impatience – Grow Mindfulness

How to Develop Patience through Meditation

Diana Winston, in her meditation podcast, Practicing Patience, suggests that patience is an expression of mindfulness. Patience involves being present in a purposeful, non-judgmental way. It requires self-awareness, self-regulation and, in the final analysis, a willingness to be with “what is”. Her guided meditation that follows this explanation is one of the many and varied, weekly meditation podcasts offered by MARC (UCLA). Diana is the principal meditation teacher but is very ably assisted by guest meditation teachers such as Matthew Brensilver, Mitra Manesh and Brian Shiers.

What makes us impatient?

The Cambridge Dictionary explains that we become impatient in two primary situations that frustrate our goal orientation, (1) where we are held up and have to wait when we are trying to go somewhere and (2) where we perceive that we are not achieving something fast enough that we are excited by. So, impatience involves a lack of tolerance of the present situation where we must wait or of our rate of progression to a desired future state. Richard Wolf explains that learning a new piece of music requires practice, patience and persistence, but we can be impatient with our rate of progress towards mastery. The tendency, then, is to become judgmental and self-critical.

The sources of our impatience can be numerous, e.g. stopped by a traffic light, held up by a slow driver or a cyclist in our car lane, experiencing writer’s block, an inability to master some aspect of a desired sporting skill, a mental blockage when presenting an idea, cooking a meal that overheats or becomes burnt, delays that make us late for a meeting or when preparing a meal for guests or any other sources of frustration of the achievement of our goals.

When we are impatient, we can experience a wide range of negative emotions such as annoyance, agitation, anxiety, anger or resentment. We can become overwhelmed, make poor decisions and behave rashly. In contrast, patience can lead to many positive outcomes – it is a common belief that “patience is a virtue” because it leads to many benefits such as maintaining peace and equanimity, keeping things in perspective, opening up opportunities and enriching relationships.

A meditation for developing patience

Diana in her meditation podcast provides a meditation designed to develop patience and cultivate the associated benefits. The patience meditation has several steps:

Become grounded and focused – using your personal choice of an anchor such as your breath, sound or bodily sensation.
Envisage a time when you were impatient – identify your thoughts, capture and name your feelings and revisit your bodily sensations
Envisage a time when you were patient – again experience what it was like in respect of your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations
Re-envisage the situation where you were impatient – this time picture yourself being patient and in control. Try to capture the positive thoughts, feelings and sensations that accompany being patient in that situation.

This meditation, if repeated with some regularity, can help you to develop patience and experience the many positive benefits that accrue.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness through patience meditation, we can learn to transform situations where we have been impatient into ones where we are patient. In this way, we can develop our patience and realise the many benefits that accrue with the practice of patience.

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Image by wal_172619 from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Reasons Why Meaningless Values Lead to Depression

In the previous post I explored Johann Hari’s discussion of the research demonstrating that disconnection from meaningful values – expressed as obsession with materialism – leads to depression and anxiety. In this post I will explore the reasons why this occurs.

Four reasons why meaningless values lead to depression

In identifying why materialism leads to depression, Johann draws on the research of Emeritus Professor Tim Kasser and his colleague, Professor Richard Ryan, one of the acknowledged world leaders in understanding human motivation. Based on their work and his own research, Johann identifies four main reasons for the consuming sadness experienced by people who relentlessly pursue materialistic values that focus on extrinsic rewards (Lost Connections, pp. 97-99).

1. Damages relations with other people

The research shows that people who primarily pursue materialistic values experience “shorter relationships” that are of lesser quality than their peers who focus more on intrinsic values. Materialistic-oriented people are more concerned about superficial things such as another person’s looks, their ability to impress others and their material possessions, than they are about the innate qualities of the person. Their focus on external qualities makes it more likely to end a relationship because they invariably find someone who possesses these external qualities to a greater degree. Their self-absorption also means that their partner in a relationship is also more likely to separate from them. People who are out to impress others as their major motivator are very poor at reflective listening as they are more likely to interrupt and divert a conversation so that the focus is on them and their accomplishments. Listening is the lifeblood of a sustainable relationship and has profound effects on the its quality.

2. Deprives them of the joy of being in the present moment

Because a materialistic person is always seeking more or pursuing an elusive goal over which they have no control, they are more likely to be frequently frustrated and disappointed. They tend to be driven and impatient in the pursuit of their external goals and they experience time-pressures continuously. It is difficult for them to be fully engaged in the present moment and to experience the joy that derives from present awareness. The researchers point out, too, that the pursuit of materialistic values results in the inability to experience “flow states” – being in the zone where you are hyper-focused and highly creative and productive.

3. Become dependent on how other people think of them

Other’s opinions become the driver for the materialistic person’s words and actions. They seek to gain positive assessment by others of their looks, their possessions (e.g. clothes and cars) and their income and social standing. They tend to pursue relationships for what they can get out of them in terms of extrinsic rewards. They can never be satisfied and often engage in attempts to outdo others. The researchers point out that materialistic-oriented people are also more sensitive to feeling slighted, even when no slight is intended – because of their sensitivity to others’ opinions, they can more easily feel criticised and be hurt by seemingly harmless comments. This can result in their being “on edge” all the time when with other people. Their sense of self-worth becomes “contingent on the opinion of others” which, in turn, can lead to negative self-evaluation and self-deprecation.

4. Frustrates innate human needs

Tim Kasser observed that a core reason why materialism leads to depression is that it ultimately frustrates a person’s innate needs – needs such as the desire for meaningful connection with others; realising a sense of competence in their endeavours; a sense of autonomy and being in-control; and wanting to do, and achieve, something meaningful in their lives. Depression and anxiety will grow over time when these real, innate human needs are not met.

We can choose how we spend our time and energy

Johann observes that time is limited and that our day is like a pie with defined parameters. The way we carve up our day – how we allocate our time to aspects of our life – will significantly affect whether we realise joy and happiness or depression and anxiety. If we can align the way we spend our time to the pursuit of meaningful values, we can experience mentally healthy states of positivity, joy, happiness and gratitude. The more time we spend on materialistic goals, the lower will be our “personal well-being”.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, we are better able to notice the impact that the pursuit of materialistic values has on our quality of life – our relationships, our joy, our sense of self-worth. We will have a clearer idea of how well we meet our innate needs and how we can improve on their fulfillment. Importantly, we will better understand the sources of our frustration and anger and be able to improve our self-regulation. By developing mindfulness, we will more often experience the joy of being in the zone – of experiencing “flow states”.

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Image by KarinKarin from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Driving with Mindfulness

Often when you are driving you can become agitated, annoyed or frustrated by the traffic holdups caused by others. Sharon Salzberg provides a timely reminder that “you are traffic too“. We focus so much on our own needs in the heavy traffic situation that we lose sight of the needs of others. Sharon puts this down to the “centrality of ourselves” – where the world revolves around our self-centredness, rather than other-centredness.

Diana Watson too in one of her MARC weekly meditation podcasts, provides us with a meditation that enables us to bring mindfulness on the road. She describes one of her own experiences when she was running late to conduct a meditation and found her irritation and agitation rising.

Diana found that she was swamped with thoughts and emotions. The thoughts reflected the negative bias of the brain – “I’m not going to make it on time”, “What will happen if I am late?”, “People may never come again if they are new to the meditation practice! So, our minds can catastrophize any situation and unsettle us as we are driving.

Another source of emotional disturbance occurs if we then engage in self-recrimination or negative self-evaluation – “If only I had planned for traffic delays!”, “Why was I rushing out the door when I know that I need to have a strong presence of mind to conduct this mindfulness session?’

Bringing mindfulness to driving – noticing thoughts and emotions

What Diana found that she ended up doing was to start noticing, not entertaining, thoughts and emotions as they arose, e.g. “I am feeling anxious (or irritated)”, “I keep thinking that I will be late, and this causes me to become agitated”. If we start naming our emotions, we can begin to control them.

She also suggests that we can focus on what is going on in our body as these emotions and precipitating thoughts arise. We can notice the tightness in our chest, the pain in our neck or the onset of a worry headache. If we can notice the thoughts and name the emotions, we can wind back our habituated response and calm ourselves.

Without this calming mindfulness on the road, we can end up taking more risks while driving, act out our anger and frustration through “road rage” or find ourselves making poor decisions about what choices to make to get to our destination. Our growing agitation and impatience can frustrate our attempts to arrive on time.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practice that grounds us in the present moment, we can more readily deal with situations such as driving in heavy traffic when our needs for timeliness are being frustrated. We can also bring to the situation self-awareness and self-regulation so that we are not captive to our negative thoughts and emotions – we can begin to drive mindfully.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of pixaoppa on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.