Working with the Five Hindrances

SnowFlower Sun March 2026

Walt Keough looks at how we can use the Five Hindrances to increase our self awareness, instead of using them as a checklist for self-criticism.

from a talk by Walt Keough

This is another numbered list for Buddhists—five mindfulness trainings, five aggregates, five remembrances, and now, of course, five hindrances.

The Five Hindrances appear in the foundational sutra on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Satipatthana Sutra. One of the four foundations is mindfulness of the mind, listed alongside mindfulness of the body. We often talk about practicing by bringing our attention to the body, but tonight we’re bringing our attention to the mind.

The Five Hindrances are:

• Sensual desire
• Anger (or ill will)
• Dullness
• Restlessness
• Doubt

Interestingly, Thich Nhat Hanh doesn’t talk much about the hindrances.  I think that’s because they are often looked on as a checklist of self-criticism.  That isn’t a healthy practice, and there’s a big danger here.  My idea is to go over the hindrances, not with the message that we should eliminate them from our lives, because that’s simply impossible.  They are a part of everyone’s makeup, our basic tendencies.  My own take is that the value in going into them is to increase our self-awareness.

The trick is to bring mindfulness to our habitual mental attitudes and simply let our awareness undermine those habits.  If we slip into a “get rid of it” mentality, that’s just another expression of the hindrance of ill-will!  Or we can think that noticing these hindrances in the mind means that somehow MY mind is bad, defective, unskilled, the problem.  These hindrances are not anyone’s personal failing or unique to any one person.  They are what the mind often does; the danger comes when we identify with them and act on them.”

So, my reflections here are about using the Hindrances as another technique, another tool, to bring mindfulness into our lives and create a pause between our automatic reactions and our aware self.

Ajahn Sumedo, a monk from Thai Forest Tradition: “In meditation, one develops an understanding of the Five Hindrances––how, when one of them is present, you investigate it, you understand it, you accept its presence, and you learn how to deal with it. Sometimes you can just tell it to go away, and it goes; sometimes you just have to allow it to be there till it wears out.”

So, what is most important is to first understand that they are not beneficial, and then to recognize and acknowledge that a hindrance is present.  Don’t rush to do anything about it too quickly.  Wait until you feel confident that you aren’t acting from aversion, because then you can know that any changes you make in your thinking or actions are from clarity and wisdom.

Here are steps for working with the Hindrances, which I took from Jan Sheppard in a class that she taught here in Madison a few years ago:

• Recognize it as a hindrance, “name that hindrance.”
• Notice how it feels in the body, open to it, allow it to be there in spaciousness.
• Separate the hindrance, as an act of the mind, from the object.
• Don’t fall into the trap of wanting to get rid of the hindrance: proceed carefully.
• Replace the unskillful thoughts with more skillful ones.

Sensual Desire

The first Hindrance is Sensual Desire.  Note that desire as a concept is not bad; some desires are wholesome.  But sensual desire is a dangerous distraction from the realities of life, especially a distraction from our practice of living in the moment and appreciating what is here and now.  When I find myself leaning into the future, I can ask myself if the hindrance of sensual desire is operating unconsciously.  Naming it and bringing my attention to how that desire feels in my body, I recognize the discomfort present.  I can sense that the desire is in my mind, separate from the object of desire. This is Mindfulness, and usually it’s a wakeup call, which is beneficial in itself, even if I continue on striving for whatever it is that I‘m desiring.  I can see that, in the long run, doing this tends to weaken the strength of the desire. That’s how I can sidestep the natural response to try to squelch and eliminate the desire. And sometimes this approach works to deflect me from my mindless drive toward that object of desire.  It works pretty well when my eye is caught by a very interesting teaser news headline.  I can see and feel the desire there, the curiosity, and work with it.  This works a little less reliably when I’m in a buffet line; that desire is more hard-wired, I can be aware of it and still entirely fill my plate.  But sometimes it works there too.

Ill-will

The second Hindrance is Ill-will, or not wanting.  A word I use for myself is Aversion.  My automatic reaction to things that I don’t like.  Somewhere I learned that we have a natural tendency to be driven more by one hindrance than the others, and I’ve come to realize, with my personality, that I’m driven much more often by aversion than by attraction.  When I enter a room with new people, my mindset is to look around for the challenges there, with a sense of defensiveness, rather than immediately looking for opportunities for enjoyment.  I have the same kind of reaction to a sales presentation; I look for trickery and resist the attractive picture being described.  That’s just how I am, and I try to be aware of that tendency, not to eliminate it but simply to recognize that it’s operating and separate my feeling (of fear or whatever) from the objects outside of myself, and allow myself to be more mindfully levelheaded in that moment.  There are many other examples I could give of moments when awareness of ill will or aversion would greatly enhance my enjoyment of life.

So, Desire and Aversion are a pair, and the other pair of Hindrances is Dullness and Restlessness.  I like how dullness is also called “sloth and torpor.”  This could be a physical state during meditation of lethargy or sleepiness, but it could also refer to a comfortable meditation sit where I let the time pass easily without much actual directed attention.  Or during the day, I can get into a very comfortable zoned-out state for an extended time.  Where I’m not really enjoying life.  This is tricky to deal with, because my whole background is constantly about accomplishing things, as a human do-er rather than a human being.  So, it’s very easy for me to flip into a guilty, “have to be productive” mode when I become aware that I’m letting my day slip away.  Rather than simply becoming mindful of my mind-state, it’s flipping into the opposite Hindrance of “Restlessness.”  That is when I need to be busy simply to feel good, to stay distracted.

The goal is to be mindfully present and let the naturally emerging energy manifest.

Finally, a thought on Doubt.  Often this is interpreted as doubting the Teachings and Dharma, but it applies much more widely.  This is from a book the Sunday gathering is reading, Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine:

“When the going gets tough, when we are in a difficult state of mind (affliction, illness, etc.), it’s hard to imagine things ever getting better. There is a hallucinatory quality to heavy states that causes us to doubt our capacities and power. That doubt is as valuable an exploration for the mind as it is for the heart. It takes confidence to watch doubt without thinking we have to do something about it, trusting its natural impermanence to carry it away as long as we don’t pull back from it or compulsively react. It is important to become familiar with doubt sufficiently to be able to turn toward it instead of away.”

These are my reflections on how I try to work with the Five Hindrances.
When I notice that I’m not mindfully present, I aspire to:

• Ask whether a Hindrance is operating and name it.
• Notice how it feels and allow it to be there.
• Separate the mental Hindrance from the object it is reacting to.
• Try to remain in the present moment—watching my mind without fixing anything—until I’m sure I’m acting mindfully.