Foundational Attitude of Mindfulness: Patience

In Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "Patience is a form of wisdom," and in Wherever You Go, There You Are he says, "It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried."

Impatience is a kind of suffering. It's bad enough we may be in a hurry when the cashier at the grocery store is moving slowly. But then we exacerbate this situation by growing ever more impatient with each slow movement, each pause, or each attempt at casual conversation by the clerk. With patience, we begin to accept that this is how it is right now in this moment and there's not much I can do to control this situation; it's OK. Like JKZ said, it's a form of wisdom. So rather than suffer, we try to bring an attitude of patience to these situations. With mindful and intentional patience, we pause and calm ourselves and end the suffering of impatience. When you think about it, patience is THE alternative, THE remedy to being impatient.

Speaking of suffering, what does impatience feel like in your body? For me, I get antsy, shifting my weight from side to side, crossing and uncrossing my arms, craning my neck in an attempt to see what's holding things up, and my heart beats faster, my stomach might even tighten up. I make myself sick being impatient about things I can't control. Not worth it.

So then why are we impatient? Sometimes it's because we're in a hurry and things can't move fast enough. But that's probably only the first layer of the onion. Maybe the next layer is anger that a particular situation, like being stuck in traffic, is going to make you late. Or maybe you're angry at yourself for not accounting for heavy traffic when calculating how long it would take you to get to an appointment. Or maybe you're angry at the grocery store cashier for making you late, but clearly he or she is not responsible. We need to peel back another layer of the onion here. What's behind the anger? Is it worry about what others will think of you if you're late? (Of course we want to be respectful of other people's time and we can make a mindful, conscious effort to do so.) Is it FOMO (fear of missing out)? What is it we fear about being late? Can we put whatever this fear is in perspective? And can we be compassionate toward ourselves and others in this moment?

When you think about it, impatience is usually a reaction to fear, worry, anxiety, anger - impatience is an expression of these emotions, devoid of compassion for yourself or others or the situation. In a moment of impatience, if you can pause and take a breath, you can recognize this and potentially interrupt the reaction of impatience so that you can respond in a different way. That pause is being patient in that moment.

In mindfulness practice, we are intentionally cultivating patience. We learn how to be patient and self-compassionate when we have too many thoughts or can't sit still or find ourselves judging our thoughts or our breath during meditation. Because it's a practice, we're learning all these things at the same time and it takes patience to develop this awareness and how to be in the present moment. Patience and compassion become part of us the more we practice it, and then we apply these ways of being to our lives beyond the mat or the cushion.

To be patient is to be open to and accepting of each moment in all its richness, waiting for the exhale to complete before the inhale begins. The attitude of patience is an expression of peace and compassion. It is an allowing for the butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis in its own time, according to its own nature. I'll leave you with one last quote from the great JKZ: "... in patience lies wisdom, knowing that what will come next will be determined in large measure by how we are now."