The five hindrances, expanded; the five subtler hindrances.

Buddhism has an amazingly large amount of numbered lists. It is almost like reading a buzzfeed web page. One of the lists is the Five Hindrances. The Buddha listed these 5 things as a complete list of all the hindrances to making progress on the Buddhist path. That means that if you have any suffering or greed or anger or fear or delusion and it isn't just the raw emotion but it's part of your brain spinning, that means it's one of these five hindrances.

The five hindrances are 

1. Sensual Desire
2. Anger and Ill-will 
3. Sloth and torpor 
4. Restlessness 
5. Doubt 

So if you're stuck, instead of just feeling this amorphous stuckness, this list invites you to analyze and get a little deeper into that stuff this. You can investigate and try on these five categories. Do these fit?

It's easy when something clearly fits. If you're lusting for sex or food, that is sexual desire. Anger and ill-will is unsurprisingly anger and ill-will. Sloth and torpor also includes laziness. Restlessness is when you can't get rest like when your mind is busy. And Doubt is when you're not sure about what you're doing, specifically doubting the truth or usefulness of the Buddhist path.

I ran into some trouble when I got sucked into watching some YouTube videos about replacing my car brakes. That didn't seem like any of the five categories. I wasn't super attached to the idea. I also wasn't really restless I was actually quite calm and peaceful. The issue was that I was trying to breathe and I got an idea in my head and then started you know reading some articles and then watching a YouTube video. These are all good things to do and I needed to do them at some point so it's helpful in a sense. (But, not the right time to hit a YouTube hole.) With hyperbole, why is Buddhism so rough on me when I'm trying to do something good and taking care of my stuff!

So Buddhism isn't telling you don't take care of your car. I wasn't telling the whole story when I told you the example. I left out the beginning, that I started with trying to do some sitting meditation. And a lot of stuff just happened in my brain and was causing me not to want to do it. Or maybe not to succeed in doing it. That's a critical detail, I was trying to do one pass but was sidetracked wiht one task and then another task.

Rethinking the five hindrances, I figured out that my definition of the hindrances was too narrow. And so a lot of the more ambiguous things that were hindering me weren't fitting into those categories. And so I had a realization. In the moment, it seemed big, but now as I write this seems very small. I'm laughing as I write this: the realization was two things.

First big realization you can have multiple hindrances at once. I kept on trying to think, "is this restlessness or is it sensual desire" when I'm thinking about eating a burrito. It can be restlessness and sexual desire. The purpose of the hinderances isn't to be right in picking the correct multiple-choice answer. The purpose of the hindrances is to offer a structured way to investigate, to get a little deeper into the workings of the mind. So the answer is use the list of hindrances in whatever ways that help you develop more sensitivity and understanding of your hindrances. Sometimes me wanting to eat a burrito is also sloth and torpor. Sometimes there isn't any restlessness, just desire. Sometimes there's no desire it's just restlessness. And it was a big deal to realize that a burrito wasn't one hindrance. It really depended on the circumstances and on what was actually going on in my mind, mind and heart together.

The second big realization was that I was defining the hindrances too narrowly. So here are the hindrances expanded. When looking at the hindrance of sensual desire, oh, I can look at raw sensual desire meaning desire for different senses taste touch sounds sights smells. And also for more compound desires like lust. But taking it in its more broad sense, it also includes any form of greed and clinging and feeding, in addition to things that don't have to do with sexual desire that have to do with thoughts. When we're thinking about desire for thoughts it overlaps into restlessness and doubt, and if it's an aggressive thought maybe even into ill-will and anger. So the helpful question is investigating this hindrance I am feeling right now, is there any of this eating? and what kind of eating is it?

Anger and ill-will includes active anger and active ill-will. It includes many negative thoughts, but I don't think negativity is the hallmark of anger and ill-will. I think in the broadest definition anger and ill-will includes anything where there is aggressiveness and/or tension. So even when there's no aggressiveness like for an anxious person in a social situation oh, there is this tension. And the tension fits because it goes back to a different word use offered in Buddhism which is "aversion". So anger and ill-will includes all of the states of mind which are "I want to get rid of this now"--all caps. I'm not sure if this is true or not true, but the helpful activity that I did when looking at my hinderances was to check for the "I want to get rid of this" of it. Sometimes when I have a negative emotion, I want to get rid of it. Sometimes I'm just okay and not aggressive; and that realization was quite powerful.

Sloth and torpor is well described as anything that has low energy. And this was helpful because it's not just me being lazy. It's also me being sleepy or drained. But I found even when I'm not lazy and drained, sloth and torpor might apply with the expanded definition of anywhere where I don't have the energy to put in more effort. So one hindrance is a lack of effort. Here look for that lack of effort. Sometimes we don't even notice the lack of effort because we feel like we have a good reason not to give effort. I called this "an abundance of excuses". The abundance of excuses could be doubt could be restlessness or could be sloth and torpor. But don't rule out that it's not sloth and torpor. The feeling "I don't feel like it" is often sloth and torpor. Doubt is more about "I don't think this is a good thing to do". But if you think it's a good thing to do and you don't feel like doing it that's sloth and torpor. If you don't think it's a good thing to do and you don't feel like doing it that's both.

Restlessness is restlessness. But I like Gil Fronsdal's definition, which was  that restlessness was an abundance of energy. If it's an abundance of mental energy that's coherent then I call this windy mind. Anger has a similarly poignant analogy for me which is called "the rope". Whenever there is a rope that means there's tension. And for some reason the word rope makes instant sense to me. Similarly the word windy makes instant sense to me. I know almost instinctually whether I am windy right now or not windy. Breath meditation helps me figure that out. Even as I was typing I was windy. I was pretty calm even. But it's possible to be calm and windy. The way I could tell was because my brain and my thoughts were getting ahead of my breath. And in a subtle way it wasn't about making sure my thoughts were correct, but it was more about this thought train leaving the station and me getting caught up in the momentum of that train, forgetting that I am not simply a train operator. My job is the, you know, air traffic control / train traffic control tower monitor. I'm supposed to know where this mind is going. Not just where one thought train is going.

Restlessness also include too much energy, even for skillful things. Right now, I'm trying to write a website for Metta meditation and I have some excitement and grandiosity. This is a good task, but when my reminder to take 6 breathes rings, this momentum-restlessness is keeping me from staying with the breath.

The last hindrance is doubt. Doubt is not being sure. Specifically one of the big doubts is about whether the Buddhist path is worthwhile. But I made a lot of mistakes of understanding my hindrances when I made doubt too narrow. I find that my most frequent doubt isn't whether Buddhism is or is it worthwhile. It's whether I want to cling and feed on other things. Things like grandiosity and fame. Things like pleasure. Things like whether I want to fix the brakes today or tomorrow. Linking at back to a hindrance of the Buddhist path, when I am trying to do a "Take 5 minutes" to meditate, any thing that comes in and says I've got a different idea that's better than meditating for these 5 minutes... that is doubt. That includes any time I'm thinking maybe I would rather X then stay with the breath. For it to count as doubt  doesn't mean I have to doubt staying with the breath entirely. Even tiny things like maybe I need to check the news or I wonder whether I have an appointment for 8 or 9 tomorrow. Even those tiny things are tiny doubts.

So, it is helpful to have these hindrances as a roadmap early on because then I was able to see the big faults. But now I'm getting into more settled and subtle territory and I need to rethink what the hinderances are, more broadly.

So, the Buddha was correct in his list of these five master hindrances, at least from my experience. But the amazing thing about the teaching is that it fits in the beginning when you're just learning about the mind and it fits and the middle where I am where I've already learned some things about the mind and I'm developing more and more subtlety. I think a way to take care of this for me is to look for the five subtler hindrances.

 Happy to share this with you and hope it's useful. Use what useful discard the rest. UUDR