BE PATIENT

BE PATIENT

“Sometimes we in the West think that we come to the Dhamma with an advantage: We’ve got so much education, we’re so well‐read. But we have a major disadvantage in that we lack the patience and consistency that come with mastering a skill. So keep that in mind as you’re meditating, when you find yourself getting impatient for results. You have to be watchful and consistent. You need that sense of being bathed by the breath, being open to the breathing sensations in all parts of the body down to every little pore of your skin.

Then you learn the sensitivity that’s required, the consistency that’s required, to maintain that. That way the sense of fullness can grow and grow and grow until it becomes really gratifying, really satisfying, to give your concentration the kind of strength, the sense of refreshment, the sense of nourishment it needs in order to keep going.
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Ajaan Fuang once said that without this sense of fullness, refreshment, or rapture, your meditation gets dry. You need this lubricant to keep things smooth and running: the sense of well‐being and refreshment, the immediate visceral pleasure of being in a concentrated state.
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At the same time, it heals all our mental wounds: any sense of tiredness, of being stressed‐out, mistreated, abused. It’s like medicine for these mental wounds. Now, medicine often takes time to work, especially soothing and reconstituting medicine. Think of the creams you put on chapped skin. The skin isn’t immediately cured when you first rub on the cream. It takes time. The skin has to be exposed to the cream for long periods of time to allow the cream to do its work. The same with concentration. It’s a treatment that takes time. Your nervous system needs to be exposed to the sense of fullness for a long period of time, giving it a chance to breathe in, breath out all around so that the mindfulness and the breath together can do their healing work.
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So don’t get impatient. Don’t feel that nothing is happening. A lot of things that are very important require time, and they do their work subtly. If you give them the time they need, you find that you’re more than repaid…”
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Bathed in the Breath December, 2002
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/meditations.html#bathed