Removing the barriers we've built against love

Plus: A meditation and writing workshop on re-imagining intimacy in midlife

Feb 13, 2026

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. — Rumi

Last week, I wrote about the Five Hindrances, an ancient Buddhist teaching on the five ways that we get stuck when attempting to start or maintain a meditation practice. These include:

#1: Torpor or sleepiness

#2: Restlessness or anxiety

#3: Ill will or anger

#4: Grasping or craving

#5: Doubt.

This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring what it might look like if we viewed our relationships, and not just our meditation cushions, as a space of practice.

For example:

If we feel too tired to make the effort to connect, how can we become more curious about that?
If we feel so distracted and busy that it’s hard to make time for real relationship-tending, how can we re-center ourselves?
If we’re blaming someone or something else for our discomfort, how can we re-claim the agency we have to shift this dynamic?
If we or our loved ones are serving Veruca Salt vibes in our relationships, frequently chasing golden-goose proxies for safety, happiness and belonging instead of the real thing, how can we gain insight into what we really need?
If we constantly wonder if we’re even worth loving, or if we really matter to the people around us—how do we work with that?

In my experience, these pressing questions can arise can arise even if we’re not in an intimate or monogamous relationships. They can arise with our children, our parents, our in-laws—anyone with whom we share a life, a set of vulnerabilities, and a desire to truly connect.

Of course, sometimes allowing the connection to become slack, to allow distance and quiet to fill the space between us, can be a form of skillful means.1 As Prentiss Hemphill has said, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” However, working with the Hindrances in our healthy relationships can help us to build the muscles necessary to forge coalitions across much bigger chasms of perceived difference. I truly believe that is the work that is needed in the world right now.

P.S. You’re also invited to join me and Kate Carson, sex and relationships coach, as we take this framework further in Re-Imagining Intimacy, a meditation and writing workshop for In Tending readers, coming up on Feb. 28!

#1: Torpor

What parent/caregiver is not exhausted much of the time? Please raise your hand. And then tell us where you get your drugs.

For real, though, tiredness can be a huge but ultimately ho-hum-common hindrance within loving relationships. It’s just hard to maintain real, authentic presence when you’re pooped. Parents of young children know this. People caring for aging parents know this. People doing both really know this.

On the cushion, if you feel tired, the guidance is simple: take a nap. You’re allowed to sleep. Just try again later. Especially if you’re new at this.

I find this works in relationships, too. Trying to do our best to help each other rest, without bringing judgement into it, can be an excellent antidote to everyday torpor.

That said, there are some forms of torpor that can manifest as long-term patterns of behavior, and these can derail a relationship as easily as they can a meditation session. These are areas in which a secondary piece of advice on torpor—practice with your eyes open—can take on deeper resonance.

Practicing with eyes open

Practicing with your eyes open on the cushion means just that. You open your eyes, widen your perspective, and focus on what you see. You consciously decide not to go to sleep.

Practicing with your eyes open in relationship might mean you bring greater awareness to:

Disparities in your relationship around rest and leisure. Instead of pretending you don’t see them, you can ask your partner if they have ideas about how to make rest feel more equitable around here.
Avoidance disguised as torpor. Often this manifests in a mental pattern I call “hard = impossible.” If you’re constantly “too tired” to share the labor of tending the relationship—co-planning the date, reading the parenting book, showing up fully for couples therapy—practicing with eyes open might involve imagining how much more tiring it will be to get divorced2, and then acting accordingly.

Note: If you experience chronic fatigue, your tiredness might be related to underlying health issues—hormonal issues, iron or vitamin deficiencies, depression. (I have endometriosis, so I experience all three, and can relate.) Skillful means in this case might look like enlisting the help of a healthcare professional to find out more.

#2: Restlessness

Parenting, especially amid the current poly-crisis, is a non-stop masterclass in tolerating uncertainty. When kids are little, we’re constantly checking to see if they’re breathing as they sleep. When they’re older, we worry about cyberbullying, school shootings, and red-pilling. These are all legitimate concerns. However, restlessness doesn’t look like mounting a legitimate response to these legitimate concerns. With restlessness, everything seems urgent, but nothing ever gets truly resolved. Instead, this pattern looks like putting banal concerns and status-seeking behaviors ahead of things that would lead to true resilience.

This might look like:

Being “too busy” to engage in self-care. I.e., we might get so busy decorating the house for the holidays or planning a big splashy kid birthday that we forget to find time for that doctor’s appointment we’ve been putting off.
Missing bids for connection due to distraction. This might look like assembling the the perfect fantasy sports team, but failing to actually be a team member to your partner. Or getting so caught up in solving the Times crossword puzzle that you don’t notice your kid needs help with an actual academic struggle in school.
Feeling too restless to focus on tending connection. This could look like burning up so much energy folding the laundry and mowing the lawn that there’s no energy left to engage in loving touch and presence at night. Or being so focused on keeping the train of extracurriculars going while a loved one is sick or grieving that you don’t see these as opportunities to teach kids about how to slow down and show care.

In each of these cases, it’s not that you’re “not doing enough.” It’s that you’re not noticing and then doing what is most needed.

Bringing more focus, prioritization and intentionality to your relationships, in this case, could look like a weekly meeting with your partner where you decide on how to triage what matters. Following through. And/or getting outside help and accountability if ongoing issues like impulsivity, distractibility and avoidance have been hard to resolve in the past.

#3: Ill will

Anyone who’s hit a rocky patch in an important relationship has likely heard of the Four Horsemen of Relationship Failure. These terms, coined by the Gottman Institute, are all different forms of ill will. They include:

Criticism: Coming in hot with a verbal attack.
Contempt: Using your body language and tone to convey disrespect, even if you’re not saying it out loud.
Defensiveness: Refusing to own your role and help repair what was broken.
Stonewalling: Ignoring your parter. Giving the silent treatment. Acting busy instead (see above) to avoid resolving a conflict.

On the cushion, if you’re having a hard time cultivating peace inside, the guidance is to slow down, breathe, and practice metta meditation. This style of meditation, also known as loving-kindness meditation, invites us to offer ourselves safety, good health, happiness and peace—and then to extend this wish outward. Even to a loved one who is being annoying.

I am sorry to say that despite how treacly and overly sentimental this sounds, it actually works. This practice has likely saved my marriage many times over, and also probably saved me from being thrown in jail at least once.

That said, if you’re too fired up for loving-kindness practice to feel authentic, I get it. I’ve also found it helpful to engage in RAIN meditation to work directly with the anger, or to offer myself some self-compassion.

The point of all this inner work is not to let someone off the hook for their bad behavior. It is to direct the inherent power and clarity that comes with anger in ways that actually benefit you, and that also look more like love.

Conflict without violence

When you’re ready to engage in conversation with a loved one, you might also practice non-violent communication3—another sentimental-sounding concept that works very effectively, in my experience.

This can look like:

Starting conversations with observations rather than judgements (“We agreed to meet at 9am and you arrived at 9:15” versus “You’re always late!”).
Claiming agency over your feelings using “I” statements. (“I feel anxious when we’re late.”)
Stating a positive need or request—what you want to see happen next time. (“Could we leave earlier next time to grab coffee?”)

These things are hard to do when I’m very, very angry, which, again, is why I meditate so often. My husband can confirm.

Per the Gottman Institute, you can also learn to de-escalate conflict through these actions:

Expressing any appreciation that might be relevant. (“I appreciate that you thought of stopping to get us coffee on the way.”)
Taking any responsibility that might be yours to take. (“I know that in the past I’ve said how much it means to me when you remember how I like my lattes, so I get why you made the choice that you did today.”)

#4: Craving

In my experience, craving can look a lot like restlessness. But rather than being an experience of being “all over the place,” in craving, we do have a single-pointed focus. We’re just focusing on something that’s not going to bring lasting peace—only a temporary reprieve from discomfort.

Craving also often co-arises with torpor or ill will, when we are confronted with the harmfulness of our behaviors and cling tightly to them, denying or fighting reality rather than accepting it and taking action. Craving co-arises often with doubt as well, when we find ourselves craving a level of reassurance, control or certainty that is unrealistic and unsustainable.

If you find yourself frequently arguing about the following in your relationship, craving may be a part of this complex picture:

Focusing finances on wants vs. needs: Too much money being spent on gambling or shopping, in such a way that you find yourselves going into debt, or shackling one or both partners to a toxic job.
Focusing time on wants vs. needs: Too much time being spent on “virtuous” activities at the gym or office, beyond the point of necessity and to the detriment of your home life.
Focusing energy on feeding or fighting cravings vs. tolerating discomfort: One partner is engaging in addictive or compulsive activities, while the other person tries to manage the fallout.4

On the cushion, one common tip for craving—for coffee, or food, or a different kind of meditation space—is to ask yourself, What do I really need?

In our relationships, this question can be confronting. A partner who’s willing to go into doubt in order to fill the house with fancy decorative pillows might have a hidden, misdirected need for safety or loving touch. Sitting with this need, investigating where it comes from, feeling the well of grief that accompanies it, and considering how to get this need truly met—that’s harder. But more honest.

Craving as consolation prize

In my experience, craving also arises when we believe that we won’t be heard if we ask for what we really need. We know that the pretty dress or the delicious cake is only a consolation prize, not the real thing, and yet we cannot give it up, because if we did, we would not get everything we need; we would get nothing.

This feeling is so real, and so hard. In cases like this, we need support and space to truly grieve. This RAIN meditation, and this Internal Family Systems-inspired meditation, may help you more deeply connect with the parts of yourself that deserve to be heard.

That said, you also deserve to be heard by other human beings. This is why we have parent/caregiver support circles here at In Tending, and why therapy can be so helpful. Because ruptures in belonging call for relational healing, not just solo self-helping.

Consider the consequences

Life is full of uncertainty; ideally, our communities and/or healing containers teach us the skills to cope with this reality, not to hide from it. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time. Considering the consequence of wasted time, and other downsides and opportunity costs of craving, is another way that we can move differently when it comes to craving. For example:

“When I smoke, it tastes gross, wastes money, and puts my health at risk. I need to develop other ways of coping with my anxiety.”
“When I drink, I get mean, feel awful in the morning, and regret it later. I need to develop other ways of quieting my mind and relaxing after work.”

Mindfulness training itself can be very helpful for developing these coping tools.

#5: Doubt

Doubt is a many-headed hydra. I find that when we strike down one form of it, another often arises in its place. Doubt manifests as our inner hater, a voice that tells us that we’re not ____ enough. Not serious enough, not smart enough, not talented enough… the list goes on. In relationships, doubt can manifest in similarly varied and sneaky ways:

Doubt about yourself and your own lovability. For example: when our partners reassures us that our bodies are perfectly lovable, but we don’t believe it, so our intimacy suffers.
Doubt about your worth as a partner. For example: when we avoid planning dates, reading the parenting book, or showing up fully in therapy—not because we don’t want to or can’t be bothered, but because failure feels terrifying. What if my lover doesn’t like the restaurant I chose? What if the book reveals that I’m actually a bad parent? What if my partner figures out who I really am through therapy, and they hate what they see? The problem is that when we do nothing, it looks like torpor and it hits like stonewalling for the ones we love. This can leads to accusations that we are intentionally slacking off, which obscure the real issue: we do care, but sometimes we are deeply confused about how to show it.
Doubt about your contributions to the family. Some of us do all that we can to help our partners, but we also struggle with a chronic illness or disability, so we may question whether or not we’re “doing enough” physically. Or we work hard, but in a field where low pay and/or frequent layoffs are common, so we wonder if our loved ones really respect us, even when we’re not “bringing home the bacon.”

Though doubt is by far the most complex hindrance, in my experience, the guidance couldn’t be more simple: just keep going. Do the thing.

For example:

Do it in the body you have. Dress yourself with dignity. Allow yourself to surrender to both giving and receiving in relationship. Don’t wait to become more physically perfect first. This is how we actually practice unconditional love—and model it for our children.
Do it scared. This is especially important when someone is grieving, as our many posts and interviews on this topic can attest. Just show up. Bring some soup. Do not allow your minor discomfort to become more important than someone else’s life-shattering levels of suffering.
Do it as an experiment. Will you fail? Maybe! Will you succeed? Maybe! Do you know everything there is to know about doing it “right”? Not until you actually have an embodied experience with it. And isn’t that what love is, ultimately? A wild experiment? Why pretend it isn’t?

As the poet Rumi purportedly said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” In the case of the Five Hindrances, we can see how this might be true. How easy it is, how common, for us to allow exhaustion, anxiety, resentment, grasping or self-criticism to come between us and the ones we love the most.

Fortunately, this framework shows us how the inverse is also true. Real love doesn’t have to involve going out and getting something expensive, planning something publicly lavish, or wearing something with underwire. (Because: ugh.) Instead, it shows us that one of the best gifts we can offer to our loved ones is the inner work we do to stay open to connection. It is the labor we do to shovel our proverbial sidewalks, over and over again. To allow love to come in, come in, to come back in.

In Tending

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