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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good evening and welcome, welcome everybody.

Nice to see you all.

So, when I first started a meditation practice a number of years ago now, I so often had this idea like,

wow, everybody else must be like on the brink of enlightenment or they're enlightened and I am so awful as a meditator.

I remember that I actually learned how to meditate on a meditation retreat and it was incomprehensible.

I just could not understand how come that person sitting in front of me was still for 45 minutes.

I just didn't even like know how that was possible. I was like in so much pain and non-stop squirming and it was quite something.

And I had this, I was saying myself, why did I ever think this was a good idea?

But as I learned more and more about meditation, you know, really touched me like in my heart and some kind of way that I couldn't even describe or explain something was pulling me.

But I still couldn't do it very well and I couldn't sit still and my mind was all over the place.

But it wasn't until I had been meditating for quite some time, I remember precisely how long.

But for quite some time before I ever heard of these things called the hindrances.

And that was a game changer for me when I learned about this.

Some of you may be familiar with this, it's a common teaching, but for whatever reason maybe I was just absent on those days when they were being talked about.

I had never heard about them, but it made such a big difference.

So what are the hindrances?

These are something that are preserved in the teachings from early Buddhism, so it's attributed to the Buddha.

So thousands of years ago people were talking about this same thing, which for me I'd love this idea like wow thousands of years ago they were talking about what I'm experiencing today.

And that somehow you know makes it less personal with that countless numbers of people have had these same problems that I'm having, these same issues that I'm having.

So it kind of like normalized my meditation experience and the difficulties.

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