If you love yourself, you will guard yourself well.  --The Dhammapada, Chapter 12

Zen practice is very simple:  moment to moment, how do I keep my mind?  On the cushion, we train in letting go of our narratives, our "false imaginings" as the Buddha put it.  Over time, we begin to trust practice more and more; trust our original mind; trust the irreducible truth of this moment.

The question then becomes "how much do we trust it away from the cushion?"  It's true that practice seems more difficult in our lives -- paying bills, trying to raise children, dealing with our cars breaking down -- than it is in the meditation hall, where everything seems to support it.  But it's also true, and probably even more basic, that we don't tend to make the same effort off the cushion as on it.  People leave retreats with some measure of awareness and often express concern that it's going to go right out the window as soon as they get back home, back to work, maybe even on the drive home.  But the real difference between "retreat mind" and "everyday mind" isn't simply that "everyday mind" has more to deal with.  It's not as though we're at the complete mercy of traffic on the way home, but that we tend to make an effort to practice on retreat that we let go of as soon as we're waving goodbye to our fellow retreatants, thinking about that blueberry muffin and latte we're going to get at Avalon, or the movie we're going to rent, or whatever.  The point is not that the meditation cushion is inherently better than blueberry muffins, but that we've decided one is for practice and the other isn't.

Moment to moment, we're either awake to our lives or we're sleepwalking.  The choice is the same wherever we are.  The cushion is necessary and temples are helpful, but only to the extent that they teach us how not to be seduced by the very things we love to be seduced by:  hitting rewind and play on the same scenes over and over that have only ever existed in our heads.

I've just had a bit of trying week.  In the midst of all the normal stuff that needed doing, we were having problems with the old pipes in this building:  seemed like they were all either freezing or clogging up.  We had some minor electrical things.  Messes.  There's a line from Charles Bukowski that comes to me from time to time during weeks like these (and I'm paraphrasing a bit):  "It's not the big things that send a man to the madhouse:  death, disease.  These things he's prepared for.  No, it's the little things, like a broken shoelace with no time left."

Watching our minds at these times, we can see, very clearly, that we want to be hooked by things.  It's not that practice has become any more difficult, really, but that we're compelled to get caught in the drama.  So our excuse is, "well, things are really crazy right now and I'm tired and stressed and whatnot," but the truth is we let go of our effort to practice.  We're seduced by broken shoelaces because we want to be. 

The point is not to never be stressed, but to make the same effort when we are stressed that we make on the cushion.  When practice is easy, we try.  When practice is difficult, we try. 

Or not.  But it's our choice.

Shakyamuni Buddha distilled all of the ways we like to run away into what he called the Five Hindrances. 

The First Hindrance is sense desire, sometimes called greed or lust.  The traditional term is tanha, which basically means "thirst."  Sometimes we think if we don't go to the mall or look at catalogues and that sort of thing, our greed will dissipate.  And it's true, these can be helpful practices.  But our greed will follow us anywhere.  I remember reading Ajahn Sumedho say that when he was a young monk in the forests of Thailand, each monk owned only one robe.  And one monk's robe might be a little more yellow than another's, or a little more orange.  And he started obsessing about getting a different robe with a color he liked a little better.  Our thirst is internal and it will look for any object in the world to justify its existence.  We have to really see this, and see how it's born of this idea of our own basic impoverishment; this idea that we fundamentally lack something.  The reality is that we lack nothing.  From the beginning, we lack nothing.

The Second Hindrance is usually translated as ill-will or anger or hatred.  Actually, ill-will and hatred are born of anger.  The energy of anger is first, often fleeting; ill-will and hatred are narratives plus anger.  So when we let go of our storylines, which we build around anger to protect us, we learn to deal with the raw energy of anger by itself.  And then we see how compelling anger is to us, how seductive:  the first sparks of hatred. 

The Third Hindrance is dullness or sloth.  In other words, "I don't have time to practice."  When one of her students said this to the Indian saint Dipa Ma, she said, "Well, do you have time to breathe?"  Again, do we leave our effort on the cushion?   

The Fourth Hindrance is restlessness, agitation, or worry.  We tend to be addicted to our anxiety (actually we're addicted to all five hindrances).  Meditation practice can be boring as hell:  there's nothing to hold on to.  Anxiety at least makes us feel like we're doing something!  And we tend to equate our agitation with caring, don't we?  "It's because I care that I'm a basketcase."  Maybe we even think, "if you really cared, you'd be a basketcase, too!" 

Restlessness and agitation are habits of mind and will always find an excuse to exist if we let them.  But peace and an open mind are habits, too.  There's a story I love about the composer John Cage.  One evening he slept on Alan Watts's couch, near a hamster cage with a squeaky wheel, and this hamster just kept running along on it, squeak squeak squeak. . . .  Watts offered to move it for him so he could sleep okay, and Cage replied, "No, don't do that, it's the most fascinating sound, I shall use it as a lullaby."   

And the Fifth Hindrance is skeptical doubt.  There's a classic Zen teaching that the three things required for a pracitioner are Great Faith, Great Courage, and Great Doubt.  This "Great Doubt" and the skeptical doubt of the Fifth Hindrance are actually diametric opposites, although this word "doubt" is used for both.  It's really just a problem of translation.  "Great Doubt" is also sometimes called "Great Questioning" and points to our willingness to return over and over to this moment without all of our mental armor.  What is this?  Skeptical doubt points to its opposite:  our tendency to always want to know how our efforts will turn out.  Skeptical doubt points to the ways in which we're always referring to our own understanding, our own ideas and ideals.  Some teachers have called this kind of doubt "wavering":  it's like practicing with one foot in the door and one foot out.  Or like trying to swim while hanging onto the side of the pool.

All of the hindrances are born of ignorance:  "I'm a solid, fixed permanent self apart from you, apart from the universe."  And the hindrances feed our ignorance.  Ignorance as in ignoring.  And our job as pracitioners is precisely not to ignore, whether in the meditation hall or the supermarket.  Moment to moment.