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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello and welcome to this week where we're considering what the early Buddhist tradition considers the primary hindrances obstacles to

meditation practice and these five are also many of us can recognize them as one of the primary

may be obstacles challenges that we face in our daily life as well.

So first ones are desires, sensual desires in particular, or a certain kind of greed, avariciousness, wanting something

so desperately.

And the second is ill will, aversion, wanting something to go away or be destroyed or not exist

and with a certain degree of ever slight animosity.

And both of these, desire and aversion anger, for example, are energizing and there can be even a sense of

pleasure in the in the energy of life the energy of life, the energy of being vigorous and engaged and

and some people may be even part of their addiction to anger and maybe desire is how it helps

them feel alive and therefore that they count, that they're valuable, that there's purpose or something.

The next hindrance is usually translated as sloth and torpor,

and I'll talk more about this later and maybe that these might not be the best

translations or there might be alternatives that are interesting to look at. But this is where the life energy dissipates, where the caffeine

of the soul, desire and aversion is no longer there and without that caffeine

there can be withdrawal there can be dullness to torper sets inacency, a kind of giving up, and that can happen if things are comfortable

in meditation, the complacency of pleasure of bliss and we stop engaging in the mindfulness

because we're just enjoying it in the way that certain vitality dissipates the

vitality of the inspiration of I'm here fully here and it can be

complacency it can just be a shutting down. It could be no longer kind of applying ourselves to what doing because we're enjoying it.

And it could also be the shutting down from it's too difficult that I'm discouraged, I'm bored and this is not really

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