Learn how to work with the five hindrances using the Buddha's own method from MN 19. Practical TWIM meditation guidance from the Kalimpong Retreat 2025.
Your Mind Wanders? The Buddha’s Step-by-Step Fix for the Five Hindrances
Have you ever sat down to meditate only to find your mind hijacked by desire, irritation, or restless thinking? If so, you are in good company. Before the Buddha attained full awakening, he faced exactly these same struggles. And in Majjhima Nikaya sutta 19 — the Dvedhavitakka Sutta, or “Two Kinds of Thought” — he gave us a remarkably honest and practical account of how he navigated them.
In this Day 2 talk from the Kalimpong Retreat (April 2025), the teachers of the Metta Vipassana Way unpack this sutta and show how the TWIM (Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation) practice of the six Rs gives us a direct, step-by-step method for working with the hindrances. Whether you are new to meditation or a seasoned practitioner, the approach described here can transform how you relate to the difficult states that arise in your mind.
A word of caution from the teachers, though: don’t disappear down the rabbit hole of thinking about your practice rather than doing your practice. Over the course of a retreat, the talks will be “intellectually very satisfying. But intellectual satisfaction is not knowing. It’s information.” The practice is when you know this and make it part of you. The intellectual stuff you will generally forget. But if you feel it and experience it, you will not.
Two Kinds of Thought: The Buddha’s Own Struggle
The Dvedhavitakka Sutta begins with a striking admission. The bodhisattva — the Buddha before his awakening — divided his thoughts into two categories. On one side: sensual desire, ill will, and cruelty. On the other: renunciation, loving kindness, and compassion.
What is remarkable about this teaching is how human it is. Even with all his prior training, the bodhisattva experienced sensual desire arising in his mind. He was not exempt from it. But what he did next is the teaching that matters.
He recognized the thought for what it was: “This thought of sensual desire has arisen in me.” Then he examined its consequences: “This leads to my own affliction, to others’ affliction, and to the affliction of both. It obstructs wisdom, causes difficulties, and leads away from Nibbana.”
And when he considered these consequences clearly, the thought subsided. He abandoned it, removed it, and did away with it. He then applied the same process to thoughts of ill will and cruelty.
The Six Rs: A Practical Method for Releasing Hindrances
So how do we actually do what the Buddha described? In the TWIM approach, the answer is the six Rs — a simple, repeatable process that maps directly onto the Buddha’s own method. As the teachers liked to remind us: “We ask lots of questions. Usually there’s only one answer.” And that answer is the six Rs.
Recognize
The first step is to recognize what is happening in your mind. A thought of sensual desire has arisen. Or ill will. Or restlessness, or dullness. You simply notice it. This is the moment of awareness that the Buddha described: “I understood thus — this thought has arisen in me.”
Release
Next, you release the thought. This does not mean you change it, repress it, or try to force it away. You simply abandon it. You stop feeding it with your attention. As the teachers emphasized, what sustains these thoughts is our attention — we are feeding them, and the release is the act of turning our attention away.
Relax
When we recognize the tension in our body and brain, we are recognizing tanha — craving. The “I like it, I don’t like it” mind. The “I want it, I don’t want it” mind. One of the beautiful insights of the Buddhist teaching is the recognition that craving is always associated with physical tension. We are invited to tranquilize the bodily formation as part of the practice. When we relax the bodily tension, we relax craving. And craving and dukkha are bedfellows — you do not get one without the other. Relaxing breaks that circle.
Smile
Smiling helps the mind go wide and open. When we strain, the mind narrows. When we relax and smile, the mind becomes expansive, receptive, and ready to observe. As the teachers put it: “Smiling is a free ticket to that wide mind. Why wouldn’t you want a free ticket? Because meditation seems it should be serious.” The idea that meditation must be grim-faced effort is exactly what holds us back.
Return
You return to the feeling of loving kindness — or compassion, or sympathetic joy, or equanimity, whichever of the four Brahma Viharas you are cultivating. Metta (loving kindness) is the antidote to ill will. And loving kindness is also the precursor to karuna (compassion); as practice deepens, the mind naturally migrates through these wholesome states.
Repeat
The process repeats. The mind wanders, you recognize it, release, relax, smile, and return. This is the meditation. And as the teachers made clear: even if your mind wanders away fifty times and you bring it back, you are still having a good meditation. The only time you are not meditating is when you follow a distraction and stay with it.
The Cowherd Simile: Patience in the Early Days
The Buddha offered a vivid image for the early stages of practice. Imagine it is the last month of the rainy season, autumn, and the young crops are thickening in the fields. A cowherd must guard the herd constantly, tapping and poking the cows on this side and that to keep them out of the crops. If they stray into the fields, the cowherd will be fined and blamed.
This is what the early days of retreat practice feel like. You must constantly check what the “cows” of the mind are doing. Sensual desire, ill will, restlessness — they will wander toward the crops if you look away for even a moment.
The teachers offered this encouragement: do not be disappointed when you notice the cows straying. It is the nature of cows to want to eat nice green shoots. It is the nature of the mind to wander, to grasp at sensual desire, to feel defensive and therefore aggressive. For the first few days, you are going to feel, “Oh my god, all I got to do is keep poking these cows! I’ve got no opportunity to sit at the base of the tree and relax because if I shut my eyes one moment, they’ll be off.” That is okay. That is what you are there to do.
But the simile has a second part. In the last month of the hot season, when the crops have been harvested and brought inside the village, the cowherd can relax at the root of a tree. The cows can wander — he only needs to be mindful that they are there.
This is what happens as practice deepens. As you become more familiar with the six Rs, the process begins to take over. Less direct effort is needed. You can rest in the practice, simply observing how the mind is, and your learning deepens.
Changing the Inclination of the Mind
One of the most powerful teachings in MN 19 is this: “Whatever a student frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of their mind.”
If you frequently think and ponder upon thoughts of sensual desire, your mind inclines toward sensual desire. If you nurture grudges — even against yourself, with thoughts like “I’m not worth it” or “I don’t deserve anything better” — your mind inclines toward ill will and cruelty.
But if you frequently think and ponder upon renunciation, loving kindness, and compassion, your mind inclines toward those instead.
So what is the process of moving from sensual desire to renunciation, from ill will to non-ill will, from cruelty to non-cruelty? As the teacher put it with a grin: “I told you there’s only one answer.” The six Rs. Always the six Rs.
This is not positive thinking or forced optimism. It is a retraining of the mind through the meditation process. The habitual patterns — the stories that come up, the reflexes, the ingrained impressions about yourself and others — are so automatic that they are no longer experienced as thoughts. They feel like truths. But a thought is not a truth. And through the six Rs, you change the way the mind thinks and ponders. You create new habitual patterns.
Pain, Dukkha, and Compassion
A question arose during the talk that many meditators will recognize: what about situations that cause deep pain, where anger feels justified, and compassion feels impossible?
The teachers drew a crucial distinction. Pain is not dukkha. Pain is unpleasant sensation — it arises from conditions, and we are not in control of it. The Buddha described feeling (vedana) as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and said this is not under our control.
But what comes after vedana is tanha — craving, the “I like it, I don’t like it” mind. This, the Buddha said, is where we can exercise choice. While we cannot prevent the initial feeling, we can choose how we respond to it. If we persist with craving, we build stories about why we like or dislike something, and with those stories come all our habitual patterns of reaction.
When we make pain “me, mine, and my own,” distress magnifies. When we find a way of not making it personal, the distress — which is the actual dukkha, not the pain itself — can be released.
The teaching on impermanence supports this. When pain arises, we tend to believe it is permanent. We take it personally: “Why is this happening to me?” We resist it. But understanding impermanence, understanding that pain arises and passes away, makes it possible to release, relax, smile, and return to loving kindness. As one of the teachers illustrated: even the earth itself is impermanent — it will not be here in ten billion years. There was a clip of a child who hears that the earth is going to be destroyed in ten billion years and starts crying, taking it personally: “Why? The earth which I like so much, it will get over in ten billion years!” Even impermanence on a cosmic scale, we manage to take personally. That is the resistance, and that is what we are learning to release.
And crucially: having compassion does not mean you do not act. Even in the monastic rules, monks are allowed to defend themselves. The question is: what kind of action will you take if your mind is full of sensual desire, ill will, and cruelty compared to the action you will take if your mind is full of renunciation, loving kindness, and compassion? You can still hold people to account — but you do it from a place of balance.
Right Effort: The Foundation of the Practice
The talk connected MN 19 directly to the Noble Eightfold Path, and specifically to right effort. In the TWIM practice, right effort is expressed through the six Rs.
Right effort has two halves. The first is recognizing that something unwholesome has arisen and releasing away from it. The release removes the nutrient from the unwholesome thought; the relaxing removes the craving that was holding on to it.
But that is only half the job. The second half is reestablishing the wholesome and keeping it going — the smiling and returning to loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, or equanimity. The Buddha called these four Brahma Viharas states of no blame: they can cause no harm to you, no harm to another, no harm to both.
The teachers also offered an important clarification about what “unwholesome” means in this context. It is not limited to obviously harmful acts. The unwholesome, in the Buddha’s teaching, is anything we take personally — anything we make “me, mine, and my own.” Why? Because personalizing experience opens the door to attachment and aversion. And attachment and aversion are the doorway to dukkha.
The Deer and the Marsh: Finding the Safe Path
The sutta concludes with a beautiful simile. Imagine a great low-lying marsh where a large herd of deer lives. A man arrives who wishes the deer harm. He closes off the safe, good path and opens a false one, setting out decoys and dummies to lure the deer toward calamity.
But then another man comes, desiring the deer’s welfare. He reopens the good path, closes the false one, removes the decoys, and destroys the dummies.
The Buddha explained: the marsh is sensual pleasures. The herd of deer is beings — us. The man desiring harm is Mara, everything that keeps us caught in the cycle of attachment and aversion. The false path is the wrong eightfold path — wrong view, wrong intention, wrong speech, wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, and wrong concentration.
It is worth pausing on one element: wrong mindfulness. Mindfulness itself is amoral. It is neither good nor bad. We can apply mindfulness to nefarious acts. What determines whether mindfulness leads to liberation or deeper entanglement is intention. This is why right effort, right intention, and right mindfulness must work together.
The safe and good path is the Noble Eightfold Path. And the man who reopens it is the Tathagata — the Buddha himself, who told his students: “What should be done for his disciples out of compassion by a teacher who seeks their welfare — that I have done for you.”
Practical Takeaways
Here is what you can bring into your meditation practice today:
- Recognize the two kinds of thought. When you notice what is in your mind, ask: is this sensual desire, ill will, or cruelty? Or is it renunciation, loving kindness, or compassion? Simply recognizing this distinction is the first step.
- Use the six Rs consistently. Recognize, release, relax, smile, return, repeat. Do not try to force thoughts away. Do not struggle or strain. Simply redirect attention through the process.
- Be patient with the cows. In the early stages, your entire job is to keep noticing and redirecting. Do not judge yourself for how often the mind wanders. If you bring it back fifty times, that is fifty moments of good practice.
- Know that you are retraining the mind. Every time you release a thought of ill will and return to loving kindness, you are changing the inclination of your mind. This is not a one-time event but a gradual transformation.
- Distinguish pain from dukkha. Pain is unpleasant sensation, and it is not under your control. Your relationship to pain — the craving, the personalizing, the story-making — is under your control. That is where freedom lies.
- Relax into the practice. When you relax, the mind goes wide and open. When you strain, it narrows. The path forward is through ease, not force.
- Be diligent, ardent, and resolute. Diligent: stay with your practice conscientiously. Ardent: put your heart into it. Resolute: keep going, even when it feels like everything is falling apart. Because as the teachers said — it is not. But it is. And that is the practice.
Watch the Full Talk
This article is based on the Day 2 talk from the Kalimpong Retreat (April 2025) by the Metta Vipassana Way. To experience the full teaching, watch the video below.
For more information about upcoming retreats and the TWIM meditation practice, visit mettavipassana.org.
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