Dear Roberta:

Congrats for starting your very first thread in the forums!

I began listening to the YouTube about Patience and found myself losing patience, lol. But I do intend to listen to all of it and let you know what it meant for me

I want to honor your participation in tiny buddha by posting here parts of your very first post in the forums. It was in a thread titled “The End of the Road”:

Roberta, April 2, 2022: “Dear Javier I only joined this tiny buddha today, so I hope it is alright to post to you.
As an only child, I knew it would be up to me to look after my parents in their old age, and if I did not want it to be a living hell for all of us including my children then something had to change to break the age old cycle

“I had an uneasy relationship (that is putting it politely) with my mother. Back in 2009 when on retreat I realised  that I could only change my attitude and ideas about my mother, but not her and that the Buddhist path was going to be the biggest help…

“The one or two practices that helped me be with my mum as she was dying was foremostly the loving kindness practice: May you be filled with loving kindness, may you be held with loving kindness, may you be peaceful & at ease and may you be happy…. Her passing was very peaceful and I am glad that I made the effort to not only study but practice the dharma. I am at peace with myself and my mother…. Kind regards, Dharma granny”

May I be filled with loving kindness today and every day. May I hold others with loving kindness. May I be peaceful & at ease and may I help others be peaceful and at ease.

Thank you, Roberta (Dharma granny) for your honest, high quality posts to so many members over the years (3 years, 8 months, and 7 days).   

Kind regards, 🤍 Anita

Thank you for the reply, Roberta. I will listen to the rest of the video by tomorrow and get back to you!

Best wishes back to you!

Anita

More than 49 minutes on patience as opening instead of enduring. Lost me in the first few minutes. Will try again when I might be more receptive. 49 minutes, … of that soft monotone voice.

Dear Roberta and Thomas:

I enjoy both of your senses of humor, brings a smile to my face!

Been busy here, in the forums all day, so didn’t get the time to listen to the audio/ video. Like Thomas though, it’s not just about time. It really is difficult for me to listen to an audio, particularly when someone speaks slowly and in a monotone (speaking fast and in a monotone is worse!), “makes me itchy pants” (Thomas’s words), ha-ha, don’t remember hearing it said just that way.

Be back to this thread later.

🙏 Anita

Dear Roberta:

I wish your father well. I shared recently that I have a desire to volunteer in a nursery home for old people facing end of life.

Problem solved in regard to listening to the video. I found a transcript.. well, not quite, the words don’t appear with spaces in between, so I had to form spaces in between letters so to form words.

“So this idea of knowing how to be present for things which are pleasant and unpleasant, pleasing and unpleasing, and have the mind have this spaciousness or stability or largeness that we’re not triggered easily, we’re not upset, we don’t get caught up in it and lost in the reactivity to it, is part of what patience is about, this khanti. So maybe there’s another word in English besides patience that would capture this better. I don’t know what that would be. Or we have to kind of learn the Buddhist word for meaning of patience.

“But in the context of wider Buddhism, and especially these things called the perfections, we have to also understand what gives rise to patience, what gives rise to this earth‑like ability to hold in beautiful way the life that we have, to hold in a beautiful way what is unpleasing, what is difficult. And that is to understand something about the Buddhist notion of wholesomeness. And the idea is that,
so I like to translate patience as, not by a single different word than patience, khanti, but rather to call it wholesome patience. And then maybe you get a sense of that maybe it could be beautiful if it’s wholesome. And so one of the functions of wisdom in Buddhism, and Buddhism is often seen as a wisdom tradition, is not to read an encyclopedia about Buddhist philosophy and then become wise,
but rather for you to take a deep look in yourself, to really not be present for yourself, to be able to see, feel, observe within yourself what feels healthy for you and what is unhealthy.

“What feels like it diminishes you and what kind of opens you, inspires you. To feel what nourishes you versus what denourishes you. To feel what gives you good energy and what drains it away. And all those ideas are kind of held within this concept of wholesomeness and unwholesomeness. Which I kind of like because it means part of the whole or not part of the whole. The unwholesome is what
takes us away from the whole.

“What whole? I don’t know. The whole of who you are, the whole of what this world is like, that we want to be in it in the whole, as it is, not partial, not selective, not with blinders on. And there’s something about clinging, resisting, assertiveness, conceit, something about even anxiety and fear sometimes, that become kind of like blinders. It’s kind of like we diminish ourselves. We’re cutting, it’s a selectivity process that takes us out of the whole. And so to return to the whole, to the whole experience of the present moment, the Buddha often talked about the whole body, being mindful of the whole body as we meditate, being mindful of the whole mind ,not the divided mind ,but them in… really getting to know for ourselves is how we use our awareness, how we use attention. The very thing that is the means by which we navigate through our world, the very medium, it’s kind of like if the medium for fish to get through their world is water, the medium for humans to get through our world is our awareness, our attention. Everything that we experience in the world goes through that filter.

“And so how are you aware? How are you attending to the world? How are you observing? How are you seeing it? And is that wholesome or unwholesome? Is it beautiful or is it not so beautiful how you see it?

“And so awareness itself sometimes, the way we attend to the world, can be full of greed, can be full of hatred, can be full of delusion. It can be full of anxiety, restlessness. It can be filled with preoccupations and doubt. It can be filled with interpretations and bias through which we see the experience of the world. And so this focus on what is healthy and not healthy is not to interpret these things, but to feel what we’re doing and feel, oh, when I’m seeing the world through my hatred, this is unhealthy for me.
This doesn’t feel good. There’s tension here. There’s stress here. When I have seen the world through my greed, there’s tension here. It diminishes me. It takes me out of the whole.

“When I’ve caught up in my anxiety, you know, it’s hard with anxiety because anxiety is so concerned with what it’s anxious about that we don’t see the effect anxiety has on us. It just seems like it’s true. But if we turn all these ways, we turn the attention around 180 degrees to really look at the effect that our behavior has, the effect of how we’re relating to things, we can feel, wow, this is actually, no wonder I’m exhausted by the end of the day. I’m just constantly reacting against everything. I’m constantly afraid of everything and trying to establish my place. I’m constantly wanting something. And I’m constantly disappointed, constantly the world’s not living up to what I want it to be. And so we see that and say, is there another way? Is there a way that it’s not stressful? What’s the opposite of stress? Not just the absence of stress, but it’s some kind of wonderful vitality, wonderful, relaxed, open vitality in which we live our life.

“So the wisdom factor in Buddhism, the mindfulness practice in Buddhism, is here partly for us to be able to read ourselves well. That’s the encyclopedia we want to study. Don’t get the book. The book you want to read is your own heart. You want to have a very acute sensitivity to what goes on in your heart, in your mind, in your body, in your speech, so that it stops being unwholesome. It starts being wholesome. It stops being, I don’t know if I want to say ugly, but I just did. And instead we want it to be beautiful.

“Can we make it beautiful, what we do and how we live? Is that wise? Is that useful? Well, if what you want to do is get wealthy really fast, maybe not, so don’t bother. You can go now. But if you want freedom, if you want to not just be distressed and be calm, but to find
this higher capacity for living a life that’s beautiful, the qualities of heart and mind that come forth in you, are satisfying, deeply, deeply satisfying for you. You feel like, ah, I’m home. Because I know inside of me now, this feels good. We become our own friend.

“Our inner life is our friend. Ah, this is beautiful. This is nice. So wisdom begins helping us discern the difference between what’s healthy and not healthy for us, wholesome and not wholesome. And one of the things that teaches us then is where to put our energy, how to appl your energy. And so we have to make choices. And so as we have a better sense of what is wholesome and unwholesome, we can make wiser choices about where we take this wonderful human capacity of vitality that we have, energy we have, and use it to awaken a healthy kind of energy and kind of stop doing things which are a kind of energy that is exhausting, that’s agitating, that’s stressful, that’s exhausting for us. And it’s one of the great delight of Buddhist practice to start feeling this wonderful, engagement with the world, the things that we do, engagement with practice, that feels like it has a vitality and a liveness to it that feels good and
healthy.”-

There’s more, but I am done with separating letters to reveal words (exhausting). This will have to do. Will process the above tomorrow.

Anita