Earlier this week, I came across a quotation that picked me up, shook me around a bit, and then plopped me back down. (I love when this happens.) In the book The Spirituality of Imperfection (a title that, when I first saw it, already gave me the “this is important” shivers), Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham write,

We modern people are problem-solvers, but the demand for answers crowds out patience—and perhaps, especially, patience with mystery, with that which we cannot control. Intolerant of ambiguity, we deny our own ambivalences searching for answers to our most anguished questions in technique, hoping to find an ultimate healing in technology.

I am certainly a problem-solver and answer-demander, but have always thought that I scored pretty high on the patience scale. I’ll stick to a task until it’s done. I’ll go slow and steady if I have to. I’ll be the one to cross the finish line, to get the degree, to bide my time until an answer is confirmed. That’s patience, right?

Well, maybe. Sometimes. But other times it’s just willful stubbornness laced with “I’ll show you” and spiked with exactly what Kurtz and Ketcham find to be such a problem: an intolerance of ambiguity (as in, “What do you mean ‘Will this work?’ Of course this will work. I’ll show you—even if it kills me.”). I know this pattern in myself. It’s what got me through graduate school. But I’m not all that comfortable with it anymore. I’m much more interested in cultivating true patience, even (and perhaps especially) patience with mystery.

There doesn’t seem to be one term in Sanskrit that captures just what we mean by the term “patience.” Abhaya points to the fearlessness that patience sometimes requires, and dhairya denotes firmness or steadiness, which captures another aspect of patience. But kshama may be closest, as it can mean forbearance, a term often used in English as a synonym for patience. Like most Sanskrit terms, however, it’s meaning is layered, for it also means forgiveness.

So to have patience with yourself or another person is not only to forebear frustration, or discomfort, or whatever feeling the situation triggers in you, but to also forgive. How difficult, but how beautiful.

Even with our more basic understanding of patience, we tend to find it difficult to cultivate. We’re problem-solvers, sure. But yoga philosophy suggests an even deeper root: attachment. Our setting of expectations, and our attachment to finding “solutions”—especially solutions outside of us—precede the problem-solving. We wonder why we’re not happy, and turn to certain other people or things to solve the problem. When that doesn’t work, we turn to yet more people—or jobs, or cities, or pieces of pie, or whatever.

Why? Kurtz and Ketcham suggest that we’re intolerant of ambiguities and we deny our own ambivalences. I think they are on to something. We’re uncomfortable in that place of suspension, feeling an equal pull between two opposites. We’re uncomfortable fluctuating between what strikes us true but what could be false, between something we find both attractive and unattractive. When we’re stuck in the middle of a river, we tend to call whichever bank seems closest the “right” or “best” bank.

In our meditation practice, this intolerance can show up as giving up on certain techniques or sitting postures—or giving up the practice altogether—when we don’t experience exactly what we expect. But of all things, meditation puts us face to face with mystery, and to complicate this mystery, we often look to meditation to answer our most anguished questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? And so meditation is the quintessential activity for the cultivation of patience. Journeying into—and beyond—the unconscious mind, with all the other things that this requires and entails, means bumping into ambiguity after ambiguity after ambiguity. And while we can learn of the meditative experiences of others, ultimately our own experiences will be absolutely unique. Others can provide a kind of roadmap, but we must take the steps. What those steps will be like for each of us depends on who we are. And self-discovery takes patience.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should stick with something or someone if it isn’t working for us or if it’s harmful. But as one of my teachers is fond of saying, the mind is like a laboratory, and as meditators, we are scientists of the mind. The best scientists don’t assume what they’ll see; they formulate hypotheses. They don’t demand solutions; they test and observe. And then they test and observe again. This technique of problem-solving doesn’t crowd out patience; rather, it requires it and allows it to flourish. And it helps scientists see their way forward.

These days, as I take my meditation seat, I practice that kind of patience, the patience of the explorer, the patience of the scientist. I test and observe and forgive myself my flares of impatience, all the while keeping an eye on the roadmap of the great meditators who say that, as one practices in this way, the highest part of the mind, the buddhi, the intuitive intelligence, helps guide the way.