khanti or patiece part 1

A spiritual friend suggested to me that I focus on patience in my practice.

At the time I didn't think that was sexy enough, but it's percolated down into me. At the time I said, "should I try to put the Fonzie in forbearance?!"

It is part of the ten or six perfections.

So the first step for me in working on something in my practice, is to decide to work on it. There is a kind of gathering momentum, a kind of preponderance of evidence, that leads to feeling that this is what I most need to work on now. I open up a file in my hard drive called patience. I monitor when I feel impatience and investigate. What story am I telling myself.

I can work on patience in meditation. I noticed in the first stage of the mindfulness of breathing I rush to count the breath. I must wait till it is done.

In metta bhavana meditation, the 5th stage you equalize and spread out metta. The various visualization I rush through. Slowing down my visualization is an act of patience.

One day I was doing a puja with my 4 and 6 year old sons fighting in the background. My youngest cried. I did not see how to clearly intervene, so I just monitored. I could not continue, with my son crying. I felt impatience. And I was not reactive. When he was done I resumed. I hope I'm helping my boys to develop emotional intelligence by accepting, naming and not trying to modify their emotion. Helping them to learn to negotiate and compromise, grasp and work towards the possible, to communicate and advocate for what you want, all these things are long term projects, sophisticated skills. It takes patience to develop them. Parenting takes patience. It means putting off meditation for a while, unless you have really supportive conditions.

The internet and computers are a great place for patience. When things don't load up quickly or you can't figure out how to find a file.

Even further in thinking about impatience to know, to have answers. I think about Buechler's dichotomy of contrast between paranoia and curiosity, and she often quoting Rilke about living the questions instead of rushing to an answer. When you explore you don't focus on right and wrong. We can get locked up in the rigid need for certainties. In a way that's what's so hard about being a therapist--what is the value when objectivity is dead?

I think about Sangharakshita warning about a premature synthesis. Tolerating and having patience in ambivalence and in the face of the unknown is an essential part of the spiritual life.

I think about the following quote from The Big Lebowski:

"This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder's head."

In the end, patience is about tolerating unpleasant emotions and not trying to do something to get rid of the unpleasant emotions. Can I not make things worse by resisting my experience? Can I weather the unpleasant storms with grace and mindfulness? Can I allow things to unfold the way they really are?

So I'm just going to post on my riffs of thoughts. Upcoming, hopefully sometime, I will delve more into the cannon to get more info on khanti.




(Patience is also about waiting for money to come your way. By the way, I will donate everything I earn from monetizing my blog to the NYC sangha. When I search the perfections, Amazon gives me a book by Boorstein. I haven't read the below book, though of course Sylvia Boorstein is a good writer, who I have read. When I wikipedia her name, seems she doesn't have an entry, but that did lead me to another interesting looking book.)