Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

with the mind, you can see fluctuations. Perhaps in the morning
you’re really in a good mood, you had a good meditation and
you see somebody behaving in a certain way, or something
happens and – yes – it doesn’t really affect you. In the
afternoon you are a little bit tired, you’re a little bit fed up,
something has gone wrong, you see the same thing and you
have a much stronger reaction. The intensity of the reaction is
not solely the function of the irritant. It is a dual production.
One part – and it is the important part – is coming from within
us. It’s affected by our own mental state. This is our great
opportunity.
So we try to develop that patience and patient
endurance, that steadfastness, that groundedness of mind which
is not jumping around with delight at things that we like, or
pulling away and shrinking from, or flaring up with anger at
things we don’t like, having a sense of just being there, very
calmly being present to our experience. Then we begin to see
that there is nothing out there which can force a particular
emotion to arise in our mind. At most we may be subject to a
very compelling invitation. We can feel that someone is giving
us a very strong invitation to be angry, or someone or
something is giving us a very strong invitation to feel greedy or
lustful, but it’s not compulsion. This is where the opportunity
for freedom becomes very apparent. We see that if we keep
doing this work and we keep plugging away very patiently,
very methodically, and calmly, our ability to not receive the
invitation, to not react blindly tot that impingement becomes
stronger and stronger. And our sense of self reliance, the sense
of being our own refuge, become more and more real.
Our meditation practice gains immeasurably from the
intention to develop khanti. Without it insights don’t take root.
With it they do. So we learn to cherish this quality of khanti,
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