The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and welcome to this third talk on the therances, the five hindrances. Today we do the third

hindrance and the hindrances are that which compromises our capacity for a useful engagement with our activities,

whatever we do, whether it's meditation or life itself in other ways.

And I use the word engagement because being mindful is also an engagement.

Something is activated or comes alive when we're mindful.

And to only associate mindfulness with calm might actually encourage a kind of dullness in the mindfulness. It's

possible to get over calm and and but to associate mindfulness with making effort for some people means that we're trying too much.

We're straining or we're agitated in a certain kind of way.

And so this is a classic metaphor in Buddhism of the middle way that where's that middle?

And so in terms of the five hindrances, the first two, kind of a great desire, compulsive desire, clinging desire, and then hostile a hostile aversion.

That these are kind of a desire and aversion

are both energizing.

And some people, even if they're really hostile love to be hostile and

angry because now they feel truly alive and otherwise they don't feel much

maybe they feel and otherwise they don't feel much.

Maybe they feel unworthy or dull or bored or something

and being angry just makes them feel kind of like energized

and they feel so, you know that's what they're

attached to not necessarily the aversion but the ending energized they love it

or same thing with desire, that the, sometimes with fantasies of different types, it might be a pleasant fantasy, but desire, but it's the sense of coming alive and what it does in the body and the feelings and that we feel like there's purpose and meaning.

And sometimes people spend a lot of time in fantasy because it's there's a pleasure of feeling alive.

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