Welcome to Meeting the Five Hindrances
Throughout this course, you'll find the text of each video beneath the talk. You don't need to read these, but they may pull out key ideas and exercises for reference. These materials will be collected in a downloadable workbook.
Welcome to Meeting the Five Hindrances
A central teaching, yet often overlooked
The course we're offering over these units is on the five hindrances, and it's about finding clarity of mind in meditation and in life. Why were we inspired to offer this course? These five patterns of sensual desire, ill will, restlessness and worry, dullness and numbness, and doubt, are patterns that we see woven into our lives, not just into our meditations. And we know the ways, and the Buddha spoke of the ways, that these patterns obstruct freedom, and that they ask for understanding.
Over the length of this course, we will endeavor to go into these patterns in great depth. Initially, this might not strike you as a particularly exciting or thrilling exploration. In so many ways, this is the practice to find freedom within these patterns.
We were inspired to offer this course because, although we all have first-hand familiarity and experience with these patterns, in truth, there's not so much that is written about them. If you look at the early teachings, the Buddha speaks about these patterns over and over again, and yet we can be dismissive of them as being meditation problems to get over. This is not really what these patterns are telling us.
Bringing awareness into everyday life
This is the reason our aim is to bring the theme of the hindrances to your everyday life. We want to offer reflections on the five hindrances, but also to talk about how we can practice with them in daily life, how we can recognize them, and how we can meet them in a more skillful way.
Taking this course, you might recognize that your daily life is a rich field for exploration. And you might recognize how much practice and cultivation is possible in daily life.
Timeless self-knowledge
Being able to relate to these hindrances more and more skillfully, to understand them, is an enormous enrichment for our lives. The Buddha compares it to being free from debt or being free from illness. And this is really all about the quality of our lives.
It this doesn't matter whether you are a beginner in this practice or whether you have practiced for many years. All of us experience these hindrances in one way or another, both in our meditation and in our lives. As it was a relevant topic 2,500 years ago, it is just as relevant in this time and age.
Small changes can have a big impact
Finding a way to understand hindrance patterns, finding a way of living, which is no longer dictated by the hindrance patterns, is a direct path of cultivating happiness and freedom. This is true in all of the small moments of our lives. Understanding what the patterns do to the mind and how they can be released and unbound from: this is so helpful for us in the many moments of our lives when we meet distress, when we meet conflict, when we meet confusion, when we feel that we have lost our way and hardly know how to respond to that which is right before us.
Over the length of this course, we will point out ways of not being lost, of reclaiming our path, and of being able to respond to the life we live and to the world we live in.
Seeing for ourselves
Our approach to this topic is not so much a prescriptive approach where we tell you exactly what to do. Instead, it's an encouragement to really investigate for yourselves.
We will give some suggestions, but this is really about looking for yourself at how these patterns manifest in your life, what they feel like, and how to skillfully relate to them.
Why this approach works
The benefit of such an approach is that we really can make our own discoveries. Looking at our own life, we start to understand how a hindrance plays out in our own life.
This is how we also find freedom: by looking at our own life, looking at our own patterns, we start to find other ways of meeting such difficult mind states. And that's a much deeper learning than just taking it from some books through reading.
Writing in a journal
Another suggestion that we would like to make to you is to use the method of journaling during the course. We suggest taking some time every day to just note for yourself:
What have you noticed? Where did this hindrance arise?
And maybe also taking up some of the suggestions that we will give to you.
Let's begin
All three of us feel that this is a truly worthwhile exploration, so central to the teaching of the Buddha's path of liberation. We look forward to your joining us in this investigation and in this reflection, and wishing you well on this course.