---
ai_generation_date: '2026-06-19'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
  - date: '2023-01-29'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/17651/20230129-Ines_Freedman-IMC-transforming_impatience_boredom_and_complacency.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Ines Freedman
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/57
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: Transforming Impatience, Boredom, and Complacency
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17651
    video_unavailable: false
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: 54D4eK5IXnA
  imprecise_upload_date: '2023-05-04'
  title: Transforming Impatience, Boredom, and Complacency
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54D4eK5IXnA
---

# Transforming Impatience, Boredom, and Complacency - [Ines Freedman](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/57)

*This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.*

## [Transforming Impatience, Boredom, and Complacency](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17651)

## Introduction

It's particularly wonderful for me to be back here. It's been a number of years since I've been at IMC teaching. It was very sweet because one of my good friends, Peter Medina—some of you might know him—died last year, and over 20 years ago he was a monk in Asia and he gave IMC his travel clock. And so it's still here! It survived all the modernization and improvements and it's still here, so it's kind of sweet to see that.

I'll start with a metaphor that really helped me in my early practice, which was the metaphor of the snow globe. When you shake a snow globe, all the snow is all over and you can barely see anything inside it, but if you just let it settle, very gently eventually it settles down. That image was very helpful for me in my early meditation. I'd sit down and my mind would be so chaotic, there's so much happening, but just thinking of the snow globe was like, "Okay, I just have to sit here and in time it will settle." For quite a while that was a really helpful piece of my practice—that patience of just, "Okay, it will settle."

But at a certain point, I realized that I was thinking of those first fifteen or twenty minutes that it took me to settle as not really being part of my meditation. I'd just kind of sit down and think about whatever I want, take an occasional breath, and start really taking it for granted. I assumed that this part of my mind wasn't even worth paying attention to, that it was so irrelevant. 

As I started learning more about the subtleties of practice, I began to really understand that my thinking, messy mind is what's here right now, and that that first fifteen to twenty minutes of lots of messiness and chaotic, busy, restless thinking was really worthwhile to pay attention to. It was a very rich part of my practice. I found that no matter how restless and agitated my mind was in that time, by becoming mindfully aware of it, there would be a little bit of space around it. There was the agitation, and there was that little bit of sweet space. I recognized that that agitation was unpleasant, and so I was trying to avoid it. I didn't want to feel that agitation; I really didn't like how my mind felt at those times. 

So I just started folding all of that into my practice. My practice is just as rich whether my mind is busy or my mind is still. It's still just as close and intimate regardless of the state of the mind. The practice teaches us to show up for any mind state, whether we like it or judge it as not interesting.

## Impatience

I wanted to talk about three related mental states that arise commonly in meditation, and because they're related, we tend to not find them all that compelling to pay attention to. They are impatience, boredom, and complacency. 

All of those are kind of subtle states. If you've got a strong emotion in meditation, that's really juicy, that's really interesting. Or a fantasy is very strong, very compelling. Even physical pain we can get very interested in—trying to fix it, there's a lot to grab onto, a lot to engage with. But boredom, impatience, and complacency are all mental states that we tend to not like. We don't like them, but we don't hate them enough to pay attention to them. So they tend to kind of go under the radar.

For instance, are any of you—maybe not today, maybe on rare occasion—kind of waiting for the bell to ring? I've met very few people who haven't had that experience at least once. For a long time in practice, I used to keep a clock in front of me. I'd also have a timer that would go off, so I didn't really need the clock, the timer did its job. But I would just sneak a peek. If there was fifteen minutes, I'd think, "Ah, fifteen more minutes." The idea that there was fifteen more minutes was unpleasant—more unpleasant than the moment itself. So I'd get really involved in my impatient thoughts. I'd get very engaged: "Okay, so fifteen more minutes, that's 150 breaths." I'd negotiate my way through it, totally involved, much more interesting at the moment. 

But then if it was like five minutes, my whole heart would lift. "Oh, only five more minutes! Great." And suddenly I'd settle. My mind would settle and I would actually enjoy my meditation, and I could go longer. The idea of this long time period of possibly not enjoying it got in the way. So these are the games we play because we don't like that feeling of the impatient mind. It's just a slight unpleasantness, right? Nothing so terrible, nothing that awful. It's just a slight, low-level unpleasantness. 

But I find it really interesting that the English word for patience comes from the Latin word *pati*, which means to suffer. It means to suffer with. The definition is a delay, difficulty, and annoyance. So it's the ability to suffer with, to feel the pain of delay. Have you felt impatience arise waiting in traffic? Waiting in line, impatience arises. It's the ability to be with that with patience. With annoyance, with somebody who's just non-stop talking and annoying us—the ability to be patient with that, the ability to be with difficult things.

When we're feeling impatient, what's really helpful is to realize that there's something in our experience we're resisting. There's actually aversion when we're feeling that impatience; I don't want something. And so the practice calls us to turn towards it. How does impatience feel in the body? Maybe the body is tense. Maybe part of the body is tense—your shoulders are up, your face, different parts. How's the belly when we're feeling impatience? Or how does the mind feel? What is the flavor of the mind? Do you know what I mean by the flavor? How do we know the difference between "this is anger" and "this is fear" or "this is love"? It's a flavor of the mind. So what is the flavor of the impatient mind? How does that actually feel? We turn our attention to the actual felt experience of the moment, the actual felt experience of impatience.

Patience is considered one of the most important qualities to develop and practice. In the Buddhist teachings, many of you are familiar with the ten *pāramī*[^1], the ten perfections—the qualities that we have to develop to wake up, such as virtue, patience, loving-kindness, energy, wisdom. All these wonderful qualities that we develop. But patience is a particularly interesting one. Gil Fronsdal is the one who told me this: once we got digitized versions of the suttas, he counted how many times the word "patience" appeared in the Majjhima Nikaya compared to the other *pāramī*. I guess he had a lot of time on his hands! But it shows how commonly the Buddha said patience is essential to wake up. 

Now, patience is only needed when there's something happening that we don't want. If we're not resisting anything, patience is no longer needed; it no longer takes effort. So there's always something going on that we don't want to see, we don't want to know, we don't want it to be there. We're pushing something away.

One kind of patience is patient perseverance. For instance, we can persevere if we're training for a marathon, or training for something that you're trying to get really good at. Every day you go out there regardless of how you feel. You can do that with the attitude of gritting your teeth: "I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna do this." Or you can do it with a relaxed attitude: "Oh, I'll show up every day." They both get to the goal, but the difference is an attitude with kindness—how happy we are, how at ease we are. With almost anything we do, bringing in the quality of kindness is what makes persevering patience really possible. It has to be with a softness, with a kindness.

Sometimes meditation is difficult. It is unpleasant, and we can appreciate that this is hard sometimes. When things are painful and hard, kindness is appropriate. It's like we bring that into our space: "Oh yeah, I'm suffering here. This is hard. My body's uncomfortable, I'm in pain. I just don't like doing this at this moment." I can bring kindness and compassion to that moment.

When we're feeling that way, it's hard to put our arms around it; we may have an intellectual understanding of it. So it can help to remember that the first part of working with this impatient state is to recognize it. Just recognize that it's there. That already gives us a little bit of objectivity. "Oh, it's just impatience. It's only impatience. It's just something that comes and goes." And then we turn to our bodies. "This is impatience in the body," and we start getting interested in what it's really like. What is it like to be impatient? 

Sometimes focusing on a bigger picture can be really helpful. Sometimes that directness doesn't quite work for us. For instance, we can be stuck in gridlock, and instead of being all caught up in, "Oh my, how much longer, it's going to take forever," and all those thoughts, we can go, "Oh, what a great opportunity to practice!" We sometimes go, "I only have half an hour here, I'm going to sneak it in." No, *this* is a great time to practice. 

If you feel tight, you can bring loving-kindness into your space. I know people who make it a habit whenever they're stuck at a red light, they just look around and do loving-kindness towards the people they see in the other cars. It's a very sweet thing to do. It makes it a joyous choice. Or you can just settle into meditating, just watching the breath with open eyes. Just want to make sure I say that! I gave walking instructions once, and at the end of the walking instructions I sent people out to go for their walk. One of the young men said, "Do we do this with our eyes closed?" It never occurred to me!

One of the things that is always a go-to when I'm suffering is humor. Like Jack Kornfield used to say, "I'll be the first meditator to die of impatience." [Laughter] I would just think of that and it would break a little bit of my seriousness. There's a cartoon from *The New Yorker* a long time ago. You see a group of meditators, and the teacher is sitting on a podium just like this, with a poster that says "Journey to Enlightenment." One of the meditators whispers to another one, "Are we there yet?" So, a little bit of humor.

## Boredom

A close relative of impatience is boredom. Boredom, if you haven't noticed, is a state none of us like. We don't like to be bored. If we look at boredom a little bit more closely, we see that often what's happening is that the mind has very little stimulation going on. If we're in pain, we're not bored. We may not like it, but we're definitely not bored. But in boredom, there's just very low stimulation. 

In regular life, usually when we're bored we either go to sleep or we go do something different. We stimulate ourselves. As the mind begins to get calm, it stops stimulating itself so much with all this thinking. Initially, that calmness is a little bit unfamiliar; it's not what we're used to during the day, and it can feel really boring. "Is this it? I've been meditating, and is this it? Just a little bit of calm, but hey, this isn't fun." So there's a little bit of something unpleasant, not enough "something" going on in that state. 

Again, we can turn our attention right to the boredom. We can get interested in the boredom. What is boredom really like? What is the flavor of the mind that we don't like? Really notice how that feels. What does it feel like in the body? Sometimes there are actually other things going on underneath, but it's not thinking about it and figuring it out. It's really seeing what this moment is really like. What am I resisting? What don't I like? What am I pushing away?

I read somewhere—I don't know where they get these statistics—but 31 percent of Americans wonder if heaven will be boring. Now what's interesting about it is that when we think of heaven, we think of everything being good and everybody being nice. It says something that we think everybody being good and everybody being nice is boring! All we have to do is look at our entertainment. What sells the most are horror movies, war movies, violent thrillers—all these things that aren't good and nice. Even a lot of humor is slapstick, people falling, or put-down humor, laughing at pain or laughing at other people's pain. All those things are very stimulating to the mind. The mind really likes being stimulated. 

Boy, with no devices to really stimulate us, a lot of us prefer "doomscrolling"—looking at bad news after bad news after bad news for long periods of time—over being bored. Over that terrible horrible feeling of being bored, we think, "Let me look at how horrible the disasters in the world are." There's so much more stimulating than being bored. So it's really interesting to look at these aspects of the mind.

We're used to stimulating ourselves externally. We can do it in unskillful ways, watching things that are actually dark to our minds. Or we can stimulate ourselves externally with wholesome things: watching a movie that has a lot of depth, reading a biography that connects us with people, listening to wonderful music, meeting with friends. There are lots of wonderful stimuli out in the world—going out into nature, going hiking. I'm not pointing at it being wrong to stimulate the mind. That's how we learn, that's how we grow. It's really great for the cognitive mind to stimulate it in ways that are productive. 

But we also stimulate the mind internally. And how do we do that? We can stimulate the mind internally with planning, which can be really useful, or it can be compulsively done in a minute. During meditation in particular, especially on retreat, I find myself planning what I was going to say to the teacher when I met with them. Over and over and over again, just kind of rehearsing, "This is what I'm going to say to them," totally missing out on my process. Just planning, planning, planning. 

So we do stimulate ourselves internally. Because we like stimulus, sometimes just to avoid feeling boredom, we'll stimulate ourselves with thoughts that upset us even more because we'd rather have upsetting thoughts than be bored.

One of the things that happens with giving something attention is that when we become attentive, energy arises. When energy arises, interest follows. By turning our attention to boredom, we bring energy to it and we bring interest. The quality of our beingness kind of increases in its energy and its aliveness. We start getting connected with ourselves just by giving open attention to what's really going on in the moment. Knowing boredom, just knowing it, really being close to it, transforms it into something interesting. 

I'll just say one word about intimacy. If you think about an intimate moment, maybe with a young child or a lover, where you're touching their face very gently, you're very close to them. You're right there, you're very soft, there's no distance between the two of you. This is the intimacy that we develop in meditation. It's a little bit of a love affair with the moment. Just being very close to that breath, very intimate, very open to it. And if what you're touching is a child that starts to cry because they're sad, you don't lose that intimacy because they're sad. You don't lose the intimacy because they're laughing. The intimacy is there because of your willingness to be close, your willingness to be connected that way. In the same way, we can be intimate with our experience, being very close to it. Whether it's laughter, whether it's a wonderful sense of peace permeating, or whether it's a really agitated mind. Just like the agitated child, we can stay intimate.

In the 60s, Aldous Huxley wrote a utopian novel called *Island*. I hardly remember any of it, but I remember it had birds that flew around and they'd go near humans and go, "Attention, attention!" And it's one of the things that periodically shows up in my meditation when I'm distracted.

## Complacency

Many of you are familiar with MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. It's a secular mindfulness meditation program that Jon Kabat-Zinn created in the early 80s for the medical community to make mindfulness available to people who were having major surgeries, cancer diagnoses, and terminal illnesses. So it needed to be very secular and very specific, and they'd do it in sessions of eight weekly trainings. It encompassed sitting meditation similar to what we do here, but it also included a guided body scan done lying down, where it guides you through relaxing each part of your body, connecting with each part of your body. It lasts about 45 minutes; it's a long guided scan.

At the time that it was just beginning to take off and gain a little bit of renown in the medical world, the teachers at IMS (Insight Meditation Society)—which is a retreat center in Massachusetts—thought, "Well, we should know about this, so why don't we do the training so we know how it is and what people are doing." Several of the teachers went to this class where they were the only people who didn't have either a terminal illness or something severe going on in their lives. They did the sitting meditation, and then they went to do the guided body scan. Everybody in the room lay down and did this, and every one of the teachers fell asleep. None of the other students fell asleep!

After that, one of the teachers was reflecting back on it and realized what had happened in her practice. After all the years of lots of *dukkha*[^2] and suffering, her practice had gotten to a point in her life where everything was pretty good. She'd sit and meditate and it was pretty pleasant, it was kind of nice, and she'd become really complacent. 

It's such a tricky, seductive little thing to just say, "Oh yeah, it's good enough. It's good enough." Not that we want to mistake it with the mind that says, "That's never good enough," but there's this quality where we stop really paying attention to what's going on. A definition of complacency is "self-satisfaction, especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies." So what does that mean in meditation? It's not seeing the dangers of reinforcing certain habits of mind, which get strengthened when we become complacent. We just strengthen the part of our minds that doesn't pay attention. 

The teachings guide us to allow our experience, to accept our experience, not to strive, not to push, to really be at ease with our experience. But again, that comes back to the issue of intimacy. We allow and accept something by being close to it, by being intimate with it. We allow it: "Accept that my body hurts right now. Oh yeah, my body's hurting." We're close, I feel it, I'm not pushing it away, I'm right there with it, allowing it, I see the reality of it. Complacency says, "Oh yeah, it's hurting, I'm not going to pay attention to it. I'm not going to be near it." It's distancing ourselves from our experience.

The practice points to a balance between tranquility and alertness. We're trying to go to a meeting of those two where the mind is really at peace but really bright and alert, really curious. The words that I like, that have been guiding words for me in my practice, is what Sayadaw U Tejaniya[^3] calls "affectionate curiosity." It's the quality that we want to bring into those moments. That's what's missing in complacency. Complacency doesn't have either the affection or the curiosity. It's just kind of nice or "good enough." Like those first 15-20 minutes of my sitting: "Oh yeah, that's good enough."

When some people first start meditating, they take to it right away and they like it right away, and they have nice pleasant sits right away. That wasn't me. For me, meditation was really hard-earned. The fact that I persevered was because I just had such a strong intuition in me. I had a certain level of trust that this was the way for me, even though quite a fairly long period of time was not very pleasant for me. 

And so when I finally started experiencing these really nice periods of calm, and they'd go into this nice drifty peaceful calm, it was so nice! It was so nice, and there was so little sharpness or alertness, but it was such a pleasant change from my agitated state that I hung in there for a long time. It was very healing for me to do that. It allowed me to just be, feel, and enjoy being with myself. But as my practice grew, then I saw that there was more and more engagement. I don't want to make that wrong, but then I would find my patterns. 

Especially on retreat—if any of you have done retreat, we have a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes a lot of stuff can come up, and sometimes really painful emotions would come up, or really intense physical sensations would come up that weren't pleasant. Maybe I'd spend a couple of sittings just crying or feeling all sorts of painful feelings, and then it would be over and it'd be like, "Ah." And then I'd reward myself with a fantasy! "Okay, that was good enough, I worked hard, fantasy time!" I had that pattern for a while where I'd get really complacent instead of, "Okay, now let's stay really engaged with what's next." So it took a while for me to see that. 

As I mentioned, I really want to stress that as we meet complacency when it arises, we must notice a difference between that and "not good enough." Like the Type A personality or the workaholic personality, they get a lot done, they accomplish a lot, but it's very tight. We really want to caution that attitude in how we work with our minds. We're more aiming for the quality of a musician, really enjoying playing the music but really listening carefully, not doing it automatically. Maybe they play that song a hundred times, but they still find something new in it. Or maybe the runner, really engaged in the running, might notice, "Oh yeah, my shoulders are a little tense, let me relax them a little bit." Or maybe the artist who's painting notices, "Oh, the sunset could use a little more red over here," and makes adjustments. But the adjustments are just part of the play, part of the engagement. It's not that there's something wrong that we have to fix, it's just an adjustment. There's no fixing needed. We don't need to fix complacency, we don't need to fix impatience, we just need to get to know them. Once we get to know them, as we engage with them, they reveal themselves, they transform.

## Conclusion

One of the real benefits of turning towards the challenging, towards the difficult, is that this practice says if it's hard, you turn towards it. We turn towards the wonderful, we turn towards the difficult with equal interest. And by doing so, by developing patience, we increase our capacity to be with the difficult. I like to say we become comfortable being uncomfortable. We can tolerate, be there for things that are very hard to tolerate. And that capacity works both ways. It increases our ability to feel joy, to feel all the really wholesome, happy, enjoyable things in life. It allows that connection to happen, so we increase that practice of really being here full-heartedly in the moment.

The last thing I'll say is that sometimes the magic word for me in my mind is to "relax." Just relax, let go. And at other times the magic word for me is a very strong "here, now." Just here, now, show up. So at different times we need different little pep talks to ourselves. Usually these little singular words, I shortcut them. I might say, "sit up straight" or "pay attention."

Keep folding in everything that happens in the practice. It belongs. It all belongs. The deeper states of mind, when we develop *samādhi*[^4] in meditation where the mind's really steady—we call it a unification of the mind, where the mind is united—it includes everything. And that's the thing about this practice: it does not exclude any part of who we are, any part of our experience. It all fits in there, it all belongs.

I'd like to end with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I don't know if you know her work.

In May I planted a whole row of beans  
along the back fence of the garden,  
pushed each of the small white seeds  
one inch into the spring damp soil.  
I waited weeks. Not one came up. Not one.  
I planted them again, planted them in twos,  
two inches apart.  
I waited weeks. Three came up.  
There were over a hundred seeds.  

I'm trying to tell you that sometimes  
what we wish for doesn't happen,  
though we do everything by the rules,  
though we have known success before,  
though we long for our plans to take root,  
to bloom, to fruit.  

Then all through the rows  
emerged this spring  
dozens of volunteer Cosmos.  
This morning, a generous riot of pink,  
dark pink, and white  
fluttering in the spaces where I envisioned  
only the green of beans.  

Thank you.

---

[^1]: **Pāramī:** The Ten Perfections in Theravada Buddhism, which are wholesome qualities developed to achieve enlightenment.
[^2]: **Dukkha:** A Pali word often translated as "suffering," "stress," or "unsatisfactoriness."
[^3]: **Sayadaw U Tejaniya:** A Burmese Buddhist monk and meditation teacher known for his teachings on continuous mindfulness. Original transcript said "so much and tomato he", corrected based on context.
[^4]: **Samādhi:** A Pali word describing a state of deep, meditative concentration and unification of mind.