Patience

Thoughts On A Life-Changing Skill

Meditation helps us develop a quality which is extremely important in life: patience.

We think of patience as a virtue, but patience also has many benefits to those who practice it. Those benefits include better mental health, better friendships and neighborliness, less depression and frustration, greater satisfaction in life goals, and enhanced physical well-being, according to just one study cited by Greater Good Magazine.*

I’ll get back to patience in a moment, so bear with me. First I’d like to state the obvious. We are busy people. Our lives are filled with lots of doing. We spend our days departing, arriving, making, planning, scheduling, thinking, judging, deciding, etc. We get lots of things done in our modern, complex world. But from a meditation perspective, we may not be getting as much done as we think.

There is a well-known teaching story of a Buddhist monk from Asia who was visiting the United States and at the airport in the US he was asked what he thought of America so far. The monk looked around at all the people rushing about the airport, and he replied archly, “It seems like Americans are quite lazy.”

Photo by Lisa Horbach on Unsplash

What the monk in this story is saying is that, from a spiritual perspective, if you really want to get something done, you need to stop being so busy doing things and start paying attention to your mind. But it is also true that for the non-monastic householder, to sit down and deliberately do nothing for a half hour of meditation is to go against all the pressures and conditioning on us about being busy and “productive.”

Let me add one more thread. And that is a famous quote from Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Our lives are filled with our reactions to things that happen to us. Those reactions are sometimes quite necessary as we need to meet what life gives us. But often and to our detriment, many of our reactions are a reflection of our fundamental impatience with difficulty. For example, an unpleasant event happens (stimulus), and we react negatively (response). Someone says something unkind or unfair to me, and I get into an argument with them. That’s a very typical scenario (and it is one that I personally have experienced more than I’d like to admit.).

But when you meditate, if the unpleasant experience comes to mind, you may feel the urge to get into an argument and fight back, but you can’t act on the urge. You can only observe it. And that’s the space that Viktor Frankl talked about. And this is one of the ways that we can develop patience from practice. By meditating every day and watching your urges come and go in the space of awareness, you are widening that gap between stimulus and response. And that changes your brain, your life and how you relate to your challenges.

In Buddhism patience finds its way onto one of the famous Buddhist lists. It is considered to be one of the six Pāramīs, or Perfections, that are critical qualities for spiritual development. They are given in this order: Generosity, Virtue, Patience, Energy, Concentration, Wisdom.

The word for patience in Pali is Khanti. It is often translated as patience, but it also conveys other qualities, like forbearance, endurance, steadfastness, and tolerance. So Khanti isn’t just about turning the other cheek; there’s a toughness to it as well. An ability to endure. Patience can be thought of not only as an excellent personal quality, but also as something you can practice. If you are a meditator you already hang out in that gap between stimulus and response on a regular basis and so your patience muscle is stronger than for many people. So when you’re in a difficult situation, reminding yourself of your capacity to dwell in the space of choice rather than reactivity is a way of gently encouraging patience. Bringing to mind your gratitude for what you already have is another fine way to cultivate patience.

Patience helps us out in many difficult situations. When dealing with someone who annoys you, practicing a little patience can save you from your worst impulses of disdain or insult. Waiting on a seemingly interminable line at the grocery store or in the middle of a traffic jam, practicing patience can keep you from blowing your top in frustration. And patience goes a long way in a romantic relationship and can be the thing that keeps it intact and moving towards greater intimacy and connection.

One of the most challenging and also transformative ways we can practice khanti is when people are hurting us in some way. The best example of this we’ve seen recently is the way the people of Minneapolis responded to the fascistic ICE invasion and Federal Government-sanctioned brutality in their community. Folks from all walks of life teamed up and kept their neighbors safe in a process that became known as “neighboring.” People drove children to school so that their parents wouldn’t get hauled away by ICE. Women gave their breast milk to strangers’ children for the same reason. Rapid response ICE watch networks tracked ICE agents in real time and warned immigrants of their presence. Food deliveries kept neighbors fed. And this community intervention against ICE was done non-violently. That’s the patience, the endurance, the steadfastness, showing up.

Patience doesn’t mean sticking your head under a rock. It means not allowing your response to be weakened by rage and fear.

Just as practice deepens our ability to be patient because it widens the gap between stimulus and response, so it also takes patience to practice in the first place. As soon as we assume our meditation posture, all the things we need to get done or are preoccupied with start crowding into our minds. This is one reason why meditators choose not to meditate. They don’t want to face that restlessness. But if you can be patient toward the restlessness and let it be, you will eventually settle down.

It certainly takes patience to be on a spiritual path. Spiritual work is a little bit like peeling an onion. Just when you think you’ve figured things out, that you’ve left your old destructive patterns behind you, the next thing you know they come roaring back, destabilizing you anew.

So on the path of inner development one vital thing we have to learn is to be patient with ourselves. Having your dysfunctions repeat is not a sign you’re doing the practice wrong, it’s a sign of how deep your conditioning is. As it is for all of us.

Above all, it takes time to heal and to evolve. And patience is a key skill on that path.

*(https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_reasons_to_cultivate_patience).