'Tolerance' isn't most folks' favorite word. Tolerance: the ability to endure something we find unpleasant. Blah.
Yet when we get the least bit invested in mindful practice, tolerance is as good as chocolate. If we want to discover what makes us happy, tolerance is one of the doors.
Evolution has hardwired us to turn away from lots of stuff: stuff that scares, hurts, disappoints, confuses. For most of our lives we mostly go with how we're wired.
And then we begin to accumulate clues that life, as we've lived it so far, is smaller than we'd hoped--constricted, and for many of us, disappointing.
Yet over time, we'll glimpse something in others who have wider, deeper experience of life, and something in us finds it attractive. We're somehow 'pulled' toward it. But, no surprise, once we're pulled toward what our hardwiring has resisted, we'll also become uncomfortable.
Every doorway into deeper happiness has (in small print) an inscription: "This passage will make you uncomfortable." But this is where we learn to love tolerance. We never make it to the other side of uncomfortable passages without it.
One of the first gifts and challenges of contemplative practice is tolerance. What do we do with each thought or feeling that comes up in mindful practices? We accept it, we tolerate it. We even experiment with 'welcoming' it. This is big time training.
Over time, all kinds of 'crap' comes up. And what's the practice? "This too" is this practice. Tolerate, welcome this and this and this and THIS TOO. When we do, we see so much that we've never seen before simply because now we're no longer avoiding it just because it makes us squirm.
Cultivating tolerance in meditation carries over into the rest of our lives and makes a big difference. Whatever that inner muscle is (that learns to hold and welcome what makes us uncomfortable) 'volunteers' to hold all kinds of everyday stuff--challenges at work, hard conversations, bad news. Lots of important stuff we used to ignore, deflect, gloss over, deny--we now know how to work with (not always skillfully--but it's a promising start)!
Becoming familiar with any landscape makes it easier to navigate--whether the landscape is personal, social, professional, or (imagine this) political.
Tolerance: the ability to endure something we find unpleasant. Imagine...stuff that drives us crazy today over time leading to deeper happiness.
