This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This week, Linda and Nelly begin a new topic: the hindrances. It’s one of the most classic teachings in the Buddhist canon, and it’s also one of the most practically useful — if we know how to approach it. Linda opens with an overview, which turns out to be less about listing the five states and more about asking the question that almost never gets asked first: what do the hindrances hinder us from?
The Five, and Their Reputation
The traditional list is familiar to many meditators: desire, ill will (aversion), sloth and torpor (sleepiness), restlessness, and doubt. And the traditional verdict is equally familiar — if a hindrance is present, you are not meditating properly.
The teaching is illustrated through a bowl of water used as a mirror. Desire colors the water. Aversion heats it to boiling. Sleepiness covers it with algae. Restlessness stirs it with wind. Doubt muddies it entirely. In each case, you can no longer see your own reflection clearly.
When Linda first encountered these teachings, the message was fairly direct: if a hindrance is present, body scan it away, breathe through it, don’t engage with it, because engagement will only make it grow. They were problems, and the task was removal.
A Different Question First
But before exploring each hindrance, Linda wants to sit with the prior question. In concentration-based meditation, the answer is clear: hindrances hinder concentration, absorption, and mental unification. That’s the goal, and these states interfere with it.
Reflective Meditation starts from a different place entirely. If the practice isn’t primarily about achieving concentration — if it’s about awareness, reflection, curiosity, honesty, and knowing ourselves more deeply — then what exactly are these states hindering?
And here’s what shifts: when the goal changes, so does the relationship to whatever appears in meditation. Desire, restlessness, doubt — these aren’t just problems to be managed. They are experiences. They carry information. They have conditions.
Curiosity Changes Everything
A hindrance, Linda suggests, becomes less of a hindrance when we become curious about it. Not immediately — sometimes curiosity takes time to arrive. But the direction of Reflective Meditation is clear: rather than treating these states as intruders to be removed, we become interested in them.
What kind of restlessness is this? Where is the aversion coming from? What is the doubt actually about?
This doesn’t mean embracing every arising uncritically. Sometimes a state genuinely needs to be interrupted — the mind needs to change the channel, ground itself, or find some steadiness before it can see clearly. That discernment is part of the practice. But the starting point is curiosity, not removal.
What the Muddy Water Might Teach
Linda closes with an image that reframes the classical simile. The bowl of water is usually offered as an argument for clarity — get rid of the algae, calm the boiling, settle the storm, and then you can see your reflection.
But what, she asks, can be learned from the water when it’s boiling? What is the algae telling us? What might be seen in the muddy depths that clear water never reveals?
There are many ways of seeing. Some of them require stillness and clarity. Others require exactly the kind of unsettled, complex, uncomfortable experience that the hindrances bring. In Reflective Meditation, both count.
And this week, the invitation is to treat the muddy water not as an obstacle — but as the teaching itself.
