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Guided Meditation: Patience

Hello everyone. Perhaps I can welcome you to the beginning of the week. It's the start of a new week for many of us, and it's nice to start it here.

Sometimes it is said that one of the first lessons that are useful to learn if you start meditating is the importance of patience. Sooner or later, meditators learn patience. We learn a variety of different ways by which to not give in to forces of stress, judgment, frustration, or discouragement.

Because sooner or later, we'll find that the mind has a mind of its own, that it has strong impulses and strong patterns of thinking. Rather than fighting it, sooner or later, there is a patience, a willingness to steadily and calmly work with it, practice with it, and not collapse around what we discover—what happens with our emotions, our thoughts, our attitudes, or the challenges we have. There are many different forms of patience. Discovering some of the different flavors of patience is part of what can be quite wonderful as we practice over a long, extended period of time.

So today, to sit with patience. Sit with patience with all things that are unresolved in your life. Be patient with the challenges that could show up as you meditate. Do not have aversion to it, or disrespect it, or dismiss it. Do not succumb to stress around having it. Do not succumb to aversion, or to the pressure to change it and fix it.

But rather, have the patience that allows us to be still, quiet, and attentive. Attentively, quietly recognizing what is actually happening for us. What is it we have? What is it that is happening that gives us reason for patience? Sit quietly in the middle of that. Breathe with it, sense it, feel it without getting caught up in fixing, thinking, and analyzing. Just quiet abiding in the midst of what's actually happening. A serious recognition, a serious engagement with our life through this wonderful avenue of quiet abiding in the midst of what arises.

So, assuming a meditation posture. Perhaps relaxing your gaze. Maybe letting your eyes gaze downward, relaxed and soft. If it's comfortable to close your eyes, you could close them gently.

If it's comfortable, take some gentle but deeper breaths that expand the rib cage. Maybe deep enough that it lifts the shoulders a bit, deep enough that if you have a backrest or your back is up against some surface, you feel the pressure as you breathe in against that surface with the back rib cage. Letting your breathing return to normal on the exhale, relax whatever tension or stress is easy to soften, relax, and unwind. A kind of releasing throughout the body as you exhale.

Perhaps, if it's comfortable for you, you can imagine that as you breathe, the energy of breathing, the sensations of breathing move through the whole body. Maybe as if you're not breathing through the nose or the mouth, but you're breathing through the whole body, in and out. As you exhale, soften the mind, relaxing the pressure to think, the contraction of thinking.

If you think in words, slow the words down in the mind. If you think in images, slow the images. And if there's a lot of feelings and emotions, maybe there's some place like the heart, maybe the hands, or the belly, that you can relax a bit and soften.

Now center yourself on the breathing, the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Perhaps the ongoing rhythm of breathing, staying close to it, will help you to be patient with whatever goes on during meditation that might be difficult. Perhaps stay close to your breathing and breathe through it, or stay centered and grounded with breathing. Remembering to be patient with all things, one breath at a time.

What could you be patient about now that would support you to be here, quieter, stiller, attentive, and not reactive? Perhaps the gentle rhythm of breathing can support you to be patient.

As we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps we can dedicate some of the benefit from sitting and meditating. The known benefits and the unknown benefits, dedicate it for the welfare of the world, for the benefit of others. Perhaps if we're more patient from meditating, we can be more patient with other people. More patient with their shortcomings and their challenges. More patient as they find their way in this difficult life.

Giving more room for people to be, without them being the recipient of our stress, of our reactivity, our impatience. May it be, through this practice, that patience is much more than patience. It's a gift in being able to be present for people as they are, free of our projections, our needs, and our reactions.

May our attention to others be a gift through this practice of mindfulness. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our patience support that possibility.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Patience (1 of 6) Staying True Under Stress

So here we are, the first day of the week, Monday. First day for our next series. For these five days, I would like to spend our time reflecting, thinking about, and focusing on patience. The Pali word for patience is khanti^[1] (k-h-a-n-t-i)—kshanti in Sanskrit.

It's a really rich word. Perhaps it is as rich as the word patience, but it's multifaceted. It's relevant at the very start of doing Buddhist practice. As I said in meditation, if you don't learn patience quickly, meditation is going to be much harder than it needs to be. It also characterizes some of the deepest insights, some of the deepest places to abide in and dwell in during meditation. There's something that's called khanti, something that's called patience.

There are many forms of patience, and I'll talk about different ones over these five days. Patience is needed, not just because it's a virtue you always practice because it's a good thing to do, but patience is a response or a practice to things that are challenging.

When we get reactive in ways that are unhealthy for us and not healthy for others, sometimes patience is a better response than anger, resentment, being stressed, or getting tense around what's happening. We need the capacity to appreciate the value of patience and understand how it enhances us and brings out the best in us, as opposed to patience that dampens us down or represses us in some way, which actually adds stress to the system rather than freeing us from it.

Today I want to talk a little bit about the themes for the week. I'll tell you the five themes of patience for the week. The first, today, is going to be staying true under stress, staying true to ourselves under stress. Tomorrow, it's gentle perseverance under difficulties and challenges. Wednesday will be patience under insult, things that happen in our life, how people treat us. To be patient with insults, what does that mean? Thursday will be forgiveness when insulted. How is that healthy? How is that done in a healthy way?

Friday is the deepest form of patience. The word khanti is used for this, whether patience is the right word in English or not. This has to do with a certain very deep patience with some of the deepest truths that we can touch into through Buddhist practice. It sounds wonderful to have deep insights and deep realizations, but some of them are challenging to have. So we develop patience around these things which are phenomenally true, but challenging to deal with.

For example, we can realize at some point—have insight and realization of the possibility of not clinging to anything. But then we end up clinging a lot. It can be frightening, this idea to let go, to really not cling. So we need to be patient, to be accepting, to somehow have some kind of healthy tolerance for this truth that clinging is not worthwhile.

So today, the topic is being true under stress.

What I mean by this is particularly meant for people who have some kind of ongoing spiritual practice, like a meditation practice. At some point, we start having access to or experiencing a way of being that feels true. It feels truer than being greedy, hateful, tense a lot, or afraid a lot. It is truer than being lost in fantasy and spinning around in thoughts.

When the thoughts quiet down, we feel more connected to ourselves, more settled^[2] in ourselves. When we're not ahead of ourselves, not behind ourselves, and when we're not carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, then we can feel like, "Oh, now I'm more myself. I'm more alive. I'm more connected." There's something here which feels true and honest. So we connect to this honesty, to this true way of being.

Maybe I'm talking a little bit in grand terms. It could just be that something like meditation helps us to be a little bit calmer, and that feels right. The calm feels better than being agitated, so there's a reference point, something that feels healthy, good, and desirable—a way of being.

To be patient, for people who have access to that, is to stay true to it in stressful situations. There's an infinite number of situations we might find ourselves in that are stressful. It could be the most mundane thing. It could be that we're late for the dentist, and so we feel we have to rush, be anxious, and worry. But we know that when we rush and worry that way, we actually lose touch with what's true about ourselves, something that's a true, connected, real, or valuable way of being.

To be patient is to not give in to that rush, not give in to the thoughts of worry that are spinning stories. To be patient with ourselves is to stay true to what we know is there. What this means is that for people who don't have access to a way of being that feels like a right way of being, or a better or satisfying way of being, patience might seem like just an obligation. It's like work: "Now I have to work at being patient too." It's just a drag because it's imposing a certain kind of virtue on top of us.

But if we know something that's valuable, if we know a way of being that's healthy and good, then to be patient is not to easily give that up. It is not to easily succumb to the temptation to be angry, the temptation to be worried, the temptation to want things to be different, and the strong impulses of impatience that might be there. We let go of the impatience so that we can stay closer to what we feel is valuable and at ease.

Sometimes this idea of patience has less to do with a way of being patient as it is letting go of the impatience, whatever the forces of impatience are, so that we can be something that feels innate, healthy, and good. Not to hold on to it, not to construct something, but to let go into something deeper that we have.

One of the exercises you might think of that goes along with what I'm saying today is when you meditate—and maybe you want to meditate a little extra this week so you can do this exercise; it doesn't have to be long, a 10-minute meditation—when you finish your meditation, if you're a little calmer or more settled than you were before, more connected, then get up from that meditation and stay very carefully attentive to when you begin losing that calm, losing that settledness. When you do, stop in your tracks and maybe close your eyes and check in with yourself. See what just happened here. Did anything happen here that was a symptom of impatience? Could I come back, since it just happened a few moments ago that I started to get tense or hurried? Can I settle back into this place of calm or settledness?

This is what I call being true under stress. There might be good reasons to start hurrying, rushing, and getting tense, but it's not necessarily the best thing to do, even if the reasons are there. The result of being stressed and doing these reactive things is that we're less wise, less involved, more forgetful, and it's easier to make mistakes. Sometimes, when we don't have to redo things because we stay calm and do them carefully the first time, it's actually more efficient.

So try this exercise when you come out of meditation, maybe even today after this talk. Notice when you begin losing some settledness or calm, and then see what it would be like to be patient. What would it be like to be true to yourself under stress? The first type of patience: staying true under stress.

I hope that as we go through these five different kinds of patience, it's a little journey for all of us into a deeper and deeper dimension of this part of our lives. Thank you, and I look forward to being here tomorrow.