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M15 Ep031: Add patience to your meditation toolkit
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Last week’s episode was about how to practice diligence, the first of four tools for enhancing your mindfulness practice. This week, we explore patience, the partner of diligence. It is simply impossible to be mindful without being patient. Let’s take a closer look.
When you first sit down to learn meditation, a whole bunch of things typically pop up. You may encounter discomfort, pain, or numbness when you try to sit for even a few minutes. You could discover an active mind that hops from one thought to next seemingly ceaselessly. You might bring up buried emotions you were trying to suppress. You may feel boredom or restlessness. All of these things can lead to frustration and disappointment. And, they might even lead you to abandon meditation.
In the last episode, I suggested you deal with these perceived obstacles using diligence. It takes time and practice to learn how to deal with all these things, so you need to persevere in your meditation. Being diligent in the practice, however, requires patience. To convince yourself to practice when the previous meditation was unsatisfying requires a patient acceptance of the time and effort it will take to make progress. It also takes a little faith. You need to believe us meditation teachers when we tell you will get better at handling distractions!
Patience is also an integral part of the practice. Mindfulness is being aware of the present moment without judging it. But your emotional reactions are typically habitual. They are automatic and can arise very quickly. It takes patience to stop and step back from your initial reactions.
Patience is what allows you to pause and accept the situation for what it is. And, patience is what lets you accept your habitual reactions without judging yourself for them. If you can apply patience this way, you give yourself time to see more deeply, to get a broader perspective on what is happening and to find more helpful and deliberate ways to react.
When it comes to mindfulness, patience is both required to practice and strengthened by practice. It takes time to develop patience, so you have to be patient with yourself when you’re not being patient enough! Next week, we’ll discuss kindness and how it helps you to foster patience toward yourself and your habitual reactions.
As you progress in your mindfulness practice, you’ll begin to observe ways in which you resist the lessons meditation is trying to teach you. Perhaps you’ll notice a habitual reaction that you’re not ready to let go of. I’ll talk more about resistance in future podcasts, but it is entirely normal. It is your mind attempting to protect your sense of self by insisting that it’s not you who needs to change, but the world around you. It can be frightening to let go of resistance, because it sometimes feels like letting go of your sense of who you are.
Patience lets you acknowledge the truth of the situation and lets you accept your own resistance with kindness and ease. When you can be patient with your own reactions, you can recognize them, explore them, and if you choose to, change them. Ultimately, patience allows you to see that your own sense of self isn’t necessarily an accurate picture of who your really are.
It may sound as if strengthening patience takes a lot of self-analysis or involves enduring painful situations to uncover the truth about them. This is not true. Patience is simply the absence of automatic reactions and it is built by gently sitting and noticing your habitual reactions.
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Listen:
Watch:
Read:
Last week’s episode was about how to practice diligence, the first of four tools for enhancing your mindfulness practice. This week, we explore patience, the partner of diligence. It is simply impossible to be mindful without being patient. Let’s take a closer look.
When you first sit down to learn meditation, a whole bunch of things typically pop up. You may encounter discomfort, pain, or numbness when you try to sit for even a few minutes. You could discover an active mind that hops from one thought to next seemingly ceaselessly. You might bring up buried emotions you were trying to suppress. You may feel boredom or restlessness. All of these things can lead to frustration and disappointment. And, they might even lead you to abandon meditation.
In the last episode, I suggested you deal with these perceived obstacles using diligence. It takes time and practice to learn how to deal with all these things, so you need to persevere in your meditation. Being diligent in the practice, however, requires patience. To convince yourself to practice when the previous meditation was unsatisfying requires a patient acceptance of the time and effort it will take to make progress. It also takes a little faith. You need to believe us meditation teachers when we tell you will get better at handling distractions!
Patience is also an integral part of the practice. Mindfulness is being aware of the present moment without judging it. But your emotional reactions are typically habitual. They are automatic and can arise very quickly. It takes patience to stop and step back from your initial reactions.
Patience is what allows you to pause and accept the situation for what it is. And, patience is what lets you accept your habitual reactions without judging yourself for them. If you can apply patience this way, you give yourself time to see more deeply, to get a broader perspective on what is happening and to find more helpful and deliberate ways to react.
When it comes to mindfulness, patience is both required to practice and strengthened by practice. It takes time to develop patience, so you have to be patient with yourself when you’re not being patient enough! Next week, we’ll discuss kindness and how it helps you to foster patience toward yourself and your habitual reactions.
As you progress in your mindfulness practice, you’ll begin to observe ways in which you resist the lessons meditation is trying to teach you. Perhaps you’ll notice a habitual reaction that you’re not ready to let go of. I’ll talk more about resistance in future podcasts, but it is entirely normal. It is your mind attempting to protect your sense of self by insisting that it’s not you who needs to change, but the world around you. It can be frightening to let go of resistance, because it sometimes feels like letting go of your sense of who you are.
Patience lets you acknowledge the truth of the situation and lets you accept your own resistance with kindness and ease. When you can be patient with your own reactions, you can recognize them, explore them, and if you choose to, change them. Ultimately, patience allows you to see that your own sense of self isn’t necessarily an accurate picture of who your really are.
It may sound as if strengthening patience takes a lot of self-analysis or involves enduring painful situations to uncover the truth about them. This is not true. Patience is simply the absence of automatic reactions and it is built by gently sitting and noticing your habitual reactions.