Five Roadblocks to Meditation, and How They Apply to Westerners

The first hindrance to meditation is desire for sense stimulation. This can range from obsessive sexual lust, to compulsive socializing, to addictive intellectual pursuits. In the West, we tend toward the addictive intellectual pursuits because we have usually disciplined ourselves regarding lustful sex and compulsive socializing before becoming interested in meditation.

There are, however, always subtle, lingering desires for sense stimulation regarding sex and socializing, and they manifest when we choose the group with which to belong. If we hope to meet that certain someone, or if we want to socialize and make friends, we will join a group where we can pursue those goals.

Then, meditation many times become secondary, no more than a ritual to promote the hidden goals, which might not be to release us from the bondage of worldly illusion. Instead of a goal of emptiness, the goal becomes activity. One goal abandons the worldly life and its illusions, the other abandons any hope of true freedom.

Even if we see the fallacy of sex and socializing when it comes to serious practice, we Westerners many times fall prey to the main sense desire, which is our love of mind, or intellectual stimulation. The mind loves to solve problems, and even though the problem of enlightenment is far beyond the mind's capability to solve, Westerners try to figure it out, and inadvertently escape from the stillness, that holds the key to enlightenment, and into their books.

Attempting to solve the problem of humanity through books stimulates our sense of mind. It's pleasurable, and offers an escape not much different from sex or socializing. We justify it, incorrectly, because we believe that we are pursuing truth, even though truth can never be found secondarily through books or lectures. If one's practice is sincere and dedicated, then a lecture or a phrase from a book can trigger insight. However, if the tendency is to rely primarily on books rather than meditation, then true insight is prohibited and delusion is fostered. When we read too much, then even the important things we run across become so watered down that no progress will be made, which inhibits insight and only promotes delusion.

Not reading or listening at all to meaningful lectures is incorrect as well, because essential reading and discussion ease us back onto the correct path in case we have strayed. A good guideline for Westerners is that only distilled reading should be done. For every hour of reading or listening to lectures, one should meditate at least 10 hours. Then, the reading becomes balanced, and less of an entertainment and stimulation of the mind. It then becomes more of a guide to one's meditation practice, and the reading will automatically become serious, distilled, and relevant to one's practice because frivolous reading wastes that precious one hour that the mind has to escape!

The second hindrance is anger or ill will. This one is particularly relevant to Westerners because our culture is so angry. If you have driven anywhere lately, you know what I mean; it's as if everyone is a hidden explosive device such as those found under the sea that has long spikes protruding from its body, just waiting to go off, and if anything or anyone even slightly touches one of the spikes . . . boom!

It is not possible to calm the mind when in the presence of such anger and ill will. We will just sit there and simmer. Pretending to be peaceful with an angry mind is just lying to ourselves, which we become pretty good at, but still, we are only faking ourselves out. Only a loving mind can go deeply into meditation, therefore, how does one become loving? One can only become loving when the one who hates disappears, and only when the one who hates disappears can true progress be made in the spiritual life.

This all begins when the focus on one's breath becomes more important than ones opinions and ideals, one's thoughts and emotions; and one's attachments and aversions. It all starts and ends with concentration on the breath, and an acknowledgement that whatever opinions and thoughts we might have; they are irrelevant for the short time that we have decided to meditate. Of course, the more we meditate, the longer we can forgo our anger and aversion. In the meantime, we get so used to being peaceful during meditation where the angry thoughts and emotions are replaced by the breath, that we carry a little of that peacefulness out into our lives.

By overcoming our anger and aversion, our meditation not only begins to deepen but we protect ourselves when out in the world. Instead of a situation looping into violence where two inflated egos fight for control, we can sit back and relax, knowing that such a thing as ego is merely a construct of mind with no substantial reality. Just through the simple process of meditation, we begin to get to know ourselves as we have never known ourselves before.

The third hindrance; sloth and torpor, is the less troublesome one for Westerners, in the beginning at least, because we tend to go at things at breakneck speeds. We are usually keen to practice and rarely become disinterested because we are tired or lazy. What does happen, however, is that many times we become sleepy in meditation because when our minds calm down, the natural response is to go to sleep if we are sleep deprived, and most of us are because we keep ourselves so busy.

Sloth and torpor can be solved quite easily, however, and it doesn't involve getting more sleep; it involves passion. If you are involved in something that you love, for example establishing a new business, or beginning a new relationship, the energy levels become so high that sleep is almost unnecessary; or eating for that matter. This kind of passion develops in th spiritual life once one begins to get some results from their meditation, and begins to understand the depth of the practice. The best advice here is to concentrate with all of your might so that a shift in consciousness can occur, remembering that shifts in consciousness are the only things that will matter when a last breath is taken. Seldom does one become sleepy when a bear is outside of their tent. And what's worse than a bear outside your tent - rounds and rounds of rebirth into the physical realm.

Restlessness, the fourth hindrance, ranks right up there with intellectualism when it comes to Westerners. We have little patience for anything, and less tolerance for things that don't agree with the views and opinions that we accumulate, many times, by second hand information. We are very gullible when we read anything, and tend to accept it as truth. Since more often than not it isn't truth, just a smattering of truth disguised as wisdom, we eventually see through it and go on to our next adventure. Hence, spiritual window shopping becomes a way of life where we never stop long enough to practice seriously.

This restlessness is very much tied into sensual desires, where if we are not entertained and stimulated physically and mentally every moment, we are not happy campers. We never stop long enough for the mind to begin clarifying, and as a result, we seek our pleasure from externals. We think that it is good that externals always provide instant gratification (or almost always, until one gets older), and bad that internal observation and investigation provides nothing, as far as our deluded minds are concerned.

It's only after hitting that wall of emptiness, the one we have been running from for so long, that we begin to see what an untainted mind can be like, and this is where the restlessness stops. In the meantime, however, when the mind decides to settle down and stop its restless ramblings, there will be mental pain no different from an addiction that is suddenly stopped. The withdrawal can be quite severe. However, if the mind does not withdraw from its addictions, such as attachment and aversion, love and hate, then when the opportunity to bounce from one thing to another is no longer available, the mind will not only no longer have an escape through external channels, but since it has not invested any effort in internal understanding, it will be cornered with no escape. Now the pain can become unbearable, catapulting one into lifetime after lifetime of unknown consequences.

And the fifth and last common hindrance is doubt. As Westerners, we are bombarded constantly by half truths and untruths, and are thus, perhaps justifiably, cynical. We don't believe anyone, even ourselves at times, and doubt, misgivings, uncertainty, and suspicion make life, and finding a spiritual practice, downright miserable.

We can doubt many things when we decide to look for a path, such as whether or not the practice we have decided to embrace really gets results, if the practice doesn't require much from us. Or we can doubt our own capacity to successfully follow and apply the practice, especially if the practice requires everything from us. We just can never find that perfect practice, or that perfect teacher.

We can doubt that the teacher of the religion or philosophy is telling us the truth, as well as doubting the modern day validity of the practice. The list goes on almost indefinitely regarding the things that the mind can come up with to get out of meditation.

Not all doubt is bad, however. We must always use discernment, and not only faith, when choosing between the world, and the promise of transcending this world. First, we must be experienced enough in the world to see how in the world we cannot really count on anything. If we doubt that this is true, then we must become more open minded so that we can really see what is going on in our lives, and in the lives of those around us.

When we see life as it is, and not how we perceive life to be, then we are seldom blindsided by disaster, for there are no disasters. Disasters are only perceived as such because of unrealistic expectations, for example; that we are going to live forever in happiness just as soon as this or that happens, and that our friends and relatives will fare the same, without ever having to suffer old age, disease and eventual death. And that we will never suffer an accident, or a streak of bad luck.

If we do see enough about life that we feel that in fact we can't trust life, then we must be very careful where we go to escape from life's uncertainties, because if we go the wrong way, we could end up more entangled in life than ever, and thus more uncertain than ever.

Therefore, the best antidote for doubt is understanding and wisdom, approached with an open and stable mind. Meditation can provide these when we use our own clear discernment to clear out the delusions that we have built up in our own minds. This then enables us to ferret out truth from fiction, and to remove all of our doubts.

So these are the roadblocks we all face as Westerners, and as human beings, not only in meditation, but in life as well. Our life always reflects our meditation practice, and our meditation practice reflects our life. But these hindrances and roadblocks are not insurmountable. Just knowing about them, understanding them, and not underestimating their power to distract us can be a beginning for us to conquer them.