Patience

With everything from chocolate cakes to hurricanes. Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Patience is one of the attitudinal foundations of mindfulness. Like pieces of a puzzle, these attitudes fit together to support us moment to moment and whatever is arising in our bodies, breath, thoughts, and emotions, as well as, how we are relating to our experience. 

There are eleven attitudes all together: patience, curiosity, kindness, gratitude & generosity, acceptance, nonjudging, nonstriving, letting go & letting be, humor, trust and a beginner’s mind. More about the Foundational Attitudes can be found in my previous and future writings this year, as well as, one of the sources for my practice and classes: A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness by Christiane Wolf, MD, PHD and J. Greg Sherpa, PHD.

Another way to imagine these attitudes is like herbs and spices by the stove. Every attitude and how we combine them flavors our experience.

Interestingly, the best time to practice patience is when we feel impatient. When we notice a tightening in the chest, maybe even a holding of the breath – or however impatience feels in your body, remembering that mindfulness is an embodied practice – we can pause and slow down our breathing and inquire, Is this urgent? 

When the moment isn't a matter of true urgency, and as life moves through and by so quickly, it is valuable to check in from time to time and inquire, What is the hurry? Can I be with this feeling and wait a little while longer before...?

It is important to remember that some moments truly are urgent. A matter of life and death. And, we honor those and move quickly as quickly as possible. 

Deadlines and expiration dates are part of life. We all have an expiration date. Unknown. It isn’t written anywhere like box of milk. Because we are not products or here to simply produce. We are human and here to live. To inquire. To be curious and hold our experience lightly as we increase our wholehearted capacity to do so.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke

In meditation we are continually noticing how we are relating to our experience and recognizing when our experience is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. It is natural to want the the pleasant moments, the joy and happiness and everything that feels good to last. Forever! And all that feels unpleasant, tight, heavy, the hard to hold emotions and those feeling states to go away. And stay away, forever. And those moments in between, the neutral moments that could easily pass through and by unnoticed, the moments of calm or even boredom. What about those? Do we cling to them or push them away or even notice them at all?

From chocolate cake to hurricanes and almost forgotten moments in between, everything that arises, has a beginning, then a middle and finally, an end. We can notice this in our breathing. Taking a slow breath in and noticing the beginning, middle and end. Space between the breath. However subtle. Slowly exhaling and sensing the release in the beginning, middle and end of the out breath. Space before the inhale. However brief. We can notice when we are in a hurry to fill our lungs -- or space, time, our bellies -- and also when we are in a rush to let go, to move on, scurrying from one thing to the next, thinking the next moment, place, relationship will be better than the one we are experiencing in this moment.

When we are in the middle of a storm, whether it is a full on hurricane taking its time to tear up trees and roll waves with crashing rocks and pull up structures as it slowly roars by or an emotional storm of overwhelm due to illness, accidents, life transitions, stress of changes or whatever is tearing at our hearts, we can find solace in the earth by pausing to feel our feet touch the ground and then the ever present companion of the breath. When the experience is too much to hold, internally, we can practice zooming out and dropping deeper into the steady rise and fall of the breath. When the breath isn’t appropriate and anxiety producing to be with, we can move our bodies, walk in nature, sweep the floor, hang the laundry, wash the dishes and in doing so, bring our attention to the sacredness of movement and attention to the task at hand. There is solace is knowing floors always need to be swept and dishes washed. Before, during and after the storm. Dishes will need care and moving our bodies in the simplest of ways, feeling the soapy suds in our hands, smoothness of glasses and shininess if water on drying plates all stacked neatly by the sink. Then, they will need to be put away. And later adorned with a colorful meal. And so on. While internal and external storms roar within and without, we can count on ordinary things to ask for our attention while we let the storm pass. Because it will as everything that arises also passes away. In the middle of it all, loads of compassion to hold us in the midst and wake of every storm.

And what about the delicious moments that we want to last forever and know in our hearts will end as all things do? Enjoy every bite and write a love letter to the baker. Let them know you appreciate their full attention in heartfully creating a marry worthy chocolate cake.

As we move towards closing this piece, a few inquiries from class this week, remembering that mindfulness is a practice of embodied awareness:

• Where does patience arise naturally for you? How does this feel in your body?
• Where is it challenging for you to access patience? What brings up impatience? How does this feel in your body?

When impatience tightens my chest and I find myself thinking that I want to leave here, this moment, because there, some next or far off moment will be better in some way, I ask myself, Can I find the grace in my heart to let this be? When I find myself in the middle of a joyous moment that I wish would last forever and know it will also come to an end and change as all things so, I ask myself the same question, Can I find the grace in my heart to let this be? And everywhere in between, the same inquiry. 

I remember the words from a poem by Mary Oliver, A Summers Day, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” My answer? Be here and live everything. As patiently, ccourageously, wholeheartedly and fully as possible.

May your well of patience continually refill so you may live your one wild and precious life as fully as your heart desires.

Namaste, Tehroma

The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider

"It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?'