Freedom & the Nine Hindrances

Posted Feb 17 2011

What hinders us from living in freedom, ease, connectedness, or witness to the sacred? If daffodils push their stalks up from the earth in spite of the madness up here, if birds return in song in spite of how crazy our schedules are, if the daphne odora reveals her creative spark on her branches in spite of how tired we are, if the jasmine revels delightfully in spite of how uncertain we are…what hinders us from living in our native beauty and grace?

Sometimes I feel overtaken by the small and large tragedies of human life, the largest being when we lose our capacity to love. A week in Mexico on a yoga retreat, a deep savasana following a challenging practice, a quiet meditation, or a moment of poignancy may refresh our faith in beauty, grace and love. However, this doesn’t always refresh our faith in our personal beauty or grace, nor our capacity to love. Therein lies one of the nine hindrances: Doubt in our capacity. Yet another: Fatigue. Oh, and Illness, Resignation, or Arrogance.

Daily we’re challenged to express our faith. We’re challenged to know ourselves, to examine our behaviors, thoughts, and actions. We’re challenged to weed out that which obscures our path and to protect ourselves from the ways in which we dull ourselves from the inside.

The path of yoga opens us to the pains and joys of an indescribable evolution of the heart. The pains? Yes, we will experience the pain, or discomfort, of saying NO to the obstacles on our path; and the sorrow of admitting to the hindrances that we’ve reinforced again and again. The joys? The tender moments of freedom and clear seeing when we know without a doubt that we are held in the family of humanity in all of our perfections and imperfections, destined to humble ourselves to the beauty and grace that blooms through us, when we are most un-self-absorbed.

Regardless of what’s occurring in my life, or in the world around me, I begin each morning at home with a baptism in this grace: I step down into my hot tub immersed in a “whole body ‘Thank God for hot water!’ shiver” of gratitude. Around me, the night sky still holds the stars, the shapes of spring’s arrival punctuate the landscape, the quiet, distant traffic sounds reveal that most of the neighborhood is asleep, and, as all hindrances, present, past or future, dissolve in the hot water, I unfailingly remember the preciousness of this life.