Tolerating Provoking Situations
Two weeks ago, my very dear teacher and mentor, Sacinandana Swami, opened his talk to an online audience with a quote from Wayne Dyer, “When there is pressure, what comes out is a sign of what is inside. When a lemon is squeezed, we get lemon juice. When a mango is squeezed, we get mango juice.” It was confronting. Just a few minutes before, I had made a distastefully sarcastic comment to my wife, having lost my patience on something trivial.
I was stressed, and I was suffering. We were going into week 7 of the quarantine. The situation in NYC was quite depressing, and the news left me with very little to bank on. Days had begun to merge; my coaching sessions had been relentless and emotionally draining. And just the week before, our 10-month old daughter had developed a high fever that had left us on edge. Her sleep patterns were changing as well, leaving us without much sleep at night. On top of all that, I was internally battling negative memories from an old relationship with a then dear friend and colleague that to-date has not been resolved.
In the broader scheme of things, my suffering was insignificant. And yet, it had enough of an effect on my consciousness to create self-absorption. What came out was bitter and leaked out on my wife, who was also going through her own stresses. I had reasons for commenting the way I did, and perhaps they were justified. But my behavior ended up creating more suffering.
Our egos are fragile. Especially when things are so out of control as they are now, the ego’s need for control is challenged in unprecedented ways. It causes enormous stress and suffering. In a culture where rugged individualism and self-expression is strongly encouraged, we have had very limited training on tolerance and patience. And while during normal times, this lack of training may go relatively unnoticed, these trying times are stark reminders of how our fragile egos have never been prepared for walking through our stresses with grace.
Tolerance and patience help us not to perpetrate our suffering. They train our fragile egos to hold our suffering, take full responsibility for it, humbly ask for help, and transform our suffering into strength of character. When we don’t learn how to do this, our egos redirect this stress to others around us, willingly or unwillingly. As one of my favorite authors, Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, quotes in his book Falling Upward, “What does not get transformed, will definitely get transmitted.”
Tolerance is not pleasant. It does not let us escape, nor does it let us react. Instead, it creates much-needed space between stimulus and response, and forces us to look at things within us that we don’t want to fully own. It makes us feel weak at the time it is being applied. Many times, tolerance is confused with being passive. Naturally, we avoid applying the principle of tolerance.
But it has consequences – small and large. On a small scale, we become short-tempered and say things we later regret (but justify!). On a large scale, our ego goes unchecked, becomes progressively entitled, relinquishes its sense of responsibility, and looks for other people to serve its endless needs. Both the small- and large-scale effects of the unchecked ego create suffering for others. As Richard Rohr puts it in Falling Upward, “In the process of avoiding our necessary suffering, we create a lot of unnecessary suffering”. We are all too familiar with this, especially in our current political environment. That potential to create the unnecessary suffering exists in all of us, if we don’t learn how to tolerate the stresses we experience.
We are at a time of transition, and transitions are never easy. My personal experience of transitions has taught me one important thing – how we walk the time of transition is what creates the new “normal” on the other side. As we look towards a new “normal”, I personally want to bring the capacity of more tolerance in my daily life. The great Bhakti yoga teacher, Swami Prabhupada, who is credited with bringing the Bhakti tradition to the West, writes, “The greatness of a person is demonstrated by how the person can tolerate provoking situations.” I sincerely want to strive for that definition of greatness.