“True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” – Thomas Merton

The Buddhist tradition tells us that when their energies are strong, there are specific antidotes for the Five Hindrances. For desire, there is the antidote of reflecting on impermanence and on death. For anger, there is the antidote of loving-kindness, and forgiveness. For sleepiness, the antidote is to arouse energy through changing posture, or visualization and faith. For restlessness the antidote is to bring calm or concentration through inner techniques of steadying and relaxing. And for doubt the antidote is faith or inspiration through reading or speaking with someone wise or finding some way to inspire oneself.

If you do not have the training and skills to help you work with the hindrances, they can seem overwhelming and too difficult and you may want to give up on your spiritual practice. This is why you need a teacher and systematic training to begin to work with your mind: your mind and the forces you encounter there can be very confusing.

Buddhist teachings point to the basic roots of human suffering as “greed, hatred, and delusion.” These are what get us into trouble. The hindrances grow from these roots. We may not be worried by this, “Oh, just desire and aversion, our dislikes and ignorance, and a little bit of unclarity of mind. We can work with this. That is not too bad.” But after we have sat for a while, we discover that greed means confronting attachment in the deepest sense, that our desire is a powerful and primal kind of force, and that hatred means discovering a rage within us like Attila the Hun and Hitler. All of these are found in each person’s mind. Greed is the deepest kind of hunger that drives the world. Delusion includes the darkest kind of confusion and ignorance.

These states are powerful. They are the forces that make war in the world. They are the forces that create poverty and starvation in one country and abundance in another. They are the forces that cause the whole cycling of what is called the samsaric repetition of birth and death to take place. And we will encounter them when we practice living in the present moment with steady, concentrated attention.

This is not easy. At times it seems overwhelming. Yet here is where we learn. Thomas Merton said, “True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” In facing the most difficult of your hindrances honorably, if you let yourself sit with them, there will come a real opening of the heart. An opening of the heart, body, and mind takes place, because we finally stop running away from our boredom or our fear or our anger or our pain.

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

The post When Prayer Becomes Impossible and the Heart has Turned to Stone: Antidotes for the Five Hinderances appeared first on Jack Kornfield.