“How can you sit in love and live in love rather than in fear? The first step is to love your fear. There’s a way in which you actually have to bow to the fear and say, ‘I know you. You too are part of this humanity.'” – Jack Kornfield

To work with Buddhism’s Five Hindrances—desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt—we must actually study them, observing and allowing them to be incorporated into our meditation practice. When desire arises, we begin to examine ‘desiring mind’ with mindfulness. We acknowledge it, “Desire, desire,” and feel its quality. To look at desire is to experience the part of ourselves that is never content, that always says, “If only I had some else, something different than this, that would make me happy. If only I had some other relationship, some other job, some more comfortable cushion, less noise, cooler temperature, warmer temperature, another meditation shawl, a little more sleep last night, then I could sit well.”

The mindful way of working with desire is not to condemn it, but to turn attention to the state of desire, to experience it in the body and mind, and to name it gently, “Wanting, wanting.” In this way we learn to be fully aware of states like desire without being so caught up by them. Then we can choose which to follow. We find freedom with our attention. Desire is rampant in the modern world. Mindfulness brings real understanding.

The same approach of mindfulness is used when working with anger, aversion, or fear. We may have to acknowledge fear eighty times before it becomes familiar to us. But if we sit unmoving, and every time fear comes we note, “Fear, fear,” and let ourselves be mindful of the trembling and the coolness and the breath stopping and the stories and images, if we just stick with it, one day fear will arise and we will say, “Fear, fear, oh, I know you! You are very familiar!” Our whole relationship to the fear will have changed and we will see it as an impersonal state, like a program that comes on the radio for a while and passes away, and we will be freer and wiser in our relationship to it.

This may sound easy, to be present with a balanced and soft attention, but it is not always so. There were several therapists at one long retreat I taught who were schooled in the primal scream tradition. Their practice was one of release and catharsis, and in their work they set a period aside every morning to release and to scream. After doing sitting meditation for a few days they said, “This mindfulness is not working.” I asked, “Why not?” They replied, “It is building up inner energy and anger and we need a place to express it. Could we use the meditation hall at a certain hour of the day to scream and release? Otherwise it gets toxic when we hold it in.” I suggested that they go back and sit with it anyway, and I hoped it would not kill them. I asked them to sit and see what happens, since they were there to learn something new. They did. And after a few days they came back and said, “Amazing.” I said: “What was amazing?” They said: “It changed!” they became free in a new way. Anger, fear, desire – all of those states can be a source of wisdom when they are acknowledged and felt fully, because as we become present for them, we see how they arise according to certain conditions and they affect the body and mind in a certain way. If we are mindful and not caught up in them, we can observe them like a storm, they are experienced for a time and then they pass away.

This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘

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