Stop Being Hijacked By Anxiety, Grief, and Anger — A Buddhist Approach | Sebene Selassie & Jeff Warren

What It Covers

Meditation teachers Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren join Dan Harris at the annual Meditation Party retreat to explore the Buddha's five hindrances to meditation practice, the Five Recollections on mortality and impermanence, and practical techniques for working with anger, grief, comparing mind, and emotional overwhelm in daily life.

Key Questions Answered

• •Five Hindrances Framework: The Buddha identified five core obstacles that arise during meditation: desire, aversion, restlessness, doubt, and sloth/torpor. Each hindrance also carries a positive counterpart — desire becomes motivation, aversion becomes discernment, restlessness becomes energy. Recognizing which hindrance is active, rather than being lost inside it, is itself the practice. Multiple hindrances can appear simultaneously as a mixed "soup" rather than cleanly one at a time.
• •RAIN Technique for Strong Emotions: When anger, grief, or overwhelm arise, use the four-step RAIN process developed by Michelle McDonald and popularized by Tara Brach: Recognize the emotion, Allow it without suppression, Investigate its physical sensations in the body, then Nurture the underlying need. Even completing only the first two steps — recognizing and allowing — produces measurable nervous system regulation without requiring full intellectual analysis.
• •Five Recollections Practice: A daily Buddhist chant covering aging, sickness, death, loss, and karma functions as an equanimity training tool, not a pessimistic exercise. Regularly acknowledging these realities reduces the psychological resistance that converts unavoidable pain into prolonged suffering. The formula "pain multiplied by resistance equals suffering" captures the mechanism — the recollections dissolve resistance, leaving pain without the added layer of mental contention.
• •Behind the Waterfall — Disembedding from Thought: Jon Kabat-Zinn's "behind the waterfall" metaphor describes the meditative skill of observing thoughts rather than inhabiting them. At first, awareness and thinking feel identical — perfectly transparent and inseparable. With practice, a gap opens: a part of awareness exists that is not the thinking itself. Each moment of noticing distraction, however brief, is a genuine instance of this disembedding, and the skill compounds over time.
• •Comparing Mind (Mana) Persists Until Full Enlightenment: The Pali concept of mana — measuring oneself as better than, worse than, or equal to others — remains active until complete awakening, making it unrealistic to expect meditation to eliminate it. The practical approach is to notice the suffering comparison produces in real time, using that pain as an alarm bell rather than a judgment. Seeing the pattern clearly, without self-criticism, gradually reduces how long one stays caught inside it.
• •Two Types of Tiredness in Meditation: Physical fatigue signals genuine rest needs, but a second category of tiredness is mental aversion disguised as sleepiness — the mind deciding current experience is intolerable and choosing to check out. Distinguishing between them matters because the second type responds not to rest but to gently staying with discomfort. Paradoxically, giving explicit permission to fall asleep often dissolves the fatigue, because the resistance driving it releases.