Patience

I was meditating before my first class last week, unsure of what I was going to share for my message, and one word kept popping into my head. It felt like a bright flashing light; PATIENCE,  a sentiment that is challenging to many of us. 

The nature of life is that we cannot predict the future, yet our will to know, to plan and to prepare often steals the joy in today and actually doesn’t serve the future outcome either.

I thought about that word and why it lit up in my mind like a Las Vegas billboard and realized perhaps its because there is a lot of uncertainty in my life at the moment including my son’s recently submitted college applications. This is a perfect example of knowing the outcome will become clear in time, knowing that negotiating and wondering will not change the end result and yet the angst still resides in the mind. I shared an excerpt from a reading by Mark Nepo about patience that I have included here:

Patience

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion. 
These are your greatest treasures.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. 
-Lao-Tzu

Patience is the second of Lao-Tzu’s central teachings, and it is a hard bit of wisdom to accept, for the place of waiting is always trying and very difficult to live out. Fear wants us to act too soon. But patience, hard as it is, helps us outlast our preconceptions. This is how tired soldiers, all out of ammo, can discover through their inescapable waiting that they have no reason to hurt each other. 
It is the same with tired lovers and with hurtful and tiresome friends. Given enough time, most of our enemies cease to be enemies, because waiting allows us to see ourselves in them. Patience devastates us with the truth that, in essence, when we fear another, we fear ourselves, when we distrust another, we distrust ourselves, when we hurt another, we hurt ourselves. 
So when hurt or afraid or confused, when feeling urgent to find your place on this Earth, hard as it is, wait… and things as you fear them will, more often than not, shrink into the irreplaceable beauty of things as they are… of which you have no choice but to be a part. 

Our asana practice helps us cultivate patience as well. Every time we step on the mat we do not know exactly what our body is going to offer us and whatever it does we accept and what it doesn’t we also have no choice but to accept. We have to sit in discomfort sometimes; tightness or restriction, without the clear knowing of when it will resolve. Sometimes for completely unexplainable reasons our bodies are fatigued or very strong and then the next day something different. This is the practice of patience through “compassionate unknowing”.  

The “inescapable waiting” and wishing and wondering– these thoughts about things we cannot change take up such valuable space in the mind. If we can sit in stillness and acceptance that things as you fear them will, more often than not, shrink into the irreplaceable beauty of things as they are… of which you have no choice but to be a part it can free us from the suffering around the desire to control and from there, from ourselves.