Archives For mindfulness

Why Couples Shouldn’t Do Couples Therapy (Says the Couples Therapist)

March 22, 2013 — 8 Comments

The number one cause of escalating conflict in marriage is one we rarely talk about. As marital therapists, we focus all of our energies on the conflict between spouses, but we ignore the battle within each partner. And as a writer, I segregate my posts about marriage and my posts about shame. Until now…

A Saturday night with the person you love can go south in a heartbeat, can’t it?

Several weeks ago, my wife and I had just finished another night of one-more-cup-of-water requests, my-legs-hurt laments, and can-I-have-another-kiss rituals, and the rustling from the kids’ bedrooms had quieted.

And a couple of open hours sprawled out before us like an oasis in the desert of living.

Until my wife began to discuss the recent seminars she’d conducted in Guatemala. She looked at me like I had heard the story before, and the truth began to slowly dawn on both of us: I had never asked about her teachings in Guatemala.

I felt a moment of sheepishness. And then I went on the attack—a mixture of defensiveness (“I watched the kids for ten days so you could do the trip!”) and offense (“It’s your fault for not telling me sooner!”).

Listen. I’m a shrink. And I still get surprised all the time by my your-not-good-enough voice of shame.

It can sink a Saturday night in just one quick beat of a shame-shadowed heart.

Marriage Enemy Number One

Our hearts are like a sponge for shame, and most of us are pretty saturated with it by the time we meet our lifelong companion. So when our partner criticizes us, or asks for change, or asks for more, or simply gets a little too close for comfort, our heart gets squeezed and we leak shame all over the place.

Except shame is a lie so it never comes out all honest and confessing. It comes out like barbed wire. Usually, we try to make our partner feel even less worthy than we feel ourselves—with verbal attacks, emotional slander, and sometimes simply with silence.

And in most marriages, shame begets shame. So, when we shame our spouses and squeeze their hearts, their shame oozes out, and they go on the attack.

Usually, when the friendly fire is over, it’s impossible to tell who really fired the first shot. We assume our spouse is at fault and we completely ignore marriage enemy number one: shame.

Why Sometimes Marital Therapy Isn’t the Answer

For many couples, the cycle of shame-escalation in the relationship is so intense the marital therapy hour looks like a weekly battlefield reenactment. The script is written and the players have little interest in changing their own lines. Oftentimes, both spouses are secretly looking for an audience who will cast the deciding vote in their favor.

So, the viability of any couples therapy is dependent upon each spouse’s answer to two questions: are you willing to focus on yourself and face your shame? And are you prepared to do so for an hour a week in the presence of your partner?

If the answer to either question is “no,” the couple should not be in marital therapy. Instead, each spouse should be attending individual therapy. But partners resist individual therapy for at least two reasons. First, the mere suggestion of individual therapy feels like more shame—more you’re-not-good-enough.

Second, the individual therapy room can feel like a prison cell—no distractions, no one to blame, no place to direct the shame spilling out of our hearts. Which is why many people go to individual therapy and use the hour to complain about a spouse.

It is far more painful to look in the mirror.

Fighting for Your Saturday Night

As my wife and I began to go toe-to-toe that Saturday night, she had the wherewithal to step back and say, “You know, right before you got angry you looked embarrassed.”

I stopped mid-fury, and suddenly, the battle wasn’t between her and I, the battle began to rage within me.

Frankly, I think every marriage hinges upon this kind of moment: Do I deny the shame she saw peak out before my defenses were up and go back to shaming her, or do I own it?

“Crap,” I thought, “This is going to hurt.”

The shame began oozing up from the cracks in my heart, and I began to share with her the multitude of ways I had felt not-enough in the past week.

It hurt to feel it. It hurt to admit it. But it felt so good to share it.

And with no shame to defend, I felt free to apologize for all the ways I bungle my priorities and lose my focus on the most interesting thing in my life—her.

It wasn’t the Saturday night we had hoped for, but I think it was the Saturday night we needed.

How to Fight Within Marriage Ourselves

You don’t fight for your Saturday night by fighting with your spouse. You fight for your Saturday night by fighting with yourself. By fighting back against your shame. Except in our fight against shame, we don’t wield weapons toward others, we lay them down.

We breathe deeply, giving ourselves just enough space to make a wise decision—the decision to look in rather than shouting out.

We cultivate a quiet-still attentiveness—it pulls the covers of anger off the bed of our shame and reveals the aching, hurting kid underneath, who just wants a place to call home.

We use a graceful self-compassion. Until we can be gentle with ourselves, we can’t be gentle to anyone else. So, when we discover the hurting kid within us, we speak to him or her like we would to any kid with a skinned knee or a bloody elbow—with an embrace and a whispered, “Hush…”

We use courage and vulnerability to reveal it all to the person we love. We say things like, “This isn’t about you; this is about me. I’m terrified I’ll never be good enough for you, but I bluster as if you are the one who isn’t good enough for me, because that feels way safer.”

And we insist on being with people who can receive this kind of confession gracefully and receive us within their embrace.

So, as the marital therapist, I often find myself saying, “I can’t help until you have faced your shame. But if you are willing to do that first…

…I don’t think you have any idea what kind of radical, life-altering, world-changing love the two of you could create together. Then, marital therapy will be a rebellion that turns this world upside down.”

How has overcoming shame improved your marriage? Share your thoughts, or any other ideas, in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook. 

The Mess: The messy places in life—and the messy places within ourselves—present us with a choice. Because the mess is where our shame collides with grace, and we can choose to succumb to shame, or we can fight to receive grace. Come visit The Mess, and join the rebellion against shame. And as always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

Preview: It’s spring break! No mid-week post this coming week. The next post will be on Friday, March 29, and is tentatively entitled, “Why Christians Can’t Stop Sinning.”  

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

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What Madmen, Drunks, and Bastards Know About How to Live

March 13, 2013 — 10 Comments

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success…If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”

—Thomas Merton, Love and Living

fire starter

Photo Credit: Dean Ayres via Compfight cc

The January night was moaning with a cold-dark wind. And our fireplace was talking back in hisses and pops of disappearing wood.

When a small voice inside of me said, “Three years of fires in this fireplace, Kelly, and you’ve never just sat. You’ve never just watched.”

So I settled in to gaze into the firelight.

Yet a mind on fire can burn hotter than wood, can’t it?

Within seconds, my eyes glazed and my thoughts blazed—blog ideas begging for a keyboard, voicemails to be checked, books to be read, texts and emails to return, a world to be kept at bay, a life to be conquered.

The desire for success can mangle the beauty in almost anything.

The Success Deception

As a psychologist, I feel like I’ve been let in on one of the most important secrets in the history of humankind: success doesn’t make us happy.

Each week in the quiet solitude of a psychotherapy office I hear some version of this story: “I wanted to prove everyone wrong and I worked like mad to reach the pinnacle of my profession and I’ve got it all—the spouse and the kids and the house and the cars—and I’m still not satisfied.”

Peter Rollins has said success feels like Wild E. Coyote the day after he catches the Road Runner—it feels like, “Is this all there is?” and “What now?” Every lottery winner describes the same kind of despair, because they’ve stumbled onto success and its dirty little secret: no amount of success can make us happy.

I think joy and contentment may be available to us all the time, in every place and in every moment, but the search for success keeps us looking in all the wrong places. Because the search for success keeps us thinking about the future—planning, organizing, anticipating—while joy and contentment are the qualities of a mind anchored in the present.

Anxiety and stress are not only caused by fear of the future—they are also caused by coveting the future. The bottom line is, whenever we invest our mind and spirit in a moment not yet arrived, we pave the way for anxiety and stress and their close cousins—anger and depression.

The search for success robs us of this moment and replaces it with endless moments of yearning.

Every Bush is Burning

Perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it best when she wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

And daub their natural faces unaware.

If we can quit searching for success, we can start plumbing the depths of what is, right here and right now…

On a January night moaning with a cold-dark wind, the firelight danced in front of me. I struggled to be still, as I felt within me a storm-surge of just-do-something-for-crying-out-loud! It felt like panic and I rode that wave of ego and insecurity with one steady breath after another. The wave crested and my mind’s tide slowly receded.

I turned my attention to the fire. I turned my attention to the moment.

I watched as orange-purple tongues licked the air in every direction. I felt my cheeks tightened by heat, and I felt the coolness of the dark behind me. I saw shadows dance, and I smelled smoke like an ancient messenger. Somehow, the fire seemed to transcend time—present at the birth of the universe and enduring agelessly, warming hands before language and now warming hands that hold iPhones.

I felt time burn away, and without time there is nothing to aspire to, nothing to work toward. There is only being, and only one place to be: in this moment.

To Become Like Children Again

And I became aware of how timeless we feel when we’re playing instead of striving, and how foreign it must be for my playing children to have parents ranting about getting out the door on time. And I wondered, could all things become play if we sacrificed our “successful” futures at the altar of our ordinary—and extravagantly beautiful—present?

Could we forsake the compulsion to succeed in everything we do?

Could we turn every moment of work into play by gazing deeply into it and finding the beauty of the ordinary there?

Could we get lost in time, rather than losing our lives to time?

Could we run late because joy doesn’t wear a watch and giggling doesn’t always stop when we need it to?

Could we fail brilliantly if that’s what it takes to reclaim the awe and wonder of every person and smile and grimace and laugh and sob and breath?

Could we simply get messed up by the awesome-ordinary?

And could we take off our shoes and behold that every common bush is burning? 

Have you every been struck by the bottomless beauty of our “common” world? Share your experience in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

Free eBook: My new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary reality of marriage. New blog subscribers will receive a free PDF copy, by clicking here to subscribe. The subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook. As always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

Preview: My next post will be this Friday and is tentatively entitled “How a Little Anger Can Set You Free.” 

Other Posts Related to Mindfulness and Gratitude:

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

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Why You Should Stage an Entertainment Strike

October 29, 2012 — Leave a comment

This post is a Tuesday Tip.

Related Post: Why Dirty Dishes Are the Biggest Threat to Your Marriage

By the beginning of October, our house had become a war zone. Oppositional kids, sibling rivalries, constant irritability and tears. My wife and I put our heads together—a couple of psychologists assessing the situation.

As it turns out, we realized our kids were constantly hung over.

Better Than Widescreen?

Photo Credit: Glenn Brown (Creative Commons)

The amount of “screen time” (i.e., television cartoons, computer games, Wii, iPod apps) had insidiously increased. They were like drunks, starting with a beer here and there and finally putting down a case per day. Whenever a screen was turned off, they went into instant withdrawal. Hooked on external stimulation and excitement, dealing with ordinary life was like detoxing.

And detoxing can get ugly.

So, we declared October “No Screens Month.”

It was touch and go for a while, but I’m happy to report they all survived.

But most importantly, they’ve had to relearn what to do with their boredom. Old favorite toys re-emerged. My boys have discovered how to make machine gun noises with their mouths again, and my daughter has simply discovered the joy of her own voice. In fact, she doesn’t ever stop using it.

They’re even sleeping better. Why? Because part of falling asleep is learning to be bored. To exist in that space without external stimulation and simply wait for sleep to take you.

I don’t think my family is alone in this. In my clinical practice, I work with many adolescents who believe they shouldn’t have to be bored. For the next generation of adults, boring tasks are considered to be unnecessary and oppressive. And it will undermine their ability to thrive in this world.

Because even the most wildly exciting lives have their fair share of boring, monotonous moments. Boredom is simply a part of living. An important part of living.

And we need to learn how to live it well. Here’s how:

  1. Declare an entertainment strike. Within your four walls, decide what things your family routinely uses to escape its boredom. Declare a strike of a particular length. A day, a week, or a month.
  2. Identify the tasks you find most boring and monotonous. Decide now you are going to begin enjoying them, whatever it requires.
  3. Choose your boredom. On the UnTangled Facebook page, doing laundry was one of the most often identified dreaded-boring task, so let’s start there. Plan to take twice as long on the laundry than you usually do. Go slowly.
  4. Be mindful. Allow the task to engage all of your senses. Smell the sweet mixture of fabric softener and warm cloth. Notice the range of colors represented, watch the mixture of light and shadows on the wrinkled cloth. Feel the warmth of the clothes on your hands as you fold them. Notice the various textures. Listen to the ripple of the sheets as you flick them flat, or the snap of a towel, or the rustle of the pile. Taste…okay, don’t taste. As your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back to the task.
  5. Be grateful. As you find yourself increasingly open to the boredom, notice the things for which you are grateful in this moment. Something about the task. Or the good things that doing this task enables you to have in your life. Or any other reason for thanksgiving that comes to mind.
  6. Do it all over again tomorrow! 

When we are able to bring our attention mindfully to our boredom, to enter into it and anticipate riches beneath the surface, we will almost always end up in a place of gratitude. And that kind of boredom is rich, indeed.

Questions: What keeps you and your family entertained? How do find ways to limit them and learn to enjoy the rest of life? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

TUESDAY TIP DISCLAIMER: The Tuesday Tip is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association website.

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Why Dirty Dishes Are the Biggest Threat to Your Marriage

October 26, 2012 — 14 Comments

Dirty dishes have killed more marriages than extramarital affairs ever did. Because they’re boring, repetitive, monotonous. And we have no idea what to do with boring. If we want our marriages to survive, we must find a way to reclaim the extraordinary lying just beneath the surface of our monotony…

Dirty dishes

Photo Credit: Andres Nieto Porras (Creative Commons)

My boys and I are playing zombie apocalypse and my three-year-old daughter is looking on with big, expectant eyes. I ask her to join us. “Caitlin, do you want to be a zombie?”

“Yes,” she replies, “a princess zombie.”

I try again. “Caitlin, do you want to be a soldier instead?”

And again she replies, “Yes, a princess soldier.”

I get the point, and so we play zombies and princesses, all at once. My boys love war stories. And my daughter loves princess stories. What do they both have in common?

Storybook endings.

THE STORYBOOK DECEPTION

In the final scenes of any good story, there is triumph and ecstasy and satisfaction—conquering heroes vanquish the zombies and princesses ride off into the sunset with prince charming. We are drawn to stories with blissfully happy endings. The only problem is, our lives don’t work that way, do they?

Our stories don’t end at the penultimate scene.

My family attended a beautiful wedding last weekend—two days full of joy and celebration and hope for this blooming romance. But then we had to get into the car for the six-hour ride home. And unpack. And do the dishes. And the laundry. And herd crabby, over-tired children into bed.

Again.

I want to see the Disney princess movie that depicts life after Flynn Rider marries Rapunzel. I want to see them trying to share a sink in the castle while the kids bang at the bathroom door. I want to see them picking up the horse’s poop for the umpteenth time so the neighbors don’t get pissed. I want to see Rapunzel clipping her toenails and having to sit on the can. I want to see Flynn wake up the day after the honeymoon to return to his day job ruling a kingdom. I want to see them arguing about whose job it is to fold the laundry if the other one ran it through the wash. (Can you imagine how much laundry there is with all those big puffy dresses?)

But I’ll never see that movie, because in a culture of smart phones and instant entertainment, we believe all of life should be thrilling, and we avoid boredom like the plague. With Facebook over morning coffee, and email at stoplights, and YouTube videos filling the nooks and crannies of life, and on-demand television at night, and iPad flicking until the eyelids droop.

And, in doing so, we leave ourselves completely unprepared for the repetitive monotony of one of the most important endeavors of our lives: marriage and family building.

I know I write a lot about conflict and anger and shame, but the truth is, boredom is just as corrosive to our marriages. We must learn to live our boredom well, or we will search for excitement elsewhere. Maybe even in the arms of another person.

A MARRIAGE LESSON FROM A PHOTOGRAPHER

A photographer recently told me the story of his photo shoot at a local forest preserve. While other photographers and pedestrians hustled around him in the gathering dusk, hunting for increasingly beautiful shots in the withering light, he sat.

And watched. And waited.

Because he knew beauty would be found not in the quantity of trees photographed. He knew beauty would be found in nuance—the infinite array of hue as the light changed angles minute-to-minute, and the slowly morphing shapes of shadows come alive.

He faced the boredom of attending to one seemingly uninteresting event, and just beneath the surface of the monotony, he discovered extraordinary beauty and wonder.

The pictures were breathtaking. 

I think the same could be true for our marriages. If we want to discover breathtakingly beautiful love and sacrificial living, we will need to learn how to stay in our boredom long enough to unearth the riches buried just beneath the surface of our monotony.

ORDINARY STITCHES IN A BEAUTIFUL TAPESTRY

Could the boring-repetitive tasks of marriage and family life—dishes, laundry, ironing, vacuuming, picking up clutter, chauffeuring—be the birthplace of joy and wonder?

I think they are, because they are the stitches in the complicated, beautiful, gloriously messy tapestry of life.

They are the strands that hold it all together. If we have lived well, when we step back in the end and look at the beautiful stories of love and loss and joy and sacrifice we have woven with our lives, others will not notice these mundane stitches, this thread that keeps all the beauty together. But without them, the beauty we created would be impossible.

If we can behold the boredom in this way, I think will find gratitude welling up like a geyser. Not heave-a-sigh-I-probably-shouldn’t-complain-other-people-have-it-worse-gratitude. But real, overwhelming, bursting-with-joy gratitude.

Gratitude. That this now dirty bowl will tomorrow be the place of my child’s sustenance—he will tip it up it to his mouth when the Cheerios are done and gleefully drink down all that sweet leftover, while we say a benediction for the day and the girl with the curls babbles and the boy with the insights expounds.

Gratitude. That love is just a word, but a clean bowl is love and sacrifice in action.  Grateful for this one opportunity to provide respite for a war-weary spouse. And in the end, what will we desire more, that we had done less dirty dishes, or that we had done more love and sacrifice?

Gratitude.

For the stitches that hold up the glorious tapestry.

And our gratitude will be the spade, unearthing the moment-to-moment wonder beneath the surface of the boring: the slick soap on hands and warm water rinsing food clean and the shimmer of light on bubbles and that favorite song playing in the background and kids screaming and pummeling each other in the bedroom and a spouse who wanders in and begins to lend a quiet hand.

With your choices, you can weave something beautiful with your life. But every tapestry requires stitches. Boring, repetitive stitches.

May you be deeply, joyfully grateful for yours.

Questions: What bores you about married life? What do you do to enter into the boredom and experience at something beautiful? Share your experiences in the comments section.

DEAR READER, Tuesday’s Tip will delve more deeply, yet practically, into the ideas articulated in the last section. How can we become attentive and mindful of our boredom, such that it actually becomes a very rich experience? As always, I’m grateful for your reading. It is truly a gift, a part of my tapestry. Warmly, Kelly

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The Best Way to Ruin the Best Moments

September 21, 2012 — 29 Comments
Overgrown and Autumn Painted

Photo Credit: thorinside, Flickr (Creative Commons)

September is cradling us in its sanctuary, poised between the warm promise of summer and the barren landscape of winter.

A few eager leaves already lie trampled on the cooling earth. The angled light of autumn holds the world in long shadows and high definition, the edges of everything sharp and brilliant. The chirping of the surviving summer crickets is muffled by the dry-rustle of brittle leaves in the canopy above. Cool breeze competes with the warmth of sun on skin.

I sit on a park bench in the midst of all this perfection and I drink it down desperately.

Before me, one lonely leaf detaches and lopes in circles to the fragile grass below. There’s a barking dog in the distance and a mower still farther off. The stillness is so complete I can here the blood pulsing in my veins.

Yet. The sacred moment is impaled upon the pit in my stomach. Even now, in the midst of this wonder, an anxiety is building and threatening.

How can I be anxious inside this sanctuary of an autumn moment?

As the smell of summer bloom mingles with the odor of fall decay, I know the answer: I don’t want it to end. I’m thinking about the end instead of the now, and this is the birthplace of anxiety.

I think we ruin sacred moments of wonder and beauty by trying to hold on to them. In fact, any moment in which we fall in the love with this world can be a moment shortened and tarnished by the impulse to hold tight and preserve.

It is ironic, isn’t it? The moments we most cherish must be held delicately. Or we squeeze the joy right out of them…

Leisurely summer vacations full of beach umbrellas, happy-splashy kids, and paperbacks riddled with sandy grit. It’s just too good and as the vacation slowly tips toward its conclusion, we grasp and hold on, but all we accomplish is to anchor our minds in the ending of it.

Or, the fallen leaves are piled in the yard and the kids are piled in it, all giggly and lost in the moment. And you want to grab time by the neck and grind it to a halt. You want the years to stop rolling by so quickly and you want to pause these little lives right here and now. And it ruins the joy of the giddy moment.

Many of us do it every weekend. We turn Sundays into the-day-before-we-go-back-to-work. And the joyful day of rest is replaced by hours of dread. It’s the never-enough thirty minutes of peace before the kids arrive home from school. It’s the last hundred pages of Harry Potter, turning the pages ever more slowly. It’s the last ten minutes of a movie that became your favorite while you were watching it—the aching for more.

If we want to drink this life down, if we want to live fully, we will have to become masters of letting go.

Several weeks ago, I walked into my sons’ bedroom to turn off their reading lights. My eight-year-old son Aidan placed his book down next to him and rolled over to face me. His eyes shimmered and he raised the book in way of explanation: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

Through a tight throat, he tried to explain his tears. He told me it was the story of a doll that repeatedly finds a loving home and each time, through random circumstance, is abandoned to wait for love all over again.

As I searched for the words to comfort him—a way to soothe him without devastating him—Aidan spoke for both of us.

“Daddy, I guess if I want to love people, I’m going to have to be okay with letting them go.”

If I want to love, I have to be okay with letting go.

If I want to live, I have to be okay with letting go.

If I want my heart to be ruptured by beauty and wonder, I have to be okay with letting go.

Because we can’t wait until our beautiful things have come to an end to do the hard work of letting go. If we wait, our dread of the end may work its way backward into our hearts, corrupting the beauty that is here now.

Instead, the hard work of surrender—of embracing the end of the embrace—must come first. Only then will we be truly free to fall head-over-heels in love with this moment or that person or a world overflowing with wonder.

Perhaps, as the world eases into its winter slumber, this season is reminding us to let go first so we can truly lose ourselves in the beauty.

And I think there might be grace in the reminder—this season of autumnal color also reminds us the most beautiful things can give way to the most barren things without despair. Because we’re in orbit, and fresh life is only months away and all things will be made new.

Perhaps this dying season is meant to ease the letting go, with the reminder that every death is followed by a resurrection. And every loss is pregnant with the seed of redemption.

Comments? What are the moments you do not want to let go of? How do you surrender them so you can fully enter into them? Please feel free to share in the comments below.

DEAR READER, There won’t be a Tuesday Tip this week. I’ve used my writing time to attend the Story conference in Chicago over the past couple of days. Will be posting some reflections about it soon. In the meantime, take the five minutes you would have spent reading the Tuesday Tip. Walk outside into the autumn bursting. And breathe. Cherish it, this one breath. You did nothing to earn it and you can do nothing to earn the next. It’s grace, pure and simple. Revel in it. Sincerely, Kelly

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Discover Patience in a Day

September 18, 2012 — 9 Comments
Silence

Photo Credit: ialla (Creative Commons)

This post is a Tuesday Tip.

Related Post: Patience is Not a Virtue, It’s a By-Product

We think patience is about waiting like a good little boy or girl.

But it’s not.

Patience is the sense of peace that grows out of letting go of what we want, facing the pain in our hearts, letting the internal temper tantrum quiet down, and then listening to the redemptive whisper that is always murmuring just beneath the surface of our suffering. We know impatience does violence to our relationships, and we are desperate to find this still place of love in which we can meet the people we cherish.

Is there a roadmap for doing so? I don’t think so.

But I’m going to describe one path, and I’ll leave it up to you to tell me where it takes you…

  1. Schedule it. Set aside a day for patience-building. Sunrise to sunset. This is the most important step. Without a wide-open day gaping before you, the temper tantrum will not have time to go quiet. Make whatever sacrifice it requires. Get a sitter, cancel obligations, disappoint somebody.
  2. Get away. Choose a place that is secluded and quiet. Away from home where distractions will beckon. A place you will not run into anyone you know. Preferably, a place you won’t run into anyone at all: a bench in a forest preserve, a retreat center, a church sanctuary in mid-week.
  3. Disconnect. No phone. No books. No phone. No music. Did I say no phone? Just a pad of paper and a pen. None of your normal methods of distraction. I’m guessing you’re getting a little queasy at this point. That’s okay. It’s the heart stuff coming up; you’re already beginning.
  4. Pick on somebody. Choose one relationship to be the focus of your day. Choose someone you care about deeply but who has been testing your patience. You are going to write them a letter today.
  5. Listen to the temper tantrum. You will spend your morning embracing your frustration and impatience. Listening to the temper tantrum. Begin by identifying at least five negative thoughts and/or emotions that arise when you think about the person. Write each one at the top of a separate page. Spend 30 minutes on each page. Do not censor any thoughts, feelings, or sensations. Record whatever comes up in relation to that thought or emotion. Remember, it is your censoring and running from your internal temper tantrum that produces endless feelings. When you allow yourself the experience, you will discover it doesn’t last forever. You will begin to quiet down inside.
  6. Sit don’t flit. The key to listening is getting your mind to sit on an emotion, rather than flitting from thought to thought, as it will be inclined to do. Every time you notice your thoughts and attention have strayed from your focal point, take three deep breaths, and return your mind to the negative thought or emotion you are attending to. Do it over and over. And over and over.
  7. Listen for the whisper. Enjoy a quiet lunch. Then, in the afternoon, when your heart sounds silent—it will never be perfect, but you will no longer feel attached to those negative thoughts and feelings—begin to listen for another voice. It will be gentle and loving and graceful. It will be patient and peaceful and kind. Listen to what it says about the person you are attending to. It will see them as broken, human like you, fallible but valuable. It will not deny the frustrating parts of them, but it will encompass all of what they are. Your mind will flit again. This time, return it to the whisper.
  8. Write the letter. Enjoy a peaceful dinner. Then, in the evening, allow the whisper to write a letter for you. Literally write it down. Let the whisper-voice write for you. Make it your voice. There is no template for the letter. Simply refrain from censoring the thoughts and feelings you are having. And write.

This may seem like a strange path upon which you are embarking. It may be populated by all sorts of strange and scary things. But remember, they cannot withstand the light of your attention. And when the scary things have subsided, and you’ve discovered another voice, you will know a healing patience.

Comments? What would be most difficult about walking this path? What would be most healing? Please feel free to share in the comments.

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Tuesday Tip Disclaimer: The Tuesday Tip is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association website.

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