Be A Patience Practitioner

Spiritual traditions regard patience as a discipline and an antidote to anger. Let's hone patience by first unhooking from our automatic reactions, writes HOMAYUN TABA

If you can wait, from sour grapes I’ll make you halwa, a sweet delicacy, goes a saying from the Middle East, where this delicious sweet is laboriously made out of grape juice.

It is meant to convey that maturing requires patient waiting.

Spiritual traditions regard patience as a discipline and an antidote to anger. “A hot-tempered man provokes a quarrel; a patient man calms strife,” says Proverb 15:18. Kshanti, patience, is included among the six Buddhist paramitas, perfect actions. And Lao Tzu considers his teachings to be summarised in three attitudes — simplicity, patience, and compassion.

Impatience starts with mild irritation and can escalate to unwise reactions that one might well regret later. Patience is the capacity to face unpleasant and unfavourable circumstances without giving way to irritation and agitation. Wisdom, discernment, implies stopping one’s habitual propensities from taking control of the mind. Pausing, cooling down and thinking through, results in more skilful handling.

We each possess a relaxation baseline which determines our stability or composure level. This baseline can be lowered by such practices as tai chi, yog, several breathing exercises and meditation. Regular practice of these helps to avoid knee-jerk responses, and quickly return, when disturbed, to the incrementally lowered baseline which is a place of stillness, of letting go and of kindness.

Constant stress and exhaustion create barriers to accessing that reservoir or baseline leading to over sensitivity and frayed nerves. Another big barrier is the easily hurt ego, because ego feeds on entitlement, me-first, and impatience when not attended to immediately. The habit of strengthening patience leads to flexibility, adjustability, and the surrendering of some of the ego’s unreasonable demands.

Faster technological advances, have made us more impatient, expecting immediate results and instant gratification. We are habituated to shortcuts and quick fixes and we treat our illnesses in the same way. We pop a pill rather than go for alternative therapies. Rather than addressing the cause, we treat the symptom. It should come as no surprise that ill person is called a patient — because there is a need for patiently waiting for the process of recovery.

Most achievements in life are based on patient work. Farmers know how one cannot speed up reaping of what has been sown. Patience is vital for research and sustained effort. Any meaningful training demands sustained investment of time and energy, take music or art. That is often why impatient people give up after the initial excitement dies down. And in terms of establishing meaningful relationships, there is a need for sustained exercise of patience. Parenthood is impossible without mega doses of patience.

Patience is needed in dealing with difficult people, those who push our buttons; and yet these give us an opportunity to transform our responses. We are told that Atisha, the great Buddhist teacher, carried his terrible attendant with him to Tibet just to exercise and strengthen his own patience. Similarly, Gurdjieff had actually paid an unbearable character to be part of his community, as an irritant to test and strengthen the patience of the group.

Awareness of triggers is an effective approach — knowing where, when and with whom one is likely to lose patience, and this includes waiting time as in traffic jams, and queues. Always carrying some reading material or a playlist of soothing music on the phone, are simple and effective coping ways. While it’s true that some impatient responses are legitimate, one needs to look for alternative routes to deal with them, and these strategies will depend on one’s creativity.