drawing collage by marguerita
"Let's say you're dealing with the development of patience.
We all get angry and we all recognize that anger is terrible,, but people start with the premise that
"I'm angry, that's the way I am."
First of all you have to be interested in diminishing your anger, and then you analyze how monstrous it is, how that moment of anger that you recently experienced is so awful it made it impossible for you to sleep that night, and all the people around you really, really dislike you.
Looking at yourself calmly
makes you recognize how ugly anger is—and as we study the laws of cause and effect and the laws of karma, every moment of anger leads you to more anger. You're more prone to lose your temper as you let go of that muscle of patience. You can get angry more and more easily. It makes you unhappy, it makes your environment unhappy, it makes people not really want to be friendly with you. As the Dalai Lama says, your digestive system starts to go and all sorts of problems arise.
We cannot expect to control our anger when we are confronted, but we can work on it when we're calm. The development of the muscle in that situation enables us to actually restrain ourselves. Our threshold has been moved to another place.
We just don't get angry."
In India, you wait in line. There are often situations where you have to wait, and it's funny, it's life, you enjoy it, you have a cup of tea while you're waiting for something. And you come back to America and you see people incapable of waiting for things and you realize that by means of experience, you've become a little more patient. And if you can think about those little things, that in itself shows you that patience is not a given, but it's something we can actually work on.
Nicholas Vreeland
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