When we are practicing insight meditation, a range of different conditions will arise. Sometimes the movement of the body will be clear to us and other times it will not. We will experience positive, negative and neutral feelings. Sometimes the mind will be busy and sometimes it will be quiet. And, we will experience various different other conditions such as worry, doubt, craving, lazy and anger.

We refer to these latter five conditions as hindrances because they tend to make meditation practice less enjoyable. To overcome them, we need not treat them any differently than another type of condition. Our job as meditators is to simply be aware of them and then bring the mind back to what we are doing. Every time that we bring the mind back to the present moment, we are effectively taking refuge from difficulty.

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(1) Understand the Pain, D. Overcoming Pain