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This week, I met with my meditation teacher for the first time in several months. I needed to talk with him about how it was all just becoming too much. After decades of developing my capacity to be with difficult things, I found myself, like so many of us, confronting more than I could bear. And this is the definition of trauma: that which is beyond our capacity to bear.
Over the course of our conversation, he mentioned MLK’s famous assertion that the arc of the universe bends towards justice.
My response surprised me. “Do you really believe that? I’m not sure I do anymore.”
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Later, as I was reflecting on my strong and sudden doubt about whether history has an arc, and if it does, in what direction it bends, I recognised that same doubt permeating many areas of my life at once. Things I had felt hopeful about just the day before, or last week, or last month, suddenly seemed hopeless. It’s like all the fires had gone out at once. Give doubt an inch and it’ll take a mile.
But then I remembered something. I’m not a scholar of the dharma, which is what we call the teachings of the Buddha, but I am a student of the dharma, and one thing I have learned is a teaching about what the Buddha called the Five Hindrances. These are five things that predictably get in the way of practice.
When people who meditate talk about practice, they usually mean meditation, but this is too narrow a definition. Practice is something we do regularly, because we are committed to the process of doing it, and because we care about what the results of that process might be. Meditation is practice. Writing is practice. Running is practice. Making art is practice. Making music, making friends, making dinner. Creativity is practice. Solidarity is practice. Resistance is practice.
The Five Hindrances are predictable barriers to practice. When I first learned about them, they were presented as a list of five challenges: craving, aversion, restlessness, lethargy, and doubt. The two hugely-successful American teachers who were discussing them asked each other what their hindrance was like they were asking each other their astrological signs.
“What’s your hindrance?”
“Lethargy. I always want to fall asleep.”
“Ahhh, mine’s craving. I’m always fantasizing about what I’d rather be doing instead.” There was a degree of identification with the hindrances that was surprising for teachers of a philosophy whose essential tenets include nonattachment.
My teacher, Yanai Postelnik, encouraged me to look at the Five Hindrances differently. He said that everybody experiences each one of the hindrances at some point in time, and it makes the most sense to think of the first four as pairs of opposites.
Craving, which is wanting things to be different, is the opposite of aversion, which is not wanting things to be as they are. Basically, they are two roads to the same destination. I want this. I don’t want that.
Restlessness, which is over-activation and over-stimulation, is the opposite of lethargy, which is under-activation and under-stimulation. I think we see these two very often right now – those who are hyper-engaged, and those who are turning away, shutting down, waiting for it all to go away.
Each of these four hindrances leads to the fifth: doubt. Doubt is not a separate hindrance. Doubt is the end result of each. If you want something different than what is happening, you doubt the practice. If you find yourself overwhelmed, you doubt the practice. If you feel like you’re running as hard as you can to stand still, you doubt the practice. All roads lead to doubt.
Doubt there’s any point. Doubt anything will change, or doubt there’s anything to be done right now to hasten change. In the case of the practice of resistance – which I know so many of you are engaged in – there is doubt we have power. Doubt there are enough people who share a vision of justice to outweigh the strength of those who don’t. Doubt we will succeed in turning the tide before it is too late.
I spend a fair chunk of my time helping people develop consistent and healthy writing practices, and one of the things I find myself saying over and over again is that doubt is part of the process. Doubt doesn’t indicate that anything is wrong, that you are not up to the task, that your work isn’t good enough and your brain isn’t big enough, that this whole thing was a stupid idea. Doubt might say those things, but doubt is not to be trusted. Doubt is just an entirely normal part of a creative process.
So the same is true of any act of creation, even – especially – trying to create a different, better reality. Those of us engaged in the small acts of sustained and daily fighting – in the practice of resistance – will encounter the five hindrances regularly.
I can remind us that there IS power in collective action – just look, for example, at what happened when JD Vance tried to celebrate bullying a heroic world leader on international television with a family ski weekend in Vermont.
I can remind us of this, but doubt doesn’t respond to rational persuasion. Doubt is too convinced of itself. Doubt is the guy who didn’t do the reading but dominates class discussion anyway, impressed with himself, sure of his overestimated intellect and well-honed bullshitting abilities. (Doubt might be JD Vance.)
So let’s not try to talk doubt out of it. Instead, let’s refocus on taking the actions themselves, regardless of outcome, because they are the right actions to take. To speak up, to show up, to support, to shame, to say no, this is not okay. To connect and care and feel, as much as we are able. To do what we can, because that is what practice asks of us. To remind ourselves that practice is something we do regularly, because we are committed to the process of doing it, and because we care about what the results of that process might be.
Resistance is a practice. It is a creative practice, and creative practice is fundamentally about the making, not about the reception. We do the things we are called to do, the things our hearts ask of us, the things our consciences demand of us, the things the times require of us – to the extent (and only to the extent) that we can.
Allow resistance to be a practice. Be unsurprised when you find yourself wanting things to be different, or not wanting things to be as they are, or feeling buzzy, wired and on edge, or feeling frozen and unable to act, and when each of these things leads to a strong sense of doubt, because these are the challenges that show up when one is engaged in practice. They mean you are doing it. You are engaging in the world, you are staying with what is there, and you are choosing how to respond.
We see what is happening and we engage, as we can, with plenty of breaks. We turn towards, and we also turn away. A practice is dynamic, not fixed; responsive, not dictatorial.
And to doubt, that smug bastard, we can graciously say, you are welcome here. You are allowed. We can invite doubt in, take its coat, mix it a drink. And then we can say to doubt, our guest, you won’t stop me. I do this every day when I sit down to work on my book: I see the doubt and I write anyway.
All of the five hindrances are to be expected in a life of practice, and each of the first four results in the fifth. There is nothing that needs doing in the face of doubt other than to wave at it and carry on.
Postcard from my garden
