This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Cultivating Patience on the Path - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
For those who are just arriving, my name is Mei. It’s so nice to be here with you, especially on this beautiful Sunday. I’d like to start with a poem. This is called Lao Tzu’s1 peace prayer. It goes like this:
“If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, there must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home. And if there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart.”
There’s a lot of suffering in the world right now, and there are many things that can be done when there’s suffering in the world—many external actions, volunteering, donations, having bridge-building conversations, lots of really important things that can be done. And I don’t think the importance of cultivating a heart of peace should be underestimated. If there’s to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the heart.
One way I like to think of it is that wars and famines don’t typically happen because of a shortage of land or resources. They happen because of greed, hatred, and delusion in the human mind. As Nisargadatta Maharaj2 said, “If you want to save the world, you must first save the world from yourself.”
This morning, we’ll be talking about a very particular way of cultivating a heart of peace. We’ll be talking about khanti3, or patience. The Buddha described patience as the highest virtue, and yet what I’ve found is that not everyone knows exactly what patience is or how to cultivate it. So that’s our focus for today.
Maybe about a month ago, Gil spoke about patience here for the Sunday talk, but it’s such an important topic that I thought it might be useful to return to it and approach it from a slightly different angle.
To begin, let’s start with the basics. By one definition, patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. It’s this ability to bear difficulty calmly, to be steadfast despite adversity. One of my Zen4 teachers used to say, “The first element of patience is a willingness to suffer.” This actually makes a lot of sense because the Latin root of patience is pati, and pati literally means “to suffer.” So embedded right in the word, we have this willingness to rest in difficulty.
I found that one common misassociation with patience is that it involves gritting our teeth and bearing it, kind of bearing our circumstances. But true patience is not a tightening against our circumstances. Rather, it’s the ability to be with difficulty while maintaining a wholesome attitude. This was pretty novel for me to really understand—that patience is the ability to be with what’s difficult while maintaining a wholesome attitude.
So how then do we cultivate patience? How do we actually bring it forth in our life? It could be easy to think that the way to patience is by getting rid of impatience, but that is not actually the case. The way to patience is actually through impatience. It’s by studying impatience that we grow the heart of patience.
Let’s zoom in on this a bit. Let’s take a closer look at impatience, and that’ll be a lot of our study today: looking at how impatience functions, because so much of cultivating patience is looking at its opposite. One thing I found through a closer look at impatience is that it’s actually the coming together of a variety of different factors of mind. What I found is that when impatience arises, it’s always coming along with a companion, and the companion is craving or aversion—wanting or not wanting. Impatience is always arising in tandem with wanting or not wanting. We could say they walk hand in hand.
Narrowing in on this a little further, we can look at the way impatience arises with wanting. Let’s say something obstructs us from getting what we want. Let’s say we want a cup of coffee or a bathroom break or a better job, whatever it is. If anything gets in our way of getting that thing, impatience can quite easily take hold. Typically, we want rapid and unhindered access to that which we desire, and if anything gets in the way of that, then impatience can reign supreme.
On the flip side, we can look at the same pattern with not wanting, with aversion. When we experience something unpleasant, something we don’t want—maybe pain in the body, a dismal mood, an illness, sadness, loss—when that happens, often impatience then urges us to rush through it.
So this is one factor of impatience: wanting or not wanting. But there’s one additional element that really makes impatience what it is, and that’s the perception of time. This sense that “I can’t bear this another moment,” or “What I want needs to happen now,” or “The thing that I don’t want, it needs to stop now.” There’s this sense of urgency associated with this perception of time.
With wanting, maybe we could say the universal refrain of impatience is, “Are we there yet?” It’s just like sitting in the backseat of our life, totally oblivious of the beautiful passing scenery and just obsessed about getting to the hotel pool. This is that tendency towards impatience: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Or with not wanting, impatience can have this time-based element of, “When will that annoying sound go away?” or “I can’t bear this headache another moment,” or “How much longer until this meeting ends?” I imagine all of you have had the experience of looking at a clock over and over until you get to the end of whatever that unpleasant event is.
So we have this element of wanting or not wanting, plus the perception of time, and boom, impatience arises.
What’s kind of interesting about impatience, and maybe we could say this for many challenging states of mind, is they tag along a little bit like a shadow, in the way that they often go unnoticed. When impatience is present, often we don’t even realize it’s there. So our very first task for practicing with impatience, for getting to know impatience, is recognition. Just simple recognition that it’s there.
As we start recognizing it, starting to see it when it’s there, it can be kind of surprising to see what a common visitor it can be. It appears while driving in traffic, during conversations with others, while stuck with a slow internet connection, while waiting in line at the grocery. The other morning, I pulled my breakfast out of the microwave, and rather than waiting for it to cool down, I chose to burn my tongue on molten oatmeal. So it’s this sense of urgency, like, “I want my breakfast now.”
Impatience can be really pervasive. Whether it’s mild impatience or strong impatience, our task is just to recognize it, just to see it. And as humbling as our impatience is, these minor league occasions provide opportunities to grow the muscle of patience before it’s needed in more difficult circumstances. We can’t really expect patience to be present for us in situations where we’re enduring really difficult hardship if we haven’t already cultivated it with lesser challenges.
In order to be able to patiently endure something really difficult, like the loss of a loved one, we need to start small. If we go to the gym, it doesn’t work so well to start with the 100-pound weights. It works a lot better to start with the five-pound weights. Same story with patience. We start by working with small situations of impatience, and we grow that muscle, gaining the capacity to be patient in more challenging circumstances.
When I was in my early 20s, I was presented with a 100-pound weight, and I had to learn the hard way. I think I was 24 years old, and I went to bed a perfectly healthy young person and I woke up the next day not a healthy young person. I was very sick. It was kind of like my digestion had stopped functioning. I went and saw the doctor; the doctor didn’t know what was happening. I saw another doctor; that doctor didn’t know what was happening. I saw doctor after doctor. Days went by, weeks went by, months went by, and I started to get pretty impatient about getting better. I really wanted to get better. It did not feel good.
During this time, I went to go see a teacher, a Dharma5 teacher in the East Bay, and I told this teacher about how unbearable this circumstance was, how difficult it was. And he said something to me that I found… that it changed me. He said something that changed me. He said, “How would you be with this if it were to be this way forever? How would you be with this if it were to be this way forever?”
Of course, this prompt wasn’t to provoke future-tripping or fear or anything like that. The way that it functioned was that it undercut my aversion. I realized if I were to be with this forever, I would have to accept it now. Otherwise, I’m just going to burn in the fire of my own aversion. So if I were to be with this forever, I would have to accept it. And as you know, impatience arises with aversion. If aversion drops out, impatience drops out.
Over time, I found a way to be with this experience with greater patience. And of course, there were times where I wasn’t patient, where impatience was present, and that’s when I would do this practice. That’s when I would recognize impatience when it was there. And then I’d do the next step. The next step, once we recognize impatience, is to feel it in the body. What’s it actually feel like to be impatient? Is there a tightness in the chest, maybe a clenching in the jaw, heat in the face? Can you get to know it, almost like an ecologist in a new ecosystem? What is the human experience of impatience like?
As we do this, as we become curious about what impatience feels like—and this is true for any difficult state—if we become really attuned to what it feels like in the body, the next time it arises, we know it right away. So we’re much less likely to get hijacked by it. I’ve seen with some states that really used to be difficult for me, sometimes the moment they arise, because I’ve spent so much time feeling them in the body, I can just drop it. It’s like, no need to get hijacked by this because I see it. I’ve really gotten to know it. This is one of the advantages to really feeling these challenging experiences in the body.
So, once we’ve recognized our impatience and felt it in the body, then we can call on wisdom or compassion. We might bring in some wisdom by reflecting on impermanence, remembering that whatever this is, whatever is happening, this too shall pass. And this too will pass in time. In the meantime, even as it seems to persist, often what we experience as fixed kind of ebbs and flows. There are changes to it. And really being able to sense those ebbs and flows, it can begin to loosen our sense of fixity, that fixed perception that “it’s like this and it’s going to stay like this for too long and I don’t want this.” We kind of get to see some cracks in our fixed perception as we really observe change.
When we really begin to see how quickly things pass, and that often they pass on their own without our volition, wisdom begins to emerge, and this can soften impatience. This clear seeing can soften impatience.
That’s a wisdom view. We can also, after recognizing and feeling impatience in the body, bring in some compassion. The way that compassion functions is that it softens impatience with its warmth. In the same way that if there’s a little kid that’s having a tantrum, a parent can approach that child and speak to that child in a soothing way and really comfort it, be kind and gentle with it, we can do that to the impatient child within. Often, there’s just a vulnerable part of ourselves that longs for things to be otherwise. So can we meet that part of our heart with kindness, with gentleness, with compassion?
Sometimes this softening that compassion provides reveals that impatience is covering up deeper hurts. We might find that below our impatience, emotions like sadness or loneliness or grief may be underneath, just asking for our loving attention.
One time I was walking through the flower garden at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center up in Marin, and I ran into an old friend there. This was a friend that I had trained with as a Zen monk at Tassajara6 many years before. It was really lovely to see him, and he was there with his daughter, who was maybe four years old at the time. She was very cute and small and bright-eyed. My friend and I started talking a little, and we weren’t talking long, but his daughter, who was fine at first—maybe digging around in a flower bed or something—it wasn’t long before she started feeling like this conversation is done, it’s time to go. “Come on, Dad.”
She expressed this in the way that kids do, which is not by saying, “Oh, I’d like to go now.” I think it began with maybe pulling her dad’s pant leg, and then some whining, and maybe a little yelling and kicking. It was one of these moments where I just felt awe at parenthood. How is it that parents don’t eat their young? It’s just extraordinary. [Laughter]
I was wondering how my friend was going to respond to this, and I was just amazed by how tender and patient and gentle he was with her. He knelt down on one knee, just spoke to her really soothingly, kindly, just so soft, so gentle. We all have this capacity to meet the impatient child within with that same kindness, that same compassion, that same gentleness.
Now, ironically, after watching my friend respond in this way for a little while, I was so amazed by his composure, I said something like, “Kogan, how do you do it? You are so patient with her.” And he raised an eyebrow and with a wry smile, he said, “You don’t know what it’s like in here.”
That really stuck with me because I think a lot of times we don’t feel patient, we don’t feel kind. But what’s the next best thing? The way that this friend was with his daughter, even though he didn’t feel patient, he enacted patience. In a lot of ways, our practice is about not leaking our defilements onto others, to not leak our greed, hatred, and delusion onto others. I’m not saying that we should never share how we’re feeling. There’s a time and a place where it’s tremendously skillful to express our impatience or our dissatisfaction or whatever the feeling is. Certainly so. And I think there are often a lot of times when we don’t need to express those things and when we don’t need to leak them onto others in a way that’s unskillful. I just thought that this friend’s enactment of patience was such a beautiful expression of being in the world aligned with one’s values, even if the heart isn’t quite there yet, even if the heart isn’t going along with the intention.
There’s another point of discernment that I’d like to clarify regarding patience, and it’s that patience shouldn’t be conflated with complacency or non-action. Some people think, “Oh, well, if I’m patient, if I accept things as they are, then there’s no energy to act. Then we just don’t do anything.”
A few weeks ago, I did a one-day sitting, and it was one of those days where the mind was just everywhere. There was tons of thinking. It was a lot of bringing the mind back to the breath, letting go of thoughts, coming back to the breath, letting go of thoughts, coming back to the breath, over and over and over again. I probably brought the mind back a thousand times that day. Would I have preferred a quiet mind? Yes, definitely. But fortunately, there was some level of patience present with the mind as it was. I wasn’t striving to get a different mind. I wasn’t longing for it to be otherwise. I was just with the mind as it was and continuing to bring it back.
So even though there was patience present, it didn’t mean that I was complacent with the thinking mind. It didn’t mean I just went, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if I’m thinking. I’m just going to stop trying.” No, I kept bringing the mind back, but I did it with a heart of patience. Tremendous effort can still be made from the heart of patience, from the heart of acceptance. When I was really sick, I was able to accept what was happening to me, but that didn’t mean that I stopped seeking medical help. There was still action that came from that place of patience, from that place of acceptance.
I share this because a lot of people wonder, if fear or anger aren’t motivating us, how do we respond to injustice? You know, there’s no fuel to act. And sometimes fear and anger is all we’ve got, and we do our best with that. But we don’t actually need fear or anger to drive our activity. There’s actually a much more powerful force for wholesome activity in the world, and that’s the power of love. Profoundly powerful action can come from a place of love. As the Buddha said, “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law.”
You don’t need to worry that patience will render you ineffective or complacent. Maybe it’s exactly what you need to have the stability and the resilience to act most powerfully. Patience can really serve us in some really significant ways, and amazing things can become possible when we have access to patience.
I sometimes think about Nelson Mandela as this really just incredible figure that personified patience in such a magnificent way. As most of you know, Nelson Mandela is the anti-apartheid activist who spent 27 years imprisoned at Robben Island in really harsh conditions, tremendous isolation, and who eventually became the president of South Africa. I was reading a while ago about what the conditions were like there on Robben Island. A few things I learned: I learned that he was allowed to have one visitor a year for a 30-minute period. He could exchange no more than one letter every six months. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what he experienced.
What was so beautiful for me was to read that he related to his imprisonment as, quote, “an education in patience and perseverance.” An education in patience and perseverance.
So whatever difficulty we might find ourselves in, can we meet it as an education in patience? We all have this capacity for a heroic patience amidst even life’s most significant hardships. And we all have this capacity to rise above our aversion, our craving, and really meet life as it is. When we meet our difficult circumstances with this type of patient nobility, we’re not the only ones who benefit. Our children, our co-workers, everyone we encounter can benefit from our peace.
And this peace doesn’t require perfection. When patience is present, great. And when impatience is present, we recognize it, we feel it. And when we do that, it opens the door for wisdom and compassion to free the heart. What’s amazing is that we can even learn to be patient with impatience itself. So we don’t have to wait for impatience to leave before patience can arise.
I’ll close with a very short quote from the Dalai Lama. It’s said that the Dalai Lama was once asked, “What’s the fastest way to enlightenment?” He gave a one-word answer: “Patience.”
When we are faced with crossing the great flood of samsara7, we could think that patience provides us with a raft and a sail for crossing the flood. And when patience is mature, we might even enjoy the ride.
Let’s sit together.
[Music]
Thank you for your kind attention, your patient attention. We’ll now have a little time for any questions or comments. Anything that might have come to mind for you, you can share. It doesn’t have to be a question, any reflections.
Audience Member: I just have to say, love is the answer.
Mei Elliott: Oh, okay.
Audience Member: It’s worth saying twice. Okay, I just have to say, love is the answer. Thank you.
Mei Elliott: Thanks.
Scott: I just wanted to express my appreciation for the image of leaking defilements. That’s very powerful.
Mei Elliott: Yeah. There’s something that feels different to really recognize a defilement in oneself, to recognize our craving or aversion, and then to consider, “Is this useful to share? How might I share this in a skillful way?” and to communicate that in an upright way, which might be very skillful, versus leaking defilements. Some people think, “Oh, well, I should never share my defilements.” But there’s a time and a place for it. But what happens more often than not is just that we’re leaking them, which doesn’t work so well. Yeah. Thank you, Scott. Oh, and please share your name if you’re willing.
Craig: Sure. My name is Craig, and my question is, in those moments where we notice that there’s anger and rage and kind of pushing away, what are some next steps you can take to kind of reorient towards love in those moments?
Mei Elliott: Yeah. Something that’s kind of useful is the practice that I offered for working with impatience is also effective for any other difficult emotion. So if anger or rage are present, recognizing that’s what’s happening, because often we don’t even know we’re angry when we’re angry, you know, we’re just hijacked by it. So to recognize it, to feel it in the body. And something that’s really helpful as we do this is to meet it with acceptance. We’re not suppressing the anger, and we’re not acting out on the anger. We’re just allowing it to move through, and we’re not feeding the storyline. Often anger is fueled by the narrative. So by landing in the body, feeling the body, that’s starting to cut off the fuel to the fire. So we’re letting go of the thoughts, being in the body, and grounding in the body. In that way, as it starts to diminish the fuel for the fire, we can be able to become more grounded, more stable, more at ease, moving us more in the direction of love. So yes, sometimes people think that we need to get rid of our anger or suppress our anger, but it’s really going through anger. We need to allow it to be felt. I mean, often anger is just trying to communicate something, like a boundary. You know, “Don’t step on me.”
Mei Elliott: Thank you.
Jill: My name is Jill. My question is, only recently I’ve started thinking that patience and impatience are not opposites. It’s way more complicated than that, but I can’t sort out what I mean. So do you have a thought on that?
Mei Elliott: Could you say a little bit more about what you’re sensing into there, even if you can’t quite fully articulate it?
Jill: I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking patience and impatience were two sides of the same coin, but I think that’s been really misguided. So maybe I just need to relabel impatience instead, because in the labeling, it sounds like they should be opposites, but I’m just not sure. I’m trying to work it out. And I thought you replace one with the other, and it’s not that simple.
Mei Elliott: Right, especially if we can be patient with impatience, if they can coexist. So here’s one way that we can think of patience and impatience as not opposites, one way that we could think of them a little differently. Often, forces of mind like our craving and aversion, it’s not that they’re evil forces in us. They’re trying to do something good for us. They’re trying to make us happy. I might feel like, “Gosh, I really just have to have that piece of cake. I have to have the chocolate cake.” So that’s your craving speaking. It’s trying to make me happy, it’s just a little bit misguided about how to do that. So most of our desire and aversion, it’s really trying to do its best for us. It thinks that yelling at our spouse is what will make us feel better. So it’s just a little misguided. And so our impatience, that’s fueled by that wanting and not wanting, it’s the mind and heart trying to do its best with a difficult circumstance and just being a little misguided. In the same way, patience is also trying to help us be happy. So we might think of them as both forces of mind that are trying to make us happy. One is just a little off track. So if we think of it that way, we’re not seeing them as polar opposites, but as two different attempted paths of happiness, one just being misguided.
Jill: Very helpful. Thank you.
Colin: Yeah. And maybe I think this is the last one we’ll have time for. Hey, I’m Colin. I have a similar question. Maybe you can help me form it. I guess I’m trying to figure out where preferences kind of fit in this. Like when you were sick, you said maybe you maintained that preference to not be sick, but you still were able to be patient.
Mei Elliott: Yeah. There’s a famous Zen poem that starts with, “The great way is not difficult for those without preference.” That’s the Xinxin Ming8. So what happens with our preferences… maybe I should start by saying preferences are not the problem. Clinging to our preferences, that’s the problem. So it’s quite natural as humans that we experience certain things as pleasant and certain things as unpleasant. And so naturally, we gravitate to the pleasant and away from the unpleasant. And of course, for each of us, what’s pleasant and unpleasant is different. I might love strawberries, you might hate strawberries. That natural gravitation, that kind of magnetic pull in one direction or the other, becomes preferences, right? It turns into what we like and dislike. When we start to cling really tightly to that, that’s when suffering occurs. So we can hold our preferences like this [clenches fist], and that’s going to feel a lot different. Like if I did this for another 10 minutes, my hand would really hurt. Or we can hold our preferences like this [opens hand]. So, you know, so we don’t get what we want, no big deal. So it’s our relationship to the preference.
Colin: Thank you.
Mei Elliott: Yeah, welcome. Thank you all for your attention. So lovely that you would all take your time, maybe your day off today, to come and cultivate a beautiful heart. This is such a valuable thing to do with your time and your life, to look within so you can help all of those around you. So may all beings feel the benefit of our practice today together, so we can have a world where beings are happy, healthy, safe, and at ease. May all beings know happiness and the causes of happiness.
[Music]
Thank you. And feel free to stick around for tea time. Take care, everyone.
Lao Tzu: An ancient Chinese philosopher and writer, reputed author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of philosophical Taoism. ↩
Nisargadatta Maharaj: A Hindu guru of the Inchagiri Sampradaya, who taught a form of nondualism (Advaita). ↩
Khanti: The Pali word for patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. It is one of the ten paramis or perfections in Theravada Buddhism. ↩
Zen: A school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School, and later developed into various schools. It emphasizes rigorous self-control, meditation-practice, insight into Buddha-nature, and the personal expression of this insight in daily life, especially for the benefit of others. ↩
Dharma: In Buddhist traditions, Dharma means “cosmic law and order,” but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha. ↩
Tassajara: Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is the oldest Japanese Buddhist Sōtō Zen monastery in the United States. ↩
Samsara: In Buddhism, the beginningless cycle of death and rebirth. ↩
Xinxin Ming: A poem attributed to the Third Chinese Chan Patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan. The title is often translated as “Faith in Mind.” ↩