Seeing Clearly in Difficult Times

I’m finding that right now, practice can be challenging.
It’s hard to get up an hour early in the dark.
But that’s often the case.
 
The bigger challenge right now is not the early dark mornings.
It’s the lack of clarity that arises when 
anger, impatience, and fear take over my sit, or my day.
 
That’s why right now, I’m understanding a little bit better
the wisdom of all the great teachers, 
who counsel us to befriend these difficult states of mind.
I’m noticing that befriending anger helps me to 
occasionally, see the pain underneath;
that making friends with impatience helps me to
sometimes, remember to take a breath;
and that letting fear be a beloved companion points to one day,
possibly, with plenty of practice, letting it go.

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen, this is Wake Up Call 466. 

Last Wake Up Call, I shared from some of my favorite teachers that three things we can do right now, in what feels like a very difficult moment to some of us at least, are to make love the source of our engagement, listen for the rhythm underneath the jagged melody, and imagine going forward in pairs of red and blue, establishment and opposition. And, we can just breathe, which was what I could manage last week.

Breath as a refuge. That’s what it’s been for me, for a long time and then this past week was no exception to say the least – it was a week when I’ve needed the refuge of the breath more than ever. And still, I’ve had moments of overwhelm, activation, reactivity, just like last week.  

I have a sense of not wanting my precious refuge to fail me, of wanting my practice to sustain me through this next period of time, which might be very difficult. And I also know that things get in the way. And not only external things but internal hindrances, that get in the way of my formal practice, and that also show up in everyday life, which is also practice and what I like to call portable practice. 

Before unpacking the hindrances, and just thinking about mindfulness practice – in other words, looking at what gets “hindered” – there are these two perspectives, formal and portable. Formal mindfulness practice is the practice of looking in. When I’m paying attention to my internal experience, or looking in, I’m noticing that the body is experiencing sensations, the eyes are seeing, the ears are hearing, the tongue is tasting, the nose is smelling, the mind is thinking, and the mind/body are having an emotion. I’m turning towards these experiences of knowing, rather than away (and rather than wishing them away). Hopefully I’m also remembering that the experiences are transient, coming and going, and not getting attached, and that the whole process is happening without me having much control – that’s it’s not a “me” or a “mine” kind of thing. 

Portable mindfulness practice is looking up. “Looking up,” meaning, paying attention to what’s happening moment by moment externally, meaning, being mindful of others and their experience, of the world as it is, and of what I can, and can’t, do to help. Tuning into the others in a room, an organization, a community, seeing (and asking) how they are, and then no matter how they are (and assuming I’m feeling safe), being able to be with them and hopefully, help in some way. Which I sometimes find hard when they’re suffering, for various reasons, and which I also sometimes find hard when they’re celebrating and it’s something I’m not celebrating. 

Tuning into the others in the room, and also tuning into the world and the truth of how things are: that the sun is up today and that it’s hotter than ever on our beautiful planet, that the news is what it is and that some portion of it may not be true, that there are multiple truths, everywhere I look. Tuning in, wanting to help, and also remembering that there’s what I can do and what I can’t; and remembering not freeze anyone or the world or myself because how things are and what I can do, is always changing. Or as Norman Fischer keeps saying these days, empires come and go. 

We know that mindfulness practice, with all of those elements, offers the potential for a durable kind of happiness and freedom, one that’s not dependent on how things are but on how we relate to them. I’m guessing everyone here has had moments of being fully present to whatever the moment holds, in all of its multiple truths and in a non-reactive, capacious way, and has felt equanimous, and in that moment of equanimity, has tasted that happiness, that freedom. 

And if you have, you’ve probably noticed that our own mind can get in the way of that happiness, that peace, that freedom. I can hinder our formal practice, and it can hinder our portable practice.

The five traditional hindrances – and you might have noticed them or these names might be new for you – are greed and hate, both of which are big buckets that contain many of what I would call subsets, and are also words – greed and hate – that always make me sit up straight and pay attention, which is why I’m using them instead of the gentler grasping and aversion; and then sloth & torpor; restlessness & worry; and doubt. I know that sounds like seven but sloth & torpor are considered a pair, as are restlessness & worry, and I’ll talk about that on another Wake Up Call.

The hindrances are states of mind. They’re transitory, like all states, and like all states, they don’t always feel that way. They arise as a result of the conditions in the moment or because of long term or past conditions or because of a habitual response or sometimes because the mind sees them as a logical response. I was in the habit of meeting my mom with impatience, for example, and it took a long time to see that, realize it was unwise and could be changed, and then change it as best as I could. 

Because the hindrances arise in this way, they’re not our fault, which is important. It’s not that I’m a bad person for having that impatience for so long, or that I could have done something about it before I did. Anger, impatience, fear: not our fault, any more than love is our fault. Remembering that makes them easier – or maybe the right word is “possible” – to see, to work with, and eventually, to let go of. 

The reason greed, hate, sloth & torpor, restlessness & worry, and doubt, are “hindrances,” is because they hinder our ability to see clearly. My impatience with my mom hindered my ability to see how much she loved me. Torpor hinders my ability to be energetic about my practice and anything else. Restlessness and its BFF anxiety, hinders my ability to sit still, and to steady my mind when I’m in the world. Worry keeps me outside the present moment, and up at night. Doubt tricks me into believing that if I don’t practice it’s fine, because how does mindfulness matter anyway, when the world is on fire?

The teachings – as usual – offer very colorful ways of helping us to remember the five hindrances and how they feel. One way is to see greed as like having a mind full of colorful dyes, beautiful but impossible to see through; hate as a mind of violently boiling hot water, sloth & torpor as a mind full of algae, moss, and slime: stagnant, restlessness & worry as like water whipped up by the wind, waves crashing, agitated and unclear, and doubt feels as a mind of murky water, also impossible to see through clearly.

So the hindrances aren’t permanent, they’re not our fault, and they do get in the way. So that’s what we’ll be exploring. And how, once we see them, they begin to lose their power and even dissipate, and we can get back to being present, with ease, and with all the multiple truths swirling around us right now.