By
Pema Chödrön
The Buddhist teachings
tell us that patience is the antidote to anger and aggression. When we
feel aggression in all its many forms—resentment, bitterness, being very
critical, complaining and so forth—we can apply the different practices
we’ve been given and all the good advice we’ve heard and given to other
people. But those often don’t seem to help us. That’s why this teaching
about patience caught my interest a few years ago, because it’s so hard
to know what to do when one feels anger and aggression.
I
thought, if patience is the antidote to aggression, maybe I’ll just try
that. In the process I learned a lot about what patience is and about
what it isn’t. I would like to share with you what I’ve learned, to
encourage you to find out for yourself how patience works with
aggression.
To begin with, I learned about patience and the cessation of
suffering.
It’s said that patience is a way to de-escalate aggression. I’m
thinking here of aggression as synonymous with pain. When we’re feeling
aggressive—and in some sense this would apply to any strong
feeling—there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the
direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel
the aggression that we want it to be resolved.
So what do we
usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and
the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. Something hurts our feelings,
and initially there is some softness there—if you’re fast, you can
catch it—but usually you don’t even realize there is any softness. You
find yourself in the middle of a hot, noisy, pulsating,
wanting-to-just-get-even-with-someone state of mind: it has a very hard
quality to it. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the
pain of aggression, you create more aggression and pain.
At that
point, patience means getting smart: you stop and wait. You also have to
shut up, because if you say anything it’s going to come out aggressive,
even if you say, “I love you.”
Once, when I was very angry at a
colleague of mine, I called him on the telephone. I can’t even remember
now what I was angry about, but at the time I couldn’t sleep because I
was so furious. I tried meditating with my anger and working with it and
doing practices with it, but nothing helped, so I just got up in the
middle of the night and called him. When he answered the phone, all I
said was, “Hi, Yeshe.” But he immediately asked, “Did I do something
wrong?” I thought I would very sweetly cover over what I was really
feeling and say something pleasant about all the bad things he had done,
whatever they were. But just by the tone of my greeting to him, he
knew. That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because
everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your
mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s
vibrating.
Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that
point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other
hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself
about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing
anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has
everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If
you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about
the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to
let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and
criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up
for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so
angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you
can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still,
you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that
comes with it.
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it,
but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of
space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express
themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting.
You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the
fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of
patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation
of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really
get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will
see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience,
you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going
cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the
energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without
going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where
it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to
complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal
wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression;
they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
Developing
patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess
of the energy. It’s like sitting on a wild horse, or on a wild tiger
that could eat you up. There’s a limerick to that effect: “There was a
young lady of Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They came back
from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the
tiger.” Sitting with your discomfort feels like riding on that tiger,
because it’s so frightening.
When we examine this process we
learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution
that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We
think we can resolve everything! When we human beings feel powerful
energy, we tend to be extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved
in some kind of secure and comforting way, either on the side of yes or
the side of no. Or the side of right or the side of wrong. Or the side
of anything at all that we can hold on to.
But the practice we’re
doing gives us nothing to hold on to. Actually, the teachings
themselves give us nothing to hold on to. In working with patience and
fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we’re human
beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time
until the end of time is naturally going to want some kind of resolution
to this edgy, moody energy. And there isn’t any. The only resolution is
temporary and just causes more suffering. We discover that as a matter
of fact joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with
yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of
the energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never
resolves itself into something solid.
So all the while, we stay
in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent
softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that
kind of energy. We don’t have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even
for a moment, because we’re just completely typical human beings; the
only thing that’s unique about us is that we’re brave enough to go into
these things more deeply and explore beneath our surface reaction of
trying to get solid ground under our feet.
Patience is an
enormously wonderful and supportive and even magical practice. It’s a
way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to
resolve things by going either to the right or the left, calling things
right or calling things wrong. It’s the way to develop courage, the way
to find out what life is really about.
Patience is also not
ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You wonder, Who
am I? Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns? Who am I at the
level beyond birth and death? If you wish to look into the nature of
your own being, you need to be inquisitive. The path is a journey of
investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what’s going on. The
teachings give us a lot of suggestions about what we can look for, and
the practices give us a lot of suggestions on how to look. Patience is
one extremely helpful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand,
prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity.
Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation into
a hard, solid, fixed pattern in which somebody wins and somebody loses.
When you begin to investigate, you notice, for one thing, that whenever
there is pain of any kind—the pain of aggression, grieving, loss,
irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain—if you
really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the
pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always
something we’re holding on to.
I say that with such confidence,
but you have to find out for yourself whether this is really true. You
can read about it: the first thing the Buddha ever taught was the truth
that suffering comes from attachment. That’s in the books. But when you
discover it yourself, it goes a little deeper right away.
As soon
as you discover that behind your pain is something you’re holding on
to, you are at a place that you will frequently experience on the
spiritual path. After a while it seems like almost every moment of your
life you’re there, at a point where you realize you actually have a
choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on
or let go, whether to harden or soften.
That choice is presented
to you again and again and again. For instance, you’re feeling pain,
you look deeply into it, and you notice that there’s something very hard
you’re holding on to. And then you have a choice: you can let go of it,
which basically means you connect with the softness behind all that
hardness. Perhaps each one of us has made the discovery that behind all
the hardness of resistance, stress, aggression and jealousy, there is
enormous softness that we’re trying to cover over. Aggression usually
begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft,
but before we even notice what we’re doing, we harden. So we can either
let go and connect with that softness or we can continue to hold on,
which means that the suffering will continue.
It requires
enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And
then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually
something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to
keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut
down. You’re going to say to yourself, “I don’t want to see this.”
You’ll be afraid, because even if you’re starting to get close to it,
the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that
you’re going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be
right. If you let go, something will die. But it’s something that needs
to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.
On the other
hand, sometimes it’s easy to let go. If you make this journey of
looking to see if there’s something you’re holding on to, often it’s
going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something
huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, “It’s too big; you
can’t let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start
noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and
just get the hang of letting go.”
That was extremely good
advice. You don’t have to do the big one, because usually you can’t.
It’s too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and
there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just
intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of
enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and
tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.
You
can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn’t mean
you’re going to be able to let go, because there’s a lot at stake.
What’s at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity.
You’re beginning to move into the territory of egolessness, the
insubstantial nature of oneself—and of everything, for that matter.
Theoretical, philosophical, distant-sounding teachings can get pretty
real when you’re beginning to have an inkling of what they’re actually
talking about.
It takes a lot of patience not to beat up on
yourself for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to
the fact that you can’t let go, somehow that helps you to do it.
Patience with the fact that you can’t let go helps you to get to the
point of letting go gradually—at a very sane and loving speed, at the
speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It’s a big moment even
to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is
what you need at that point to just wait and soften, to sit with the
restlessness and edginess and discomfort of the energy.
I’ve come to find that patience has a lot of humor and playfulness in
it. It’s a misunderstanding to think of it as endurance, as in, “Just
grin and bear it.” Endurance involves some kind of repression or trying
to live up to somebody else’s standards of perfection. Instead, you find
you have to be pretty patient with what you see as your own
imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness,
because the speed of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You are
developing patience and loving-kindness for your own imperfections, for
your own limitations, for not living up to your own high ideals. There’s
a slogan someone once came up with that I like: “Lower your standards
and relax as it is.” That’s patience.
One of the Indian Buddhist
teacher Atisha’s slogans says, “Whichever of the two occurs, be
patient.” It means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and
if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point
in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and
fearlessness, and patience and curiosity. We are actually jumping all
the time: whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re
really happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, in
terms of not just filling up the space, going a million miles an
hour—impulse buying, impulse speaking, impulse acting.
I’d like
to stress that one of the things you most have to be patient with is,
“Oops, I did it again!” There’s a slogan that says, “One at the
beginning and one at the end.” That means that when you wake up in the
morning you make your resolve, and at the end of the day you review,
with a caring and gentle attitude, how you have done. Our normal resolve
is to say something like, “I am going to be patient today,” or some
other such set-up (as someone put it, we plan our next failure). Instead
of setting yourself up, you can say, “Today, I’m going to try to the
best of my ability to be patient.” And then in the evening you can look
back over the whole day with loving-kindness and not beat yourself up.
You’re patient with the fact that when you review your day, or even the
last forty minutes, you discover, “I’ve talked and filled up all the
space, just like I’ve done all my life, as long as I can remember. I was
aggressive with the same style of aggression that I’ve used as long as I
can remember. I got carried away with irritation exactly the same way
that I have for the last...” If you’re twenty years old, it’s been
twenty years that you’ve been doing it that way; if you’re seventy-five
years old, it’s seventy-five years that you’ve been doing it that way.
You see this and you say, “Give me a break!”
The path of
developing loving-kindness and compassion is to be patient with the fact
that you’re human and that you make these mistakes. That’s more
important than getting it right. It seems to work only if you’re
aspiring to give yourself a break, to lighten up, as you practice
developing patience and other qualities such as generosity, discipline
and insight. As with the rest of the teachings, you can’t win and you
can’t lose. You don’t get to just say, “Well, since I am never able to
do it, I’m not going to try.” You are never able to do it and still you
try. And, interestingly enough, that adds up to something; it adds up
to loving-kindness for yourself and for others. You look out your eyes
and you see yourself wherever you go. You see all these people who are
losing it, just like you do. Then, you see all these people who catch
themselves and give you the gift of fearlessness. You say, “Oh wow, what
a brave one—he or she caught themselves.” You begin to appreciate even
the slightest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know
it’s not easy, and that inspires you tremendously. That’s how we can
really help each other.
