How to Practice Mindfulness of the Five Hindrances

In a recorded teaching from Sravasti Abbey dated October 16, 2026, Venerable Thubten Chodron returns to the fourth of the four establishments of mindfulness, mindfulness of phenomena, and begins with the five hindrances that cloud a meditator's mind. Working from Following in the Buddha's Footsteps, the fourth volume of the Library of Wisdom and Compassion that she co-authored with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, she presents the hindrances as habits to be watched as they arise, examined, and understood. The talk is part meditation instruction and part argument about self-criticism: the practice, she says, only works when the practitioner stops demanding results by a deadline.

What does a Buddhist teaching sound like before it begins?

The session opens the way many Tibetan Buddhist teachings do, with chanting rather than a lecture. Before any talk about the mind, the room recites a set of verses. The students are asked to visualize a merit field, a gathering of the teachers and holy beings, surrounded by all sentient beings, and to lead those beings in taking refuge and generating bodhicitta, the aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all. The verses are sung slowly. One stanza offers the ground "anointed with perfume, flowers strewn," imagined as a Buddha land, and asks that all beings "enjoy this pure land." Another refrain repeats until the room seems to breathe with it: "I take refuge until I have awakened in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha."

For anyone who has never sat through this kind of opening, it can seem like a preamble to get through. Chodron treats it as the substance of the practice. The motivation set at the start, she says, shapes everything that follows, and listeners should not treat the teaching as a private tool for calming their own minds.

Who protects the Dharma, and why does the teaching begin there?

Before the hindrances come up, Chodron spends several minutes on the Dharma protectors of the Abbey, a recitation the community performs three times in the evening chanting. She divides the protectors into three groups, each one a different kind of responsibility.

"The first time we're paying homage to the transcendental Dharma protectors, those who are Aryas, who have realizations of the Dharma, and who are fully capable of protecting the teachings. And the teachings need to be protected from our own defilements, our own afflictions, and they need to be protected from external hindrances, war, for example, bigotry." (Thubten Chodron, Sravasti Abbey teaching, around 8:45)

The second group is the teachers, whom she names in the talk, a list of masters who come to teach the community and pass the Dharma on. The third group, she says, must be the students themselves: "Because we have received the teachings and in order to pass them down... we have to practice them." Protecting the Dharma, in her framing, starts in one's own mind, and that is precisely where the five hindrances live. The ethic is practical. The teachings survive only if practitioners embody them well enough to share them later.

Why is mindfulness of phenomena the place to meet the hindrances?

The four establishments of mindfulness move from the body, to feelings, to mind, and finally to phenomena, a category broad enough to include the qualities and obstacles of the mind itself. Chodron notes that the book lists specific categories of phenomena for practice, and the first is "our old friends, the five hindrances." Her tone is wry: "Yeah, we know these guys well." But she insists that knowing a thing in theory is not the same as seeing it operate. She calls the book's instructions "very, very helpful" and recommends the meditation on the hindrances highly.

The point of the category is precision. A hindrance you cannot name is one you keep obeying. The fourth establishment asks the meditator to catch the hindrance in the act, see it as a phenomenon that arises and passes away, and stop taking it as a fixed fact about oneself.

How do you watch a hindrance arise without getting lost in it?

The clearest passage in the portion of the transcript available comes when Chodron begins working through the hindrances in conversation with the room. Sensual desire is the first example she takes up, and she invites responses before moving to the next one. Her method is to bring the mind to a specific experience, let the hindrance show itself, and then observe it. The instruction is almost physical: "Okay, watch it arise." She returns to that image more than once, the way a teacher returns to a tuning fork.

She also uses stories to keep the abstraction grounded, including an extended anecdote about a red Porsche and a sequence about a refrigerator that drew laughter from the room. The stories are not decoration. They show how craving builds from a single glance into a whole narrative, and how the mind then argues for its own conclusion. Later, when she turns to attachment, she traces it back to its causes rather than treating it as an isolated flare-up. In the portion available, the line that stands out is her statement that "attachment arises from not guarding" the mind, a reminder that the practice is preventive as well as corrective.

The approach is not about suppressing desire or refusing it. It is about seeing the sequence clearly enough that the next moment of contact can be different. A careful reader can use the same stance at home: pick one hindrance, watch for it in an ordinary situation, and notice the story it tells before acting on it.

Why does self-criticism count as an obstacle too?

Perhaps the most striking part of the talk is not a hindrance on the official list at all. Chodron turns to resilience, a theme she says came up at a conference, and she names what she sees as a cultural habit. "In our culture we tend to get so down on ourselves," she says. She describes the internal monologue that follows a meditator's failures, the thought that they are studying the qualities of great Bodhisattvas and have none of them, and the conclusion that one is a hopeless fool.

"That's not fair to ourselves. Because we're looking very short term and we're setting a bar that's like sky high... And that's not how practicing the path works... We have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And slowly we get there." (Thubten Chodron, Sravasti Abbey teaching, around 13:54 and following)

Her answer is a change of time frame. She says she does not have to beat herself up over the realizations she lacks, and she offers a sentence to practice with: "someday I will be." She is precise that there is no set date and no expectation attached. The aspiration is long-term, and it is the source of the confidence to keep going through difficulty. Her verdict on the self-critical reflex is blunt: it is "useless." For a meditation on hindrances, this matters. Self-criticism is itself a hindrance dressed as seriousness, and it blocks the same clear seeing the practice demands.

Where do the Theravada sources come in?

Chodron also notes that the explanations in the book draw on the Theravada perspective and Pali sutras, not only on Mahayana texts. She points out that sources from that tradition appear within the book's treatment of the hindrances, a reminder that the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness were transmitted across several lineages. For a reader, the practical value is that the instructions are not sectarian. They are the common ground that the various traditions have used to describe how the mind works.

What is the long-term aim of this practice?

The teaching closes on the same expansive note with which it began. Chodron frames the study and meditation as a way of benefiting all sentient beings, and she hopes that those who practice will one day be able to share what they have learned. The five hindrances, in this account, are not an examination to pass. They are the material through which a practitioner learns to see the mind clearly, and that clarity is what eventually makes it possible to help others.

It is worth stating what the transcript available here does not show. The description refers to a four-step process for contemplating the hindrances, and the book's fuller instructions are on pages 377 and 378. The excerpt does not spell out each of those steps, so this article does not reconstruct them. Readers who want the full sequence should work with the book itself.

Where to go from here

If this teaching has made you curious about the practice, start with the source. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps, the fourth volume of the Library of Wisdom and Compassion, is available through Wisdom Experience at https://wisdomexperience.org/product/following-in-the-buddhas-footsteps/. For more teachings from Sravasti Abbey, visit https://SravastiAbbey.org, and for the work of Venerable Thubten Chodron, visit https://ThubtenChodron.org.

The teaching's own note is worth carrying with you: attend online teachings the way you would attend in person. Choose one hindrance this week, watch it arise in a single ordinary moment, and when you notice yourself getting harsh about it, remember the sentence she offers: someday, and one foot in front of the other.