magnifying glass with gunk on it. It actually muddies the clarity of mindfulness.
Piti, joy or rapture, is the jhana factor that addresses this hindrance. When piti is arising, the buoyancy and the lightness of that particular factor directly addresses the lethargy. Joy is very buoyant. It's like a delightness, a bubbliness, and it naturally counters the heaviness of sloth and torpor.
I had a period on retreat in Thailand where the sleepiness was just relentless. I was meditating with a monk there and I said, yeah, I'm just being assaulted by sleepiness. It felt like I'd been sleepy for a week. His advice was to increase the vividness of my mindfulness, to be more awake, do more walking meditation. You're in a war now, you have to destroy the hindrances. That's a standard approach in the Theravada tradition. So I tried it. I just fought it for days. Fought it. Fought it. And then I was like, okay, there has to be a better way.
So I asked my intuition, the higher mind, how do I resolve this? And it gave me extremely specific instruction: on the exhalation, stop and remain in the space before the inhalation. So when my breath went out, a voice would say stay. And I would stay. And then after about 15 minutes, something happened. A kind of energy arose inside the body, like a vibration, and my whole body became full of that chi. And then bang, the sleepiness was dispelled. Every time I had sleepiness after that, I would start the meditation by noticing that gap between the breaths until it dispelled the sleepiness. Then I was actually able to just not do anything, because before that, if one of the five hindrances is present to a sufficient extent, even if you sit there and do nothing, the hindrances just whip you around.
Restlessness and Worry: The Fourth Hindrance
Restlessness and worry, uddhacca-kukkucca in Pali, is the hindrance of the scattered mind. It manifests a couple of ways in meditation. The most common is what we might call monkey mind, the inability for the mind to stay in one place, to be satisfied with the present moment, and so it jumps from thought to thought in the same way a monkey jumps from branch to branch. Restlessness also manifests as boredom, which is really just a dissatisfaction with the present moment.
Sukha, happiness, is the jhana factor that suppresses this hindrance. When sukha has arisen, when there's that deep, nourishing contentment with the present moment, with the meditation object, it quells the tendency of the mind to drift and jump. The breath is becoming pleasurable. The experience within is increasing in clarity and power. It's not something you'd want to drift from when the factor is really growing.
There is also a more physically energetic form of restlessness that can arise in longer practice, a real bodily agitation. In those cases, some teachers recommend doing some physical exercise, some stretching, something to calm the body down before revisiting the sit.
One thing I want to emphasize here and for all the hindrances: you don't try to do anything about them through force. Don't use effort to push them away. If there's a preference for stillness, that subtle preference will actually keep the chatter going. It's a kind of aversion, right? You want the mind to be still, or you have an aversion to thinking and chatter. That aversion itself will keep it going. You can see the existence of the hindrances as a way that makes you non-preferential. Don't see them as problems to stop. They're a natural part of the process.
Doubt: The Most Subtle and Dangerous
Doubt, vicikiccha in Pali, is the most peculiar of the five hindrances because usually doubt is what makes people leave meditation retreats. It's what makes people quit, or temporarily quit, a practice. The other hindrances have that possibility, but it's usually doubt. Is this practice for me? Does this teacher really know what they're talking about? Did the Buddha really attain enlightenment? Is it even possible to attain awakening in this lifetime? All coming from a place of insecurity. All coming from a place of fickleness.
Ekaggata, one-pointedness, is the jhana factor that suppresses this hindrance. When the mind is completely collected, it can just break the fickleness and uncertainty that are at the heart of doubt. The stability that comes from one-pointedness is that direct.
There is another solution I've seen work for the hindrance of doubt, and it's taking refuge and relying on faith as an enlightenment factor. When doubt is so intense that mindfulness cannot even comprehend its object, when doubt is so intense that there's nowhere else to turn, at that point, surrender. I don't usually talk about things from personal experience in formal teaching contexts, but I will attest that that is a very powerful piece of advice. In a moment of despair, you rely on the things that are very close to your heart. If the triple gem is within your heart, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, that can be a place of refuge. That factor of faith can help you through the chaotic torrents of doubt.
In meditation retreats and in the environments I've taught in, doubt is really an internal process of sabotage. It's based on discursive thinking. If we're doing the practice correctly and following the instructions of the teacher, we know we're to observe thoughts and not specifically engage and entertain them. If we're being overcome by thoughts of doubt, we're allowing the hindrance to overpower us. If we can surrender and let things pass, we can get through it and reestablish continuity of mindfulness.
Working with the Hindrances in Practice
The hindrances are trying to get you to look at something. If you see this process as a kind of mastery of your mind, mastery of mental processes, you can see the hindrances as your five teachers. When the sleepiness hindrance comes up, you're dealing with the sleepiness teacher. He's like, okay, how are you going to handle me? Are you just going to let me keep whacking you over the head? What are you going to do? You don't always do the same thing. Sometimes you apply some method. Other times the sleepiness teacher is just telling you that you need rest, so you sleep, you come back, and there's no sleepiness.
If the hindrance is anger, that's the anger teacher. How are you going to deal with this? Are you going to keep fighting, or are you going to look at why you're angry and do some forgiveness practice?
The most important thing I can tell you about working with the hindrances is this: don't use force. If there's one thing you take away from what I share, let it be three words. Don't use force. Using force only works for certain people, and even when it works, the quality of what you've built through force is fragile. Whatever is accumulated by force is subject to coming apart. Whatever is put together through force inevitably comes apart once that level of force is not being applied.
It's also strengthening the sense of self. When you're trying that hard, you're emboldening the sense of a doer, a meditator who is winning or losing a battle. And if you are able to make your mindfulness very strong through effort, the thought that can arise after the fact is ah, I finally did it. That's the wrong direction. The approach that works is setting the method and getting out of the way. Drop the anchor, say the mantra, feel the loving kindness, and then just get out of the way.
What Happens When the Hindrances Fall Away
When these qualities begin to really fade and the mind enters what the tradition calls unification, something unmistakable happens. The mindfulness becomes continuous. Not because you're forcing it, but because the hindrances are no longer interrupting it. The same thoughts that were pulling you around in the beginning of the day are appearing again, but now they're not diverting you. They've lost their grip.
This is power mindfulness. You're able to remain with the object for longer and longer periods of time without interruption. There's an actual steam behind the mindfulness, a force behind the mindfulness, not from trying harder, but from all those moments of letting go having accumulated into something stable and unshakable.
When the hindrances fall away sufficiently, you discover that happiness and peace don't come from outside of you. They've been here the whole time, at the depth of the mind, waiting for the surface turbulence to settle. The whole pathway of practice is just you going deeper into the nature of mind itself. You're not manufacturing stillness. You're allowing stillness to emerge, or you're reaching a depth of mind and consciousness where stillness and the enlightenment factors are already the case.
That's the function of the hindrances, actually. They're the friction that generates the heat. They're what the practice burns through on its way to something real.