How to Be Patient When Harmed

You don’t need patience when things go your way, and people do exactly as you wish.

But what happens when you don’t get what you want, and people refuse to cooperate?  Do you fall into complaining, irritation, impatience, anger, or aggression?  

Often we feel justified when we’re ticked off. We have our rights, after all, don’t we?

But consider the following.

On a body level, turbulent emotions can cause tension, restlessness, and burning sensations.  When they say, “Burning with anger,” it’s not just a metaphor, but an actual description of what happens in the body when vexation infiltrates it.

Heat and redness - that fiery feeling associated with anger - result from the release of various biochemicals, triggered by your very own emotions.  Your flight, fight, or freeze response may get turned on too, and thus start a cascade of stress.  Some belief your cells contract and feel “ick” when you indulge in negative emotions.

While you might puff yourself up in self-righteous indignation, at the same time you probably feel overtaken by your emotions and somewhat out of control.  Not very pleasant, is it? Chances are, you’re sending out seriously bad vibes that nobody wants to be around either.

Anger, and its multitude of cousins like irritation, impatience, indignation, and outrage, should not be suppressed - that could cause mental and physical health problems. But it doesn’t help to act them out. 

So how can you learn to acknowledge your emotional responses, and also let them be and let them go?

Troublemakers As Teachers of Patience

Would you like to have more patience? Patience begins with a complete reversal of attitude.  

If you see the “troublemakers” in your life as problems, decide to consider them as teachers instead.

The people or situations you perceive as troublemakers provide you with an unparalleled opportunity to practice patience and other spiritual qualities like loving-kindness, compassion generosity, and so on.  You cannot reach any level of spiritual awakening without developing these kinds of positive attributes.

How would you grow your patience and reduce your propensity to anger if there were no troublemakers in your life? In a sense, you need troublemakers for your spiritual growth.

Now, I know this goes against popular opinion, which says to only surround yourself with positive, like-minded people who support you and your dreams.

Like any spiritual practice, patience needs to be executed with intelligence.  Yes, of course you need to have positive, supportive people in your life.  And it wouldn’t be safe or wise to stay in an abusive or toxic relationship.  But do you need to cut out every potential irritant?

As if you could!

Even with an ideal circle of friends, you’ll still encounter troublemakers in your life:  the unhelpful customer service representative,  your boss or a co-worker, or an annoying family member.

Troublemakers can’t be avoided, but they can help you if you shift your attitude and see them as teachers rather than enemies.

3 Steps to More Patience

Now that you’ve made an attitude adjustment, which is a huge by the way, let’s look at what you can do when you feel triggered by a troublemaker.

To begin, this quote already says so much:

“When the urge arises in your mind to feelings of desire or angry hate,
Do not act!  Be silent, do not speak!  And like a log of wood be sure to stay.”  - Shantideva

1.  Recognize 

The first step is to recognize you’re triggered.  

Recently, I got annoyed when I learned that yet another Amazon package would be late.  When Amazon sends items by USPS parcel pool, they tend to get stuck in Honolulu for three extra days instead of coming directly to me. 

I went into a tizzy, searched the site for a way to contact Amazon, and launched into a frenzied message on chat.  Because Amazon should send packages on time, right? And not use stupid messages on your order page like, “Sorry, your package is late.”  Plus this was something I really wanted, didn’t they know?

Just to exacerbate the situation, chat told me there would be a 10-minute wait to chat. But I didn’t have time to wait, so I gave up on my Amazon reprimand.

Then, a few days later, when I recounted my woeful story to a group of friends, one of them responded by saying how grateful she is there are companies that send things to us given that this island is thousands and thousands miles away from any other land mass. 

That just made me all the madder!  Now, I’m supposed to be grateful too?

I confess, I never even recognized I’d been triggered until I began to reflect on patience as part of my spiritual study program.

That’s how it often is - for all of us.  We’re swept away by a stream of turbulent emotions until they finally subside. Sometimes that takes minutes or hours, but other times it can take days, weeks, or even months.

So make it a practice to recognize when you’re triggered.  If you don’t notice on the spot, at the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did anything trigger me today?”  Then write about it in your journal.  

The Amazon experience was a wake-up call for me.  I definitely want to be more aware when I’m triggered, and let it go.

I don’t want to want to waste my valuable energy being mad at Amazon; as if my anger could make a dent in their shipping practices anyway.  Besides, it wasn’t an urgent situation.  I could wait three extra days for something I desired far more than needed.  

2.  Refrain

Once you catch yourself feeling triggered, stop.  Don’t respond to aggression with aggression.  As Shantideva advises, don’t act or speak, at least for a while.  

Also, don’t escalate the storyline you’ve created about the incident by heaping on more justifications. Stop repeating, enhancing, and strengthening the story in your own mind or through repeating it to someone else.  Stop justifying your emotions and stop blaming the other person. 

You may have a compelling collection of evidence against the person, some of which may be valid, but decide it’s more important to weaken your habitual pattern, which harms you as much as anyone else, than to make the other person wrong.

3. Feel and Know

Resist the urge to react, and feel what you’re feeling with self-compassion.  Feel all your feelings, and especially, if you can, the core feeling, what’s underneath or fueling your response.

Observe how a feeling might change into other feelings or dissolve altogether.  

Simply stay present to the feeling and how it manifests in your body.  Notice your thoughts, emotions, and sensations without adding to the story. Don’t judge the emotion or yourself for having the emotion.  

You’re not suppressing the emotion, nor are you indulging it or acting it out.

Often, restless will arise in response to perceived harm: the physical urge to respond or react. Learn to sit with that restlessness. If you act on it, you may cause more trouble.

It may be very difficult, at first, to sit with your emotions. But try it for a few minutes at a time.  Start with smaller irritations rather than a big raging response to egregious behaviors.  If you tend to dissociate or easily become emotionally dysregulated due to past trauma, engage with this practice of body and mind awareness gradually, in small doses, with the guidance of a therapist.  

Learning to sit with the internal experience of an emotion is a powerful way to weaken your propensities and habitual responses, the ones that draw you into drama and decrease your joy.  Indeed, it can help heal your deepest wounds. 

With enough practice, your emotions will control you less and less so you no longer respond in a flash and further inflame difficult situations.  Instead, you’ll feel a sense of freedom and spaciousness that allows you time to respond in a more thoughtful, healthier, and constructive way.

4. Understand

To expand your perspective and create even more spaciousness, reflect on the complexity of the situation.  

In Buddhism it’s said that everything comes about due to causes and conditions.  The blame never lies entirely with one person.  

Maybe your curt telephone representative was slammed by her boss or another person that day.  She may feel angry and unsettled and may unwittingly be taking it out on you.  Maybe the person who dinged your car and left the scene is riddled in fear that his driver’s license might be taken away.  Maybe the guy that cut in front of you in line has a wife newly diagnosed with cancer. 

In short, put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

“Be kind.  For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  Socrates

These aren’t excuses for bad behavior.  Everyone is responsible for the way they behave and the consequences of their actions.  You can’t change someone else, but through understanding you can have more empathy for them. 

You can make your own mind and heart bigger and bigger, so you no longer feel perturbed by every little thing.  Patience will begin to come naturally when you understand the multiplicity of factors inherent in any situation.  Gradually, you’ll feel more sympathy and kind-heartedness towards whatever life brings you.

Patience: The Antidote to Anger

The need for the quality of patience does not contradict the need to speak out or protest against abuse or injustice. 

But instead of reacting out of anger in unfair situations, you’ll be consciously acting out of clarity with a greater sense of compassion and spaciousness.  Patience is the antidote to anger. Once transformed anger brings clarity.  Actions based in clarity will always be more effective than responding like a raging bull.

Shantideva’s admonition to act like a log of wood is probably the last thing you want to do when you feel harmed.  I know it’s incredibly hard not to react, especially if you feel profoundly betrayed or damaged.

You will likely blow it many times over. But don’t give up. Every time you succeed, you are further uprooting the seeds of anger from your unconscious mind. You’re creating new pathways in your brain. With time, patience will become easier.

Remember, when you respond with anger, you destroy your own mental joy.  When you’re caught up in a reactive mode, you lose your happiness, feel tension in your body, and may even find it impossible to sleep. A habit of reactivity also becomes a major obstacle on your spiritual path.

Alternatively, when you practice patience, you’ll be able to more effectively diffuse conflict. You’ll experience a greater sense of spaciousness and inner peace, and feel more tenderhearted with each passing day.

Your Turn

Do you find it hard to be patient when harmed? What helps you to have more patience? What do you think about being like a “log” when anger arises? I would love to hear in the comments.

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