Ooh! Now, I'll deal with the second part first: What happens to a lot of people when they start meditating, and most of you have already experienced this, is that all of a sudden you see who you are. You see all that yucky stuff that has been hiding, it's kind of like you walk into a dirty house and you have to find the dirt before you clean it but the dirt has always been there. It's just that we didn't see it before, the door was shut, locked, bolted!
So what happens for a lot of people when they start meditating is, yes, indeed, they start to see, "Oh, I don't have as much Patience as I thought I had. I don't have as much Compassion as I thought I had. I have more anger than I thought I had and so on." So sometimes when a person starts meditating they actually think they've gone backwards. They think as the statement goes, 'I became less patient'. Maybe you did, maybe, because of other factors, you did, but on another level it is likely that you are discovering that you actually have less patience than you thought you had before. okay, so that sometimes happens.
So, how can I learn to have more Patience? Everything you do in here, again, is help you have more Patience. Can you sit, especially, can you sit with a Meditation pain? Tomorrow is the night when I normally teach the Unpleasant Physical Sensations technique. Do you use it? A lot of people don't! I got a note one morning, day 5 after giving the talk, an old student doing their tenth retreat - ten retreats. They were also an assistant at the time. Ten retreats and they write, "Steve, I've heard that Unpleasant Physical Sensations talk ten times, I guess, maybe it's time to try it."
Believe me they had not tried it, and a lot of old students don't try. Ow, there starts the pain, oh, I am worried, I don't like it, so they don't try it. And even if you try it, do you go the full distance? I give a few techniques, okay? First it's to be aware of it, see its size, shape, location and all that. When you reach the end of that, it is not time to quit. Then we look at that aversion, we look at the worry and we try to find that manifesting in the body. When you finish that, it is not time to quit. One more minute, 30 seconds, ten breaths. And even when you finish with that, it is not time to quit.
Take another look, make sure you want to quit and then note to yourself, "I feel I've worked as best you could at this time, rather than building aversion I'll change my posture and start again on the breathing". Now, it's a very long technique if you use it properly. So, if you want more patience, that's a key way to start. Start working with the Unpleasant Physical Sensations all the way to the end. And actually if you get very good at working it to the end, talk to us in the interviews, there is more! okay, that is one way to develop patience, working at sitting still with a meditation pain.
Walking meditation: Develop patience in your walking meditation. Especially in the afternoon. Can you really continue putting effort into being aware of your walking without allowing yourself to get lost thinking about the food at 5.45. Can you be more patient? Just doing the walking meditation and continue without wanting something in the future. And be patient with noting when you do.
Patience is often being able to be here now without going into the future. When a person has lots and lots of impatience, when they are very, very restless, that's the opposite, being impatient, very restless. When a person says to us in the interviews that they are very restless we have a set question. It's almost always the same question we ask them, we say, "What do you want in the future?". It is as simple as that, it's a desire for something in the future that makes us restless so that we cannot be patient now. So if you can make more effort in your mental noting of your desires that will give you more patience here now.
Last week I was with my mother in Virginia, after the retreat we plan to go there again for another week. She lives in a retirement village, there are over 2000 old people there, like a small university campus with 5 storey buildings. They have ten different buildings with people living in their own apartments plus a nursing home connected to it, it's huge. Working with old people you need patience and I need patience with my mother. She doesn't think clearly, it takes her a while to do things. Patience. Can you be patient with somebody else? That is often a big test: "Why aren't they doing this? Why are they doing that?" We want to blame somebody else because we are not patient.
Impatience often comes when somebody else is involved as it is easier to blame them for our own impatience. "They are not doing something quick enough, they are not doing it well enough. Why didn't they do this, why didn't they do that?"
When we look at these situations, where somebody else is involved, if we see that we are impatient, that is a key time to ask yourself, "Wait a minute, are they really doing something wrong or am I simply expecting something from them what they cannot give me? For example, if I want my mother to act like a younger person, I am going to be upset because that is not reality.
Some of you have children so you know it's similar with children, you need a lot of patience with kids. They don't do exactly what the parents want them to do. Sit down, no, they don't. Eat your food, no, they won't. Go to bed now, no, they won't. okay, kids are a great test for patience.
So often with patience, it is practiced and developed when we are involved with another human being. It is at these times that you can really check whether you are blaming the other person just to have someone to blame or whether you are just missing being patient with somebody.