Date: 04/19/2025 04/20/2025
Location: Star Ocean Meditation Center
Teacher: Sara
Dharma Knowledge
Obstacles in Practice
Obstacles in practice are not accidental disruptions, nor signs of personal inadequacy. They are structural features of the path itself. Without clearly identifying them, practice is easily mistaken for emotional cultivation, willpower training, or moral self-enhancement, thereby losing sight of the Dharma’s central aim: understanding the causes of suffering and bringing them to an end.
From the standpoint of the Dharma, an obstacle is not an external force opposing practice, but any factor that obstructs clear observation and accurate understanding. Such factors arise from the mind’s habitual modes of operation. Practice does not create them; it reveals them. When obstacles are treated as failures, practice becomes resistance. When they are treated as objects of observation, practice truly begins.
The most fundamental obstacle is ignorance. Ignorance is not a lack of doctrinal knowledge, but a persistent misreading of experience. Even with extensive familiarity with teachings, ignorance remains operative as long as impermanence is treated as reliable, and sensations, identities, or views are taken as self or possession. In practice, this cognitive distortion manifests as confusion, repetition, and stagnation, often misinterpreted as insufficient effort or incorrect technique.
From ignorance arises attachment. Attachment is not limited to sensory desire; it includes clinging to calm states, feelings of progress, and ideas of spiritual achievement. When practice becomes a means of acquiring particular experiences or identities, attachment has already entered. The result is often anxiety, self-judgment, comparison, and subtle competition.
Another common obstacle is misunderstanding experience itself. Practice inevitably brings shifts in mental and bodily states—ease, focus, spaciousness, or intense emotional turbulence. Taking such experiences as indicators of awakening, or interpreting their absence as regression, distorts observation. The Dharma does not evaluate practice by pleasant or unpleasant states, but by whether understanding becomes clearer and less distorted.
At the methodological level, obstacles frequently arise from imbalance. Emphasizing ethical discipline without insight leads to suppression; emphasizing concentration without wisdom leads to absorption in states; emphasizing insight without the stabilizing support of discipline and concentration leaves understanding abstract and fragile. These are structural imbalances, not moral failures, and they require recalibration rather than increased force.
Emotional obstacles deserve particular attention. Greed, aversion, conceit, and doubt do not disappear simply because practice begins. Often they become more visible as awareness sharpens. The desire to protect a spiritual self-image can lead practitioners to deny or rationalize these defilements using Dharma language. Such conceptualized practice appears orderly, but avoids direct engagement with the problem.
Misplaced reliance on authority and lineage is another significant obstacle. When practice depends on external validation, endorsement by teachers, or group identity, personal observation weakens. The Dharma does not deny the value of guidance, but it explicitly rejects replacing one’s own verification with borrowed certainty. When this principle is lost, practice turns into compliance rather than liberation.
Crucially, obstacles are not opposed to practice. They are the very phenomena through which the structure of mind becomes visible. The true obstacle is not the presence of defilements, but the failure to understand their conditions and operation. When obstacles are seen as conditioned processes, they no longer block practice; they become its content.
Thus, the essential task is not to eliminate obstacles, but to avoid relating to them incorrectly. There is no need for suppression, struggle, or identification. What is required is sustained observation of their arising, transformation, and cessation. Wisdom does not emerge from idealized states, but from precise understanding of reality as it is.
