This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Ease of Mindful Seclusion; A Radiant Mind: Practice with the 5 Hindrances 1/5: Mindful w/ Desire. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: A Radiant Mind: Practice with the 5 Hindrances (1 of 5): Mindful with Desire; Guided Meditation: The Ease of Mindful Seclusion; Dharmette: The Hindrances (1 of 5): Mindful with Desire - Kodo Conlin

The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 28, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Lovely to be with this YouTube sangha. This week, we'll be exploring the topic of the five hindrances.¹ In the context of the last few weeks of teaching, you might say that the heart and the mind are so capable of loving in so many ways. And yet, there are these forces in the mind that get in the way. They obstruct, they interrupt, they hinder some of our greatest capacities, like being present and establishing mindfulness. They hinder concentration and a host of other wholesome states. So, we'll spend the week exploring five of these forces that arise in the mind.

Let's get right into the meditation. What we'll do for this meditation, it's sort of a long windup. First, we will ground ourselves in the body. We'll do this again by sweeping the attention through the body and relaxing any tensions. Then, we'll move one at a time through the eyes, relaxing; the ears, relaxing; the nose, tongue, body, and the mind before we finally settle in with the breathing. So, like I said, kind of a long windup. Let's start the meditation.

Guided Meditation: The Ease of Mindful Seclusion

Finding our seat. To gently establish that upright, steady posture. Eyes gently closed, face relaxed.

And with a full breath all the way in, all the way out, let the weight of your body rest on your support.

Breathing in. Breathing all the way out. Resting into the form.

And from our firm base, and breathing in, letting the spine grow long. Balancing the head. Rolling the shoulders back.

Now, perhaps starting at the top of the head, we'll gently move our attention, like the attention's just gliding through the body, nice and slow. Everywhere it passes, releasing any extra holding or tension. Relaxing the head, the jaws, and the face, the mouth. Slowly gliding down the neck, the throat. Shoulders. Down one arm to the elbow, to the forearm. Relaxing the wrist and the hands and the fingers. The other arm. Relaxing any tensions. All the way through the fingers.

Then gently making your way through the torso from the top to the bottom, with easeful breathing. Relaxing the ribs and the lungs, the back, the belly, and the hips to the sitting base.

Now letting the attention continue down the leg. One leg to the knee. Relaxing as you go, down through the ankle, the heel, all the way down to the toes. And the other leg, all the way.

This supported body, spine upright, at ease. Our attention right here. Not grasping after anything. Not pushing anything away. Steady, present.

Now, in a similar way, moving the attention through the senses. First to the eyes, the physical eyes. Relaxing any tension in the eyes. And by doing so, letting go of any clinging, any grasping. Secluded from grasping at the nice. Do let any ease register.

Now moving back to the ears. Is there some way that any holding associated with the ears can be relaxed? Letting go of any clinging, any impulse. Secluded from clinging at the ears.

Now the nose. Relaxing the muscles inside and around the nose. Letting the breath move in and out freely. No grasping.

Now releasing any clinging associated with the tongue, the mouth. Relax the tongue itself, cheeks and the jaws and the gums. Easeful.

And again, the body. Now just noticing if there's any place of particular holding, letting it go. Releasing any sensations, any tensions associated with clinging, grasping.

Ease at the eyes. Ease at the ears. Ease at the nose. Ease at the tongue. Ease through the body. Easeful in the mind. Secluded from the unwholesome.

Now, without moving the attention so much, we can let the attention rest with the breathing. The breathing in, the breathing out.

You clearly know this ease of seclusion. Each of the senses clearly known, relaxed, released. No friction with experience. May this easeful seclusion remind us of the nourishment that's right here. May our practice be of benefit.

Thank you very much.

Dharmette: A Radiant Mind: Practice with the 5 Hindrances (1 of 5): Mindful with Desire

Dharmette: The Hindrances (1 of 5): Mindful with Desire

Good morning again. There's so much relaxation and calm in the body after the meditation. Well, my name is Kodo, here at Gil's² invitation, as he is on teaching retreat this week. Actually, just across the way, I'm at Insight Retreat Center.

So picking up the thread, I think each of us might easily be able to think of a memory of what it's like to love easily. Maybe at these times, there's a sense of something bigger than ourselves, or our self-concern has evaporated. Maybe there's a willingness to give or to serve or to care. In the context of the last few weeks of teaching, we might say that the heart and the mind are so capable of loving. And we know all too well when the forces in the mind get in the way of this love. They obstruct our capacities.

Maybe this is expressed in the ancient text: "The mind, monks, is radiant, but it is corrupted by passing corruptions. And the mind, monks, is radiant, and it is freed from passing corruptions. A trained noble one understands this as it is."

So in his teaching, the Buddha alerted us to a number of these, shall we say, obstructing forces in the mind. And five in particular were singled out pretty frequently as hindering our meditation practice, known as the five hindrances. It's sense desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse (sometimes restlessness and worry), and skeptical doubt.

The five hindrances are sometimes described with an analogy of working with gold. So imagining five impurities of gold—something like tin or copper—if these are mixed in the gold, the gold loses its pliancy and its wieldiness, its flexibility and its radiance, and it becomes brittle and kind of difficult to work with. But if the gold is freed of these impurities, then it becomes pliant and wieldy and radiant and so on. And whatever one wishes to make with this gold, someone with the skills can do it.

So it is just so with the mind. The presence of these five coverings, the five hindrances, impairs the flexibility, the wieldiness, the radiance, the lucidity of the mind, and our ability to concentrate. And when these five hindrances are not present, it's difficult to describe just how radiant the mind can be. And it's difficult to find its limits.

Pliancy and wieldiness, they're fine words, but I thought it might be useful to find some of our own. So I'd like some input from you. Those of you who are on the live YouTube can put a word or two in. What's it like when the mind is relatively free? What's a word or phrase that comes to mind? Maybe put them in the chat. There's a little bit of a delay between the feed and the chat, so I won't be able to repeat them back, but I can sure imagine. And then a second question: when your mind is this way, what qualities are you able to offer to others?

I'll keep my eyes open for anything that comes in. Oh, they're starting to trickle in. Quiet, spacious, heaven, luminous, openness, purity, love, peaceful. Oh, this is so lovely. And we know this. Wonderful.

So these hindrances, they cover over this mind that we know. They cover over just these qualities. The function of the hindrances, they're said to overgrow the mind and weaken wisdom. And part of their consequence, the Buddha said, is they're impediments to awareness that weaken wisdom, but they impede not only our meditation but also our conduct. There was another teacher who said that really any earnest attempt at clear thinking and pure living will be seriously affected by the presence of the five hindrances.

Bhante Gunaratana,³ a great teacher on the East Coast, he was even more vivid about the effect of the hindrances. He said they're like a tornado that wreaks havoc. But in just the same way that a blue sky can come after a storm, we can say that just on the other side of the hindrances, there's greater mindfulness, there's more thorough stillness, and the conditions for the arising of deeper wisdom.

So we know the flavor of freedom, and we know all too well what the challenges are. Maybe we can summarize our task as practitioners. Of course, it's to cultivate and realize freedom for ourselves and to deeply understand and let go of suffering and the causes of suffering. Challenges aren't impediments exactly; they are the path. They show us what we are practicing with.

So the approach we'll take for the five mornings with the five hindrances—again: sense desire; ill will or hostility; sloth and torpor; restlessness and worry; and uncertainty. Just to say something about the approach first, there's a wealth of information out there about the hindrances, everything from ancient texts to modern study guides. You can get a good range of teachings, great retreat talks, too. And then Gil has a great book called Unhindered. I think of it kind of like a workbook; it's guided reflections and instruction about the hindrances.

So you'll notice as we go through that the five hindrances all have a few things in common. First, the good news: they have a universal approach. That is to say, we have a universal approach to working with them, and that's mindfulness. Mindfulness is a powerful accompaniment, a powerful antidote to the hindrances. It's not uncommon in discussions of the hindrances for various kinds of meditation to be prescribed, and these can be really useful. But for this week, my assumption is that mindfulness is the practice that we all share, so we'll talk most about that.

Another thing that the hindrances have in common is their characteristic, the way they show up. They show up both in the body as sensations (we'll talk a lot about that), and they also usually show up with a story. So we'll look at our thinking. It means that the hindrances express themselves through our body, through our breathing, through our emotions, through our thinking, and through the focus of our attention. And maybe these five things seem familiar: they're the five aspects of our mindfulness practice. And through each of those five aspects—breath, body, emotions, thinking, and our attention—we can see how a hindrance is working in us, how it's active, and it gives us a way in to work with it. So that's what we'll do.

So just briefly to introduce sense desire, Kāma-cchanda.⁴ Let's get to know it. Some of the translations might say something about the different shades of desire, things like greed, sensual desire, covetousness. But I like "sense desire" as a translation because it demonstrates the links to our senses.

A speed bump when talking about sense desire is that it gets mixed up with desire as such. We get the idea that all desire is the bad thing. As a counter-example, we can keep in mind that there are wholesome desires of the path, things like the desire to practice, the aspiration to awaken, the desire to do good, to give a wholesome gift. We know sense desire by its hindering function. We can ask, is this a form of desire that compounds the mind? Is it the sort of desire that in the texts is likened to a hungry dog that's gnawing on a bone but can't satisfy its hunger? It's characterized by some unwholesome relationship to the senses. So in short, we call it compulsive desire.

So does this state cloud the mind? Or one way you might ask yourself right now is, "Is desire the boss?" Not only does this form of sense desire overtake the mind, but it clouds our vision, and this is expressed really nicely in a classical metaphor. It says, when one dwells with a mind obsessed by sense desire, overwhelmed by sense desire, and one does not understand as it really is the escape from sense desire, on that occasion, one neither knows nor sees as it really is one's own good, or the good of others, or the good of both.

So that is to say, when the mind is overcome by sense desire, you can't tell the way out, and it's really difficult to see what's good, the skillful way forward for you, for others. The classic simile is that of holding a bowl of water. You want to look down in the water and see your reflection, but the water is mixed with a lacquer or, as the texts say, turmeric or a dye. And if you look down in this bowl, you can't see your reflection because of the coloring of the water. And it's just so with the mind. A mind overcome with sensual desire doesn't see one's own good. It doesn't see the good of others.

So when I think back of these beautiful qualities that we were talking about, if we can't see in this way, if we can't sense, if we can't know, how could we give our best to those we love?

But a key to the path of mindfulness with the hindrances is our attitude. As Gil sometimes puts it, if we're aware of desire desiringly, then desire grows. But if we're aware of desire mindfully, mindfulness grows. So this is where it's really good for us to get to know desire in its details.

So what's desire like in the breath, in the body, in the emotions, in the thinking, in the attention? I'm sure you can come up with some descriptions of your own. But for me, with sense desire, the breathing tends to either get really shallow and quick, or it gets deeper with some real force in it.

In the body, though, what does desire feel like? Sometimes maybe leaning forward or tension, even heat or gripping in the eyes, gripping in the hands. I'd suggest don't fear the sensations, but we can see and sense and feel sensations. That is the way in to be mindful with sense desire.

What about emotions? What emotions might come up? Sometimes the top layer is longing, but underneath, maybe there's another emotion. Jack Kornfield⁵ tells a story of meditating for a long time. He was out in the jungle doing a long retreat, and he was just assailed by desire. He kept up the mindfulness with it, kept up the mindfulness with it, and eventually, he saw something underneath. And it was an emotion fueling the desire that was loneliness.

Into our thinking. What story might sense desire tell? Maybe something like, "If only I could have..." or, "All of my problems will be solved if I can get blank." Or it might be as simple as, "I want this."

So the hindrances can sometimes seem non-negotiable, but they all become negotiable through mindful observation. Sense desire, like the other hindrances, can move our attention from being free and flowing, easeful, to fixed and gripping. But mindfulness can help us find the way out.

So just to sum up, as with the other hindrances, I would suggest to be a student of sense desire. Really get to know it as it's manifesting in these different ways of the breath, the body, emotions, thoughts, sensations, the attention as it appears, and know it when it's absent. Don't be fooled by the story that sense desire tells. You can turn mindfulness instead toward the body, toward the sensations. Desire can be really persuasive, but when its insistence comes with an exclamation point of a demand, maybe just add a little question mark of curiosity. What's going on here? What exactly am I experiencing?

So, maybe keep this practice with you throughout the day and see if you might be able to track where sense desire arises during your day. How does that happen? In response to what? And how does it affect you? And then notice its absence. Notice when it's not here. Notice the ease of seclusion.

This mind surely can be radiant. So may you enjoy the day of practice, and we'll continue with the hindrances tomorrow. Take care. May all beings benefit from our time together.