Dear Friends,
Continuing with the talk by Kamala Masters titled, “The Power of Patience.”
Kamala shared a reflection that resonated with me:
You might have noticed that there’s no joy when there’s impatience in the practice. … When we can go at good pace with ourselves, just allowing things to arise that are already arising, and our only job is to notice them, there can be a lot of contentment in our practice. It’s simple. … When there’s aversion and attachment and disappointment, and self-judging and judging of others, this is a sign of impatience.
It’s not just when I’m sitting in meditation that I notice the correlation between impatience and a lack of joy.
Suppose there’s a long train travelling through the city, blocking traffic… When impatience is there, I notice gripping the steering wheel, tightness in the shoulders, leaning forward, shallower breathing. There’s grumpiness too – why are these trains moving through the city when I have to get somewhere! Why didn’t I take the route with the underpass? Grumble, grumble…
All that unpleasantness doesn’t make the train move any quicker!
I recall Jeanne Corrigal saying something like, “Impatience is the doorway to patience.” I like that I don’t have to reject that impatience has arisen. Instead, I can turn my mindful attention to that.
Even just a small equanimous acknowledgement that “impatience is like this” can help me ease into what’s here. Yup, there’s a train. Yup, I might be late. But now I can open to other options than grumpiness. I can celebrate that here’s a moment I can just sit with the breathing. I can invite the muscles to relax. I can feel a contentment that in this moment, I’m fully here, watching this body+mind+heart do its thing. (I bet you just wish you were stuck in traffic now!)
Reflection: See if you can notice a moment today when impatience turned into a doorway to patience. What shift in your body+mind+heart did you notice?
Feel free to share your reflections or comments below, or by email.
With warm wishes,
Andrea
AG.
This is my life! I live on the East Side and work on the West Side. In a very non Buddhist way I schedule my life down to the precise second. My shift starts at 0300. Then, alas, hurrying up from Idyllwyld, , I see ahead of me the flashing red lights coming down right across the road at Avenue K ( mid Alphabet City) The Big H of St. Paul’s is visible not two hundred yards away. It might as well be in Timbuktu.
In an effort to decrease the number of transits through our bustling city CP loads trains up and moves them through at the witching hour when most sane people are deliriously asleep. (I swear they are ten miles long) For safety reasons the engines pull at snail pace. All the train-cars are the same – black tubes loaded with potash for the soy bean fields of the Far East.
They look like a chain of endless burnt sausage links (I am a vegetarian of course) They would have a soporific effect like the sheep I count to fall asleep except for the adrenaline flooding my limbic system. Patience… yes patience. Three choice Anglo Saxon words and a dashboard punch.
Then I remember a blog from my friend, Ananda… “It IS like this… ” The snow is falling in large languorous flakes from the indigo sky…. there’s foreign jazz on the radio…the windows have defrosted from the small peephole I scraped in my parking lot….I can see my breath…a sip of fresh hot Timmy’s…. Hey! there’s someone else awake at this hour riding his bike slowly up 20th… it is like THIS…. …. It is like this….. breathe in breathe out… it is like this….do they still have cabooses on trains?…
RND
(ps where is that underpass?… I’d like to know)