Wisdom & Patience

As of early May, I officially completed my first half-century of life. Here is my prediction for life after 50:

Some things will get better and other things will get worse.

My psychic powers are astonishing, I know. It’s easy to understand that things will change. The challenge lies in determining how I will respond to the changes that will inevitably come. Will I continue to enact the same old patterns of reaction, or might I find a different way?

In my last post, I talked about Renunciation, which is one of 10 Parami – qualities that one can cultivate in order to live a life with less suffering. I have been reading more about the Parami and am working to incorporate them into a sort of blueprint for life. The 10 Parami are:

• Generosity
• Virtue or Morality
• Renunciation
• Wisdom or Discernment
• Energy
• Patience
• Truthfulness
• Resolve
• Goodwill or Kindness
• Equanimity

The Blueprint:

With wisdom and truthfulness, I can see the narratives I tell about my life and practice dropping the stories I create about… pretty much everything. I can work to renounce my expectations of how things should be and see more clearly the truth of how things are. Then, I can bring energy and resolve to my intention to practice kindness, generosity, and virtue so that my actions tend to increase happiness and decrease suffering for myself and others. Throughout, I will endeavor to have patience with the process so that I might develop some degree of equanimity with the ups and downs that I will naturally experience.

A few stories I’m currently telling myself:

#1: Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in the “special needs mom” identity. I’m at the age where my friends’ kids are heading off to college or starting families of their own. I see my peers moving into the next phase of their lives when they can explore interests outside of parenting. Special needs parents don’t get to move on. Sarah will always be dependent for her care; she’s not going to move out to live an independent adult life one day like her big sister. There’s not going to be a phase where I get to travel, take up gardening, or buy an RV and drive around the country visiting the national parks. And, although we’re in a good place right now with regard to Sarah’s seizure control and care, my state legislature seems determined to make greater cuts to services for children with special healthcare needs and it is increasingly likely that we will lose some or possibly all of Sarah’s care in the near future. Not only am I stuck with the “special needs mom” identity, but I might have to give up even more of my personal interests and activities.

#2: I’ve been exercising regularly and generally try to eat a healthy diet. Despite my efforts, my body continues to age and refuses to return to the state it was in when I was 25. How unfair is that?!

#3-6: The government sucks. Our country is falling apart. Religious extremists, anti-vaxxers, and science deniers are taking over the world. Climate crisis is real and we’re all doomed. (You can fill in the details of these stories yourself.)

Following the blueprint:

I have a lot of fantasies about how different things would be if I were the boss of the universe. If only! Unfortunately, things are as they are and they don’t necessarily line up with my idea of how they should be. In his year-long teaching on Dependent Origination, Rodney Smith had this to say:

Drop the sense of any alternative place we could be. The truth is you cannot be in an alternative place. You have to close all the doors of your escape route… As long as those doors are open, our minds will fly out of them. We have to close those doors because they’re not true… You don’t have another alternative – you only have what’s in front of you. … Look and see: Is there an alternative to now? We have to live with the abject fact of the reality that’s before us.

This is where the Parami of Wisdom and Truthfulness come in. We must be ruthlessly honest with ourselves in order to understand where we’re caught up in our own story and how that generates suffering. It’s not that our stories are complete fiction – they usually originate from a kernel of truth. There is stress associated with special needs parenting. Climate change is real. The problem lies with the way we embellish the truth to turn it into an academy award winning drama of which we are the star.

Ask yourself continually if the way you have arranged the world – and if the way you have arranged yourself within the world – is true, or does it just seem this way.

Rodney Smith

Our task is to drop the narrative. Once we stop taking everything so personally, we can see the underlying truth of circumstances and can then discern where we can or cannot effect change. Wisdom means cultivating right view – seeing clearly how craving and aversion underpin the stories we create and manifest as discontent and suffering. If I am constantly caught up in the stories I create about life, I will continue to suffer. On the other hand, if I examine things honestly, I might come to see where my ability to change my circumstances is limited and develop the capacity to let go of my need for control.

In that full allowing of conditions to be what they are, we stabilize our hearts and find peace. It’s like putting a boat into water. We make an ark of truth: ‘Conditions are like this,’ and in that truth, we don’t adopt the conditions as our own. This is important: you can’t drain the sea, but you don’t have to drown.

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami

Of course, letting go of our stories is not easy. We like being the star of our own personal Netflix series and we spend a lot of time binge watching every episode. This is where we apply the Parami of Energy, Resolve, and Renunciation. The lure of our fantasies, the perverse joy we get from our self righteousness, the absolute attachment we have to being right: these are powerful forces and we must make a firm resolve to recognize them and escape the trap. We must apply sufficient energy to this endeavor. In her book, Unbinding: The Grace Beyond Self, Kathleen Dowling Singh writes, “Because the only mind we can liberate is our own mind, ours is the mind we explore. We can ask ourselves what is my own resistance to paying attention, to simply being present and seeing? What’s going beneath the surface of my assumptions? Where am I afraid to look? What am I afraid to find? What do I not wish – or do not feel ready or willing – to acknowledge? What suffering do I simply tolerate?”

Rather, we work to cultivate Wisdom in order to see reality clearly without the distortion of our conditioning. Then, we can engage in right action to effect change where we’re able, and also develop Equanimity so that we’re not inundated by the inevitable flood of judgments surrounding conditions. By practicing Kindness, Generosity, and non-harming (Virtue), we ensure that our actions benefit ourself and others. When examining our reactions to what life throws our way, Ajahn Sucitto advises that we ask, “Does this behavior cause me and/or others long-term harm, suffering, indignity, or stress? Does it lead to my welfare, the welfare of others, and peace?”

If all of this seems like a tall order, it is. Wisdom lets us see clearly where we are stuck and gives us the opportunity to practice the Parami so that we can escape the quagmire of our own conditioned responses. Throughout the entire process, we must foster Patience – with ourselves, others, and the inevitable challenges encountered when living a human life.

Patience is “the restraint of holding the heart still in the presence of its suffering until it lets go of the ways in which it creates that suffering.”

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami

Wisdom & Patience

As I begin to explore how to incorporate the Parami into my daily practice, I am coming to understand that Wisdom and Patience are the requisites for each of the other qualities. With right view, we gain insight into the truth of circumstances; we see where we have not been honest with ourselves or others, where we’re clinging to our opinions and ego. We begin to understand that suffering arises when we’re caught up in our drama – when we’re resisting, complaining, feeling sorry for ourselves – when we want what we don’t have or don’t want what we have. In order to truly understand suffering, you have to experience it; you can’t run from it or distract yourself from it. You must patiently sit with the experience and see it as it is. In the course of generating the Patience to be with experiences without pushing them away, we in turn bring about more clarity and so Wisdom and Patience reinforce each other.

“All the perfections contribute to the lessening or dismantling of that dukkha, but the specific quality of patience is to carry the heart through the turbulence of existence so that it no longer shakes, sinks or lashes out.”

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami

To recap: The blueprint is to use wisdom and truthfulness to see reality as it is without the narratives I tell myself about what’s going on. This helps me to renounce my attachment to how I think things should be. I resolve to bring energy to the practice of kindness, generosity, and virtue for the benefit of myself and others. Throughout the process, I remember to have patience with myself, others, and life in general, allowing equanimity to evolve. Given another 50 years, I think I can bring this to fruition!

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It’s enough to offer love,
no matter how imperfectly
received or given. It’s
enough to try and fail at
a difficult task; enough
to fall and rise, stumble,
fall again, sigh, and start
to walk, however slowly,
in the direction the soul
points. It’s enough to
seek peace and find pain,
to gain nothing but a
vision of truth, and take
the long route home.

Danna Faulds

Metta

All of Ajahn Sucitto’s books, including Parami, Ways to Cross Life’s Floods, are available for download at no cost.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Gibson for introducing the Parami to our Sangha and setting me on this path of exploration.

Credit for the featured image at the top of the post goes to Katherine Black.

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