The Five Hindrances are listed on the board in the dining hall so I'm not going to repeat them. If you need them repeated it means that you're not reading the board in the dining hall.
We can meditate on them within the Four Noble Truths reflections and within the Actions and the Results of the Actions reflection. We can take a look at sense desire; we could pick out a certain thing that we desire, for example, yesterday I was talking about your favorite candy bar. We can pick out one particular thing, and we can reflect, "Okay, why do I have such a strong sense desire for this piece of candy? What is it? Why?" By in large you're going to see that it's just coming from your conditioning, from your childhood, from your upbringing. There are so many things that we grow up with, our food tastes in particular, which are totally conditional on our upbringing. There are so many Western foods that we desire, that Thais will not. And how many Westerners actually love everything that the Thais love.
It's all conditional. So if you actually look at some sense desires and consider how conditional they are, your aversions as well, you can be able to see that they're conditional. The more your look at them in that way, the more you'll understand their causes.
How do you then let go of them? When we're considering the Four Noble Truths we're not just wanting to know where they come from and why they are coming, but more importantly we want to know how we can let go of them. There are many different ways. One is that you look at the Dukkha involved in craving, craving, craving a certain type of food - I want it, I want it. You may dream about it while your sitting in meditation, you may dream about having it on the afternoon of Day Ten. This is all Dukkha. If you actually look at it under the Dukkha aspect of reflection, you will see that craving brings its own Dukkha. Then you have to raise your Compassion for yourself. Do you want this Dukkha you're creating in yourself? Do you actually want it? Can you raise your Compassion so that you see the craving as if it's fire and finally say, "No I don't want it anymore", and let go of it?
Now, what I discussed is actually a variation of different reflections that you can do as far as meditating upon a sense desire. Sense desire and aversion are relatively straight forward. With restlessness and worry, and with sloth and torpor, these are opposites. They have a lot to do with our energy levels. So you can reflect on how you can increase your energy levels when sloth and torpor has arisen. How can you lessen you energy levels when you are too restless - how you can calm yourself down a bit? Now, some of the meditation techniques actually stimulate energy, some calm it down.
If you're totally depressed, as I've said before, reflect upon How Fortunate You Are. If you believe it, you will automatically give yourself more energy. You could also reflect on your Good Past Kamma. You could reflect on why you're here, reflecting on the motivation of why you're here will increase your energy levels. If you're spinning, spinning, spinning, where is it coming from? Is it often future desires? Quite often our restlessness arises because we are wanting something. You could reflect on death to slow down the restlessness. On the other side, if we reflect on death too much we can actually become restless, so you have to be careful with when and how much you use some of these techniques. They can bring down your energy level or they can bring it up. So you have to learn for yourself how they work.
The first four are the easiest of the Five Hindrances, the fifth one being doubt. It's not always so easy to reflect on doubt. You have to try to use your wisdom to find the wisdom inside a cloud. Because what doubt means, is that you're clouded towards your wisdom, and your ignorance is the one to follow. It's like standing on a fence and you're just not sure which way to jump. At those times the ignorance in the mind is so crafty it's going to look like wisdom, and we just don't know which way to go. So it's not always possible to actually reflect on doubt when we're doubtful.
So what do we do then? Ask questions. Ask questions of your good Kalyanamittas, your good, kind, wise spiritual friends - because often they've gone through that doubt before. They can kind of push you a little, they might encourage you to go to the left, if that's the way to go. And if you trust your good friend enough then you can try, with confidence, what they are suggesting because you know they've helped you so many times in the past. So doubt isn't so easy to actually meditate on. It often requires that you have another person to ask questions of, and get some feedback in that way.