This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This week’s theme is patience, and in this morning session, Linda looks at how patience actually develops in Reflective Meditation — which turns out to be quite different from how it’s often taught or described.
The high ideal and what it costs
In the Theravada Buddhist tradition, patience — khanti in Pali — is one of the ten paramis, or ten perfections. These are qualities cultivated over time, said to support awakening, and patience in this classical framing is often described as enduring difficulty without reacting: bearing pain, discomfort, delay, insult, with no aversion, no retaliation.
That’s the high ideal. And ideals have their place. But Linda notices what happens when we take that ideal as a personal expectation — when we expect ourselves to already be this way. We start to manage our reactions. We hold ourselves in. We tighten up trying to be patient.
The practice becomes effortful and self-correcting in a way that doesn’t actually feel like patience at all.
Staying with, rather than enduring
In Reflective Meditation, the word Linda reaches for is not endure but stay with. It may seem like a small difference, but there’s something genuinely distinct about it.
The training here is to stay with experience — not to fix it, not to escape it, not to change it. To allow, receive, befriend what is actually happening. There’s no directive to get yourself calm, or to get yourself patient. Those aren’t the rules of this practice, even if many of us have quietly given them to ourselves.
What Linda has found — through her own practice and through hearing from practitioners over time — is that when experience is allowed to unfold in its own time, without too much interference, patience begins to arise from within it. Not announced, not capital-P Patience with a neon light, but quietly present.
Meditation doesn’t run on our timeline
You might be sitting with a mood that won’t lift, or restlessness that just keeps circling, or the same story replaying again. Nothing interesting is happening. You wonder if you’re doing it right.
And then something changes. Not because you made it change — because the conditions changed.
This is something practitioners tend to absorb slowly, in small increments, over many sits: we are not in charge of the timeline of meditation. We don’t decide when insights come, when the mind settles, when something resolves. Meditation unfolds in its own time. Patience grows in the space of not interfering too much with that.
Ordinary meals
Linda’s mind went to a scene from When Harry Met Sally — the diner scene, where Sally memorably demonstrates something that brings the whole restaurant to a standstill, and an older woman at the next table simply says: I’ll have what she’s having.
We come to meditation, Linda reflects, wanting that meal. The peak experience, the insight, the transformation. And we do get some of those, over time.
But most of the time, what actually happens is that we’re having an ordinary meal. Patience in this practice is being willing to stay with the meal we have today — long enough to be curious about it, to explore what’s already there.
That’s not a consolation prize. That willingness, cultivated over and over, is how patience actually develops. Not as a discipline. Not as something we impose on ourselves in the heat of impatience. But as something earned by living, reflecting, and sitting with what is.
