Meeting the Five Hindrances

Unit 1 | Cooling Sensual Desire

You might know the experience of sitting down to meditate and quickly being swept away by pleasant fantasies. In daily life, our preoccupation with sensory delights is perhaps even stronger. In Unit 1 of this course we will explore the experience of sensual desire. We will look at how it manifests, at how it disturbs our peace of mind, and how we can skillfully meet this energy that moves through all of us in one way or another.

Unit 2 | Abandoning Ill Will

When life is difficult, uncomfortable, or uncertain, it's natural to want to turn away, to want to be rid of the perceived sources of our distress. In meditation, we resent the noise from our neighbours, we nurse old grudges and so the mind does not settle, meditation doesn't deepen. Does this sound familiar?

It takes great courage to turn towards the difficult and the unpleasant. The Buddha often described this path as swimming against the tide. Turning toward our experience is the beginning of befriending aversion, befriending ill will. It's the beginning of no longer feeding the patterns that can create so much distress, confusion, and anxiety in our lives.

Unit 3 | Waking from Dullness and Drowsiness

Perhaps you know the hindrance of dullness and drowsiness. This is a state that many meditators are familiar with, and very often we struggle with it. It is crucial to learn more about dullness, to recognize it, and to see it both in meditation and in our daily life. When we understand the causes and conditions supporting this hindrance—it's not always simple tiredness—our mindfulness and meditation can progress.

Unit 4 | Calming Restlessness and Worry

The focus of this unit is the hindrance pattern known as restlessness and worry. This hindrance obstructs our capacity for calm abiding, for easefulness, for stillness. It keeps the body moving with restlessness. It keeps the mind moving, filled with thought, often in ways that make us feel lost and overwhelmed. This is to be expected in a restless, anxious world, but we need not live this way. Perhaps the first step in the art of meditation is to begin to calm down and find some stillness and some gatheredness.

Unit 5 | Moving Beyond Skeptical Doubt

The trickiest and most serious of the hindrances is skeptical doubt, also translated as indecision. This is the hindrance of doubting what we're doing, doubting what is true, doubting what is wholesome, doubting what is helpful. It's a hindrance that prevents the mind from settling into a state of clarity. It keeps the mind going back and forth between possibilities. With skill and judgment, we can step outside of these patterns of indecision to realize the fruits of practice.

Unit 6 | Freedom and clarity

Finally, we'll talk about the possibility of being free from those hindrances. Sometimes these patterns arise together to make life very, very difficult. By bringing mindful awareness to them, we learn to relate to the hindrances differently. As we do so, increasingly there are moments where the mind is clear, unveiled, and we touch a deep inner peace.