How do you Foster Patience in Yourself?

Something I've always had trouble with is patience. This topic question is for my benefit, yes, but it is also for those who suffer from the same poison: Impatience.

I often find myself thinking too much about the future and allowing the vastness and mystery of it to seep into my mind, which not only makes everything that I am currently doing seem smaller, but also makes those future achievements feel so much less achievable. How can one truly dedicate themselves to anything enough to be sure of its outcome? Does it take willpower? What inspires such iron will? Is it true belief in a thing? That doesn't seem possible. How could you believe something before you are dedicated to it? Does it require ethereal impulsiveness that seizes control just long enough for you to find belief? How is that obtained?

I like to tell myself that I am not the kind of person with this problem. I like to say that I can easily stay dedicated to anything. The difficulty comes when, ironically to me, I do not sustain that attitude. How can one gather the willpower enough to conquer such vast expanses of time where each moment to the next is not only not guaranteed, but completely unknown?

I find myself thinking about these kinds of things as I embark on this journey that is Jediism, I have the feeling that some of you have currently, or in the past, had the same thoughts. Please share how you conquer impatience, and therefore adhere to the teachings of the Jedi. Please, if you are the kind of person to whom this patience comes naturally and without conflict, please refrain from posting. I admire that quality very, very much, but I am not sure that would be helpful for myself or others.

Axid wrote: Something I've always had trouble with is patience. This topic question is for my benefit, yes, but it is also for those who suffer from the same poison: Impatience.

I often find myself thinking too much about the future and allowing the vastness and mystery of it to seep into my mind, which not only makes everything that I am currently doing seem smaller, but also makes those future achievements feel so much less achievable. How can one truly dedicate themselves to anything enough to be sure of its outcome? Does it take willpower? What inspires such iron will? Is it true belief in a thing? That doesn't seem possible. How could you believe something before you are dedicated to it? Does it require ethereal impulsiveness that seizes control just long enough for you to find belief? How is that obtained?

I like to tell myself that I am not the kind of person with this problem. I like to say that I can easily stay dedicated to anything. The difficulty comes when, ironically to me, I do not sustain that attitude. How can one gather the willpower enough to conquer such vast expanses of time where each moment to the next is not only not guaranteed, but completely unknown?

I find myself thinking about these kinds of things as I embark on this journey that is Jediism, I have the feeling that some of you have currently, or in the past, had the same thoughts. Please share how you conquer impatience, and therefore adhere to the teachings of the Jedi. Please, if you are the kind of person to whom this patience comes naturally and without conflict, please refrain from posting. I admire that quality very, very much, but I am not sure that would be helpful for myself or others.

To answer your question from my point of view, I want to answer it into two parts.

The first being obtaining future goals. What I have found in my years of experience is there are a few different ways to approach it, but inevitably you just need to come to the conclusion for yourself that you can put all the effort possible into it, but it may still not come to be, some things just aren't. It doesn't mean that you don't try or work towards it, it just means once you realize that having 100% proof that you will, say someday become a dr will never exist, the proof that is. Once that's not a possibility it doesn't bother you as much and you just work towards it the best you can.

Taking things one day at a time, not necessarily focusing on the big picture is another part of it. Don't get caught up too much in thinking about the future or 12 months from now or even 2 months from now, or rather don't let it consume the majority of your thoughts, its fine to keep the goal in mind, but focus on what you can do today, not what you have to do in the next 2 months. There's a common quote from qui-gon that is used quite a bit and thats "Keep your focus on the here and now". From which anakin sais, "but master yoda said to be mindful of the future?" and his response was "but not at the expense of the present".

If you spend most of your day consumed by what could be and what has to be done you've just wasted a ton of energy both mental and physical and your not achieving as much in your day, and in your now as you could be. Patience isn't so much about tolerating as it is letting go of the things that stress you out and just focusing on whats in front of you.

The 2nd part about patience and this is for me personally but understanding goes the longest way. When someone is annoying me by driving 10 mph under the speed limit when I'm trying to get there it is easy to get frustrated, you have places to be, maybe your behind schedule or running late, and this isn't helping!

You also don't know why they are driving that slow, maybe they are sick and just trying to get themselves to the hospital, perhaps they are just wanting to be safe, maybe they have a slower reaction time then normal for some reason and are driving slow for the sake of safety, maybe they are driving on a flat tire or a low tire and are just trying to get to the gas station to fill up with air without putting too much abuse on the tire. I can come up with many different scenarios, so is it fair for me to get impatient and frustrated over something I don't understand? that might be perfectly legitimate?

Besides going 10mph slower then the speed limit just gives you another chance to look at the world around you and really see it and enjoy its existence, you miss out on things when your just scooting through at your normal speed. Just don't be looking around too much and not paying too much attention to the road!

Developing a trusted relationship with the subconscious can quieten its intensity - as it trys to communicate with the conscious mind through emotions and other strong feelings and drives. Listening and learning to read its signals, helping it live a healthy life and otherwise not causing injury to oneself. If patience is viewed a antidote to symptoms like anger in all its forms - then it solves the root cause rather then trying to avoid it or cover it up. I reckon these things are actually an important basis to achieve progress in spiritual type of stuff. Sort of backwards I guess, increase the capacity for patience by reducing the need for it. Otherwise, I exert visualization to draw mental energy away from whatever is requiring patience - which is probably also a type of distraction.

This is really tricky, because much as we try to encourage it from the off here, can we actually just wake up one morning and suddenly decide to be a patient person? We can decide to behave patiently, but that doesn't mean that we'll be feeling patient!

Some people do take that route - they very deliberately plot things out so as to force themselves to learn patience - for example, with the IP, they might decide to do one lesson per week, which would make the whole IP take quite some time but at least provides them with some kind of goal-orientated motivation. And I've seen plenty of examples of people for whom that has 'worked'...

For me, any degree of patience that I have with the path came as a natural lesson of first following the path highly impatiently. If you honestly feel that you will lose interest and motivation without rapid movement, might it be worth considering allowing some of that movement to occur without too much judgement?

There's a lot to be gained from ambling along slowly and smelling the roses, but that doesn't mean that there aren't worthwhile lessons to be learned from a sprint, too (which isn't to actively encourage a sprint, but to suggst that it might not be something worth beating ourselves with an iron rod over)...

If we say "I must be patient...NOW!" - well, does that really sound all that patient? We can be patient with patience, because this path affords us all the time in the world...

But only if we're on the path in the first place - so if committing to it requires us to initially dive in with the sort of enthusiasm that naturally tends to manifest in movement, it might be worth not automatically discarding it as a bad, 'un-Jedi' sort of thing. So long as we manage not to throw ourselves at things with such excessive abandon that we suffer some sort of early burn-out, we find that, as is the normal pattern in life, we naturally slow down and relax into a pace that we can feasibly sustain over a longer period of time.

This path is exciting, and honestly, there's a part of me that misses that initial drive to learn everything all at once. Would we want to stamp out the 'honeymoon phase' of a relationship? Or do we want to enjoy and experience that dimension whilst it lasts, knowing that it will eventually even itself out to something a little calmer?

Patience is a useful form of discipline, but amongst pursuit of discipline, we shouldn't forget the discipline of allowing ourselves to be human, either...

Just go with the flow, do what feels natural, and see what happens...

First of all, thank you all for participating in this discussion. All of your words have been extremely helpful in inspiring thought and progress within myself. I hope it has helped you some, as well. Even if only by bringing you back to something you had neglected for a while. Anyway, I wanted to select a quote from your feedback that I think helps to sum up what makes the biggest difference, here at the Temple of the Jedi Order.

V-Tog wrote: If we say "I must be patient...NOW!" - well, does that really sound all that patient? We can be patient with patience, because this path affords us all the time in the world...

Thank you V-Tog, for those wise words. I hadn't thought of it quite like that, but O, how true that is. "... this path affords us all the time in the world..."

A lot of my anxiety concerning the future is often brought on by the knowledge of some sort of ending. I know I have to make money now because I could run out of time to make it and payments are due. I know I have to run now because if not my body will soon suffer. It is thinking of this kind that brought me to write this post. I realize now, thanks to your kind words and everyone else's who posted here, that I can take all the time I need in my journey. No one will punish me if I do not reach a certain point by a certain time. I will not suffer worldly loss because I am not knighted my first year being here. I simply accept that this is a journey I am going to be taking my entire life. That is huge, yes, but it is certainly comforting to accept it.

We are naturally-flawed humans among a society, one that is fueled by many things that over time affect something in us very important to be aware of when it comes to patience: our attention span.

Learning what kind of attention span we have can tell us a lot about our patience and what affects it. Having a lot of easy instant gratification around us growing up is a source of conditioning that can hinder patience in us because we come to expect things to happen right now (because they more often do don't they).

This is something meditation helps to expose, because when meditating, we're doing nothing, consuming nothing, and time is passing. Soon, our body begins to react to this fact by trying to bring up thoughts hoping to trigger us into making something happen to continue being satisfied by our conditioning. But sitting there simply paying attention to this urge and the mental activity in a separate space helps to train us on how to separate ourselves from that urge by watching it objectively.

This is a constant practice, and never a perfection (regardless who you talk to who might try to tell you they have it perfected, they don't). So what is important is that we do our best to be patient with our impatience and take any kind of measure to work away at training ourselves much like we train our muscles - by practicing being in the moment itself and savoring it for the experience happening around us right now that we are often rarely aware of.

many years of [strike]disappointment[/strike] "Jedi Training" have given me patience and a wonderful sense of proportion to the daily woes of the world :laugh:



There may be quicker and less painful ways to gain the knowledge, but that might defeat the point of learning patience