Allowing our Limitations - Part 1
It’s fair to say that most of the people who know me best, especially from adolescence into my twenties, would describe me as someone who was very impatient and easily annoyed. Through both research that I’ve read and people I’ve known with ADHD, which I was diagnosed with since I was eight, these tend to be very common attributes. Of course, there are plenty of people who are easily annoyed and lacking in patience without ADHD. Regardless of the precise cause, it’s certainly fair to say that this was the temperament that I was born with.
Irritability and impatience were just a couple of the many issues that I struggled with that drew me to the practice of mindfulness meditation. Throughout these issues were common themes that I was searching for an: freedom from mind-created suffering, peace of mind, and an easeful way of moving through the world. Since my first seated meditation practice ten years ago, I have come a long way. Those who know me best comment on how I have changed in so many ways for the better in terms of being more patient, more calm, more content.
I’d love to say that I never get annoyed or impatient or identified with my thoughts and emotions...but that wouldn't be true. We all have those situations, or people, that can really trigger our emotional reactivity.
It’s worth pausing and taking a moment to reflect on which situations really trigger feelings of agitation or impatience in yourself.
As an expat living in a developing country, there’s nothing that really comes as close to dealing with feelings of impatience and agitation as dealing with immigration issues. The problems with Thai immigration bring to the surface so many of the things that frustrate so many expats about Thailand: it’s arcane bureaucracy, it’s absurd inefficiency, the opaque and arbitrary ways that rules do, or do not, get communicated and enforced.
With an upcoming extension for my visa on the horizon, I went against my better judgment and didn’t pay an agency to do the visa run for me. I considered the fee abnormally high and during the lockdown I thought that there wouldn’t be many people at immigration.
As soon as I walked into the immigration office I immediately regretted my decision. By the very high--or should I say low?--standards of queues for Thai immigration it wasn’t even that bad. But by the standards of a type A personality that likes order and efficiency, as well as someone very impatient by nature, it brought up all of the challenging feelings of things that I strongly disliked about my adopted country and that I had been successfully optimizing out of my life up until now.
The visa agent I was with was a very nice, mild mannered guy. He has probably never meditated a day in his life and yet patience seemingly comes effortlessly to him. I’ve got friends like this. From my vantage point they’ve won some kind of lottery at birth: some people are just born with this kind of easy going temperament.
It wasn’t difficult for him to see that I was frustrated with the situation. Compared to him I’m sure I did look very annoyed. Frankly, it was a lot less frustration than I would have experienced in the past but I honestly hadn’t experienced this kind of impatience and agitation in a very long time.
As I started to become aware of these feelings, I drew on the mindfulness practices that I had learned. I used the noting technique labeling “impatience,” “agitation.” I tuned into where in the body I was experiencing these feelings and tried to soften into these areas. It certainly lessened the feelings internally of my agitation. I wasn’t feeling particularly tense inside but feelings of agitation were still present and I was aware that this agitation showed in my demeanor. I was aware that I was caught in some kind of deeply ingrained condition that was playing out, yet I couldn’t extricate myself from it. It had to play itself out.
Before I departed they had another nice surprise for me: in fact, I would not receive my passport that day, as expected, but I had to drive back (quite far from my home) and get it the next day.
On the drive back, the feelings of judgment and shame started to arise. “I teach mindfulness meditation, I shouldn’t be easily perturbed like this.” The Buddha called this the second arrow: when we overlay challenging emotions or experiences with our judgments.
I want to reflect on what I might have done differently as a way to learn and grow with the hope that it might help others to become more comfortable with learning to work with our limitations more skillfully, which also includes a kind of allowing for our own imperfections. This allowing gives rise to compassion for oneself and for others which is an essential quality of the heart-mind and an important motivation in practice to become more aware for others and for ourselves.
What might I have done differently that morning?
Several things.
For me, I happened to have skipped my morning sit, which was a big mistake. During breakfast I was more interested in scanning the news headlines than in mindfully eating my meal. So I had a poor foundation of mindfulness to start my day. We experience more freedom in our lives when there is a continuity of mindfulness. This doesn’t demand that we’re always doing formal practice for long periods of time but consistent formal practice does help to keep up a kind of momentum in one’s practice. It allows for a continuity of attention that can more easily notice when we’re getting caught before awareness becomes too identified with its contents, especially deeply ingrained and not so skillful patterns of behavior.
As someone with ADHD, prone to excitation and irritability, it’s all the more crucial that I be disciplined with my formal practice.
Most importantly, when you’re aware that something is a potential trigger for you that you will have to deal with that day, actively work with it in your mindfulness practice in preparation of that event.
In this case, I knew that I was going into this situation which was a potentially major trigger for me. It would have been an excellent idea to be a noting practice in real time as I stepped out of the car and started walking towards immigration. Connecting with the sensations of the feet walking on the ground and starting to note my emotions: “anticipation, agitation, impatience, etc.”
These are a few things that would have helped to prime me for a more successful handling of a challenging event.
What went well?
In the moment I was able to at least have some awareness of my agitation. Though I was way more frustrated than my companion, comparing ourselves to others is always a mistake and I was certainly less annoyed than the “old me” would have been.
Moreover, when the situation passed, I did not continue to cling to these feelings of agitation for long. The situation passed and I could let these feelings go quite quickly.
Almost as soon as the feelings of judgment and shame arose around how this person had perceived me, I became aware of them. I became aware of how I was judging myself. I could see the judgments for what they were, as feelings that awareness should let go of rather than identify with.
I have had enough experience with practicing meditation to know that so much of our suffering comes from comparing ourselves to other people. If I’m being honest, I wish I was born with the kind of temperament that some of my friends have and this visa agent had: that I was naturally patient. But that wasn’t the hand that I was dealt at birth. I was lucky to be born with many advantages, which I can notice and be grateful for, but this kind of patient and calm temperament wasn’t one of them.
However, I don’t spend any time wishing that I was other than I am. It’s important to not only recognize our worthwhile qualities, but also to allow for our limitations.
There’s a very important balance to highlight between self acceptance and personal growth. On the one hand, we want to try to become a better person for the benefit of others and for ourselves. At the same time, all of us have our limitations and it’s important to learn to work with these limitations.
These two qualities: the desire for personal growth as well as the importance of self acceptance, must be kept in balance. This is a paradox with which we must learn to become intimate.
Having high standards for yourself can lead to great progress; however, it can also create excessive striving, tension, and dis-ease; a judgmental mind that is never at peace with itself. I’ve always had quite high expectations for myself and I have been quick to judge myself, at least on those metrics, which I deemed to be important. At times this has pushed me along farther than I might otherwise have made it but at other times it has also saddled me with judgment, blame and shame.
Through the practice of mindfulness we can start to notice the ways in which the mind is getting caught up in judgments or shame and step back from identifying with these feelings. The more clearly we practice and the more consistently we can see how these wrong views create our suffering, the more adept we become at dropping these feelings more quickly.
In part two of this “Allowing Our Limitations” blog post, we will dive deeper into using mindfulness to recognize our limitations and how to find that balance between self-acceptance and striving for more.