"Everyone Comes Out from Nothingness"
Embracing Aversion to Free Our Hearts
In December 2003, I participated in my first seven-day meditation retreat at the Austin (Texas) Zen Center. In Zen parlance, we call this particular intensive “rohatsu sesshin” because it ends with a celebration of Siddhartha’s enlightenment, usually observed on December 8th. The word “rohatsu” means “the eighth day of the 12th month,” and “sesshin” means “to collect or touch the mind.”
Like most sesshin, participants sit in silent meditation and practice walking meditation for 10-to-13-hours a day. In more formal settings, participants also eat three “oryoki” meals a day in the meditation hall. The Japanese word “oryoki” means “just the right amount,” and it’s a beautiful ritual that illuminates the interdependency of giver, receiver, and gift: each participant rotates through the serving crew (giver) that offers food (gift) to other practitioners (receiver).
Since this ritual is performed silently, those of us being served use hand gestures to indicate how much food we’d like in each of our three bowls. During one lunch period, when the woman serving me knelt to offer me rice, I gestured that I only wanted a small amount. To my utter horror, she dumped a ton of rice into my bowl. She either did not see or understand the gesture or she saw it and chose to ignore it. There’s no way for me to have known then what her intent or motivation was.
As the receiver of this unwanted gift of too much rice, I started to feel agitated and annoyed with the server. Thought started ricocheting through my mind: “I can’t believe she gave me all this rice. Didn’t she see my hand gesture? She wasn’t paying attention.” Then there were other thoughts that were more menacing: “She did this on purpose because she has the hots for my ex-boyfriend. She’s being mean and vindictive.” You get the gist.
Since I was new to Zen, I did not have the tools to work with what was arising in my mind. I was ignorant about these mental afflictions, what the Buddha called The Five Hindrances. “Aversion” or “ill-will” is the second hindrance. The other four are: desire for sensual pleasure, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse, and corrosive doubt.
What do these five hinder? Broadly speaking, they hinder a person’s spiritual development. They hinder a person’s liberation amid suffering. They distract and perturb the mind to the extent that it does not settle and does not pay careful attention to what’s arising—on and off the meditation cushion; and they prevent us from realizing the boundless, spacious nature of the mind. In Buddhist scriptures, The Five Hindrances are often called “overwhelmers of the mind or overpowerers of wisdom.”
While in meditation, these hindrances impede our ability to experience calm and insight while we’re meditating. When we are afflicted by any of these hindrances, they obscure our ability to clearly know what’s arising in the six sense doors. When we’re able to clearly know the physical and mental phenomena that’s arising, we experience these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts as unsatisfactory, impermanent, and impersonal.
In the sixth century text, The Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, the Chan monk Chih-i who wrote this manual, dedicates a chapter to the elimination of the hindrances, which he refers to as “desire-based ideas” that “cover over the wholesome mind.” Eihei Dogen, the 13th century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, refers to the hindrances as “coverings” in Hokyo-ki: a collection of dialogues between him and his teacher Rujing, who he studied with in China from 1225-1227. Here is Rujing’s response when to Dogen question “What is dropping off body and mind?”
Rujing said, “Dropping off body and mind is zazen. When we just practice zazen, we part from the five desires and remove the five coverings.”
He continues on to say, “For the descendants of buddhas and ancestors, removing even one of the five coverings or one of the five desires is of great benefit; it is meeting the buddhas and ancestors.”
In the above passage, the five desires refer to the arising of sensations from the objects of the five senses: things seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. The Chinese character used for the word “coverings” literally means a physical lid or a cover, but here implies a spiritual hindrance to wisdom.
While each of the five coverings is important to understand and study, I’m particularly interested in exploring “ill will” because there’s so much hostility in our world. There are several wars raging around the world, causing many thousands of deaths and millions of refugees. There’s been 172 mass shooting this year in the United States of America. Perhaps a more apt name is “divided states of America.” These external divisions reflect our internal divisions, our internal states of aversion and hostility.
The Buddha offered many analogies to demonstrate how these hindrances affect our bodies and minds. For ill-will, he uses the image “of a bowl of water heated on a fire and boiling and bubbling over, such that a person with good eyesight would not be able to see their face reflected accurately in the water.” When our awareness is “possessed by and overcome” with ill will, we can not see how to escape from it once it’s arisen AND we are unable to discern what’s beneficial for ourselves and others.
In comparison to all the violence that’s committed around the world, my being annoyed by the amount of rice I was served might be considered innocuous and hardly worth investigating. However, these thoughts of resistance and dislike are also an expression of aversion in its most rudimentary sense as a manifestation of this “pushing away” energy.
Working with the underlying energy dynamic of the hindrances is a practice that the Thai Forest Monk Ajahn Thiradhammo discusses in his book Working with the Five Hindrances. If we drop the labels and focus more on the felt experience of each hindrance, most of the obstacles we encounter on the spiritual path (which is life) could fit into these categories. The desire for sensual pleasure is a grasping energy. Ill-will is a pushing away energy. Sloth and torpor is a collapsing energy. Restlessness and remorse is an over activation. Corrosive doubt is vacillating energy. When they are present, these hindrances obscure reality by distorting how we perceive what’s happening.
Paying close attention to this “pushing away” energy of “ill will,” especially while we’re meditating, can help illuminate what Ajahn Thiradhammo calls “the rejection syndrome.” I confess that until I read his book, I had never thought of “anger” or “resentment” as an expression of “rejection.” I usually relate to aversion or anger as being afraid of being vulnerable, which, I did not perceive as a fear of rejection. So it’s been heart opening for me to view the second hindrance through the lens of the rejection syndrome.
Fundamentally, what gives rise to ill will is an aversion to an unpleasant experience, whether that’s a physical sensation or a mental/emotional event. In the case of receiving too much rice, I did not give voice to the thoughts of dislike ricocheting through my mind because we were in a silent retreat. Had I not been in sesshin, I probably would not have even been aware of these thoughts. Since this was a minor event in my life, those thoughts did not cause harm to myself or others.
When an experience arises that’s uncomfortable, there’s an instinctive reaction to protect the self from this perceived threat by contracting or recoiling from the emotional or physical pain. The deeper the wound of rejection, the more intense the aversion reaction will be. How we experience and express this contracted pain-energy depends on many factors, including how we were conditioned as children.
Some common reactions to avoiding the rejection wound are: fleeing, fighting, freezing, or fawning (people-pleasing). Whether we’re aware of it or not, the stuck pain-energy seeks an outlet because the nature of all conditioned phenomena is flux; so if energy is stuck, it seeks a way to flow. Also, I feel that part of our journey in this human body-mind is to transform our karma so we can experience freedom amid the swirl of suffering that arises in our lives.
Like all of the hindrances, aversion can be subtle or gross. Sometimes the aversion is so gossamer that we don’t even notice it floating around until we encounter the situation or person who is triggering the aversion and then BAM! we are overwhelmed by this pushing-away energy. Sometimes this volatile energy is so intense that we can’t tolerate being in the person’s presence. However, it’s more accurate to say that we cannot tolerate being with what’s arising internally when we’re with this person. Whatever we’re unable to make peace with in ourselves is a hindrance in making peace with “the other.”
“Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the true joy of life.” —Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Ajahn Thiradhammo says, “A substantial degree of patience and perseverance is required to undo the habitual pain contraction underpinning ill will as this goes against all the ego conditioning we have cultivated during a lifetime.” And often there’s a “considerable back log of unresolved hurt” that we are holding which makes it that much more difficult to stay close to this volatile energy.
Some people move away from this “unresolved hurt” in more visible ways, such as obvious outbursts of anger. This is the fighting reaction, which is probably the reaction that causes the most immediate harm, either to ourselves or others. Although the other aversion reactions of fleeing, freezing, or fawning might be more subtle and less visible, they also cause harm, and may be expressed as: passive-aggression, conflict avoidance, shirking responsibility, isolating from others, drug use, co-dependency, criticizing others, and simmering resentment. The list goes on!
Practicing meditation helps us to cultivate the ability to be mindful of our mental states and bodily sensations. This is key of course to begin working with any of the hindrances because we first need to notice when they are present. Then we need to develop the ability to observe what conditions give rise to the hindrances and what causes a particular hindrance to dissipate. We also need to develop the capacity to prevent (not suppress, though) the hindrances from arising in the future.
If we’re able to drop below the thinking mind to reconnect with the physicality of our bodies in the present moment we can begin to investigate the feeling tones and pain-contractions associated with ill-will. Placing the mind’s attention on arising emotion-sensation in the body is key to transforming the karmic energy of suffering—these conditioned patterns of being and doing that cause harm to ourselves or others.
For some of us, it does not feel safe to get too close to the body and especially to the pain-contraction of ill-will. If this is the case for you, some other ways that we can work with the hindrance of aversion is to:
Cultivate loving kindness toward ourselves and the hindrance when we notice it’s present. This shift in our mental posture helps us to provide some space around the pain and not add another layer of aversion by beating ourselves up for being angry.
Cultivate friendliness toward the person we’re having difficulty with, perhaps even by giving them a gift.
Practice with the anatomical parts: If we’re upset with a particular person, we can ask ourselves: “What are we angry with in that person: their hair? Their fingers? Their legs?” Or is it one of the elements of fire, earth, water or air that flows through them that’s annoying us?
The main thrust of this type of contemplation is to remind ourselves that the other person is compounded phenomena just like we are. They do not exist as a solid, independent self. So when we view the person through the lens of their anatomy or the elements, it can soften our aversion by reminding us that who they are is not who we think they are. And, that we are all composed of the same elements and anatomical parts.
Reflect on the harm that we are causing ourselves by harboring anger.
For me, when I notice ill-will or aversion is present, I do my best to touch the texture of the thoughts, then bring the mind’s attention to breathing sensations. Anchoring the mind in this way helps to slow the thinking mind and cool the heat of arising aversion. Each time the habit pattern of ill-will is interrupted it lessens the intensity and reduces the frequency of this hindrance.
Clearly knowing that whatever arises in the sense doors is not who we are and is just passing phenomena helps to slowly heal the pain of rejection and remove the armor from our hearts and become free.
Thank you for sharing your writing with us. I have been thinking a lot about the hindrances lately. The line from the heart sutra is enticing to me, "with no hindrance in the mind; no hindrance, therefore no fear." No fear sounds lovely.
I am grateful for your words on ill will and for framing it as both aversion and a fear of rejection. That resonates with me and helps frame how, at one time, ill-will could be protective. It has just become unskillful in my life now. That habitual reaction is trying to protect me from being rejected.
This line also struck a chord within, "Whatever we’re unable to make peace with in ourselves is a hindrance in making peace with “the other.”
I have lots of work to do on the hindrances arising within this body. Your essay is a helpful tool. Thank you.
In June I'll be attending a weeklong sesshin with three ōryōki meals.
First off, I want to be 100% frank and reveal that I despise the formality of ōryōki but otherwise love sesshins.
That said, my main issue is that, since we're physically pretty inactive during sesshins, rather than 3 meals, I'd prefer to eat only breakfast. Since I'll probably have to at least sit through lunch and dinner anyway, is it deemed kosher to simply turn one's ōryōki bowls upside down to indicate that one wants no food?
Thanks for any advice you can give on this subject.