..续本文上一页 to see if there”s something you”re holding on to, often it”s going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, “It”s too big; you can”t let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it”s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go.”

　　That was extremely good advice. You don”t have to do the big one, because usually you can”t. It”s too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

　　You can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn”t mean you”re going to be able to let go, because there”s a lot at stake. What”s at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity. You”re beginning to move into the territory of egolessness, the insubstantial nature of oneself—and of everything, for that matter. Theoretical, philosophical, distant-sounding teachings can get pretty real when you”re beginning to have an inkling of what they”re actually talking about.

　　It takes a lot of patience not to beat up on yourself for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to the fact that you can”t let go, somehow that helps you to do it. Patience with the fact that you can”t let go helps you to get to the point of letting go gradually—at a very sane and loving speed, at the speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It”s a big moment even to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is what you need at that point to just wait and soften, to sit with the restlessness and edginess and discomfort of the energy.

　　I”ve come to find that patience has a lot of humor and playfulness in it. It”s a misunderstanding to think of it as endurance, as in, “Just grin and bear it.” Endurance involves some kind of repression or trying to live up to somebody else”s standards of perfection. Instead, you find you have to be pretty patient with what you see as your own imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness, because the speed of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You are developing patience and loving-kindness for your own imperfections, for your own limitations, for not living up to your own high ideals. There”s a slogan someone once came up with that I like: “Lower your standards and relax as it is.” That”s patience.

　　One of the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha”s slogans says, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” It means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and fearlessness, and patience and curiosity. We are actually jumping all the time: whether it”s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we”re really happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, in terms of not just filling up the space, going a million miles an hour—impulse buying, impulse speaking, impulse acting.

　　I”d like to stress that one of the things you most have to be patient with is, “Oops, I did it again!” There”s a slogan that says, “One at the beginning and one at the end.” That means that when you wake up in the morning you make your resolve, and at the end of the day you review, with a caring and gentle attitude, how you have done. Our normal resolve is to say something like, “I am going to be patient today,” or some other such set-up (as someone put it, we plan our next failure). Instead of setting yourself up, you can say…

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