Impatience...

I am impatient.

Not all the time. I can often be very patient, depending on the circumstance. But I find I am most impatient with myself when taking up something new. I see if when I don't excel in a new topic at school. I see it when I take on craft projects and they don't turn out perfectly the first time, or when they take longer than I anticipated and I start rushing to finish. I'm seeing it a lot right now at my new job, where - even though I seem to be doing a good job based on all the positive feedback I'm receiving - I'm still getting frustrated with myself for still having to say "I don't know" after just a short month.

And I'm seeing this in my meditation practice. It's only been a few weeks. Due to my hectic life, I've only been able to try and squeeze in meditation a handful of times. And yet, because I haven't become this zen, calm, focused person yet, I find myself becoming frustrated at my self-perceived "failures".

So, like anything else I would take on and need help with, I started searching for what I was doing wrong. The thought process was that I must obviously be doing something incorrectly, thus impeding my progress toward a more mentally balanced state. Right?

As it turns out, what I'm doing wrong is expecting too much too soon. In this piece by Matthieu Ricard, an author and Buddhist monk, he explains that we spend years learning to walk and talk and write or learn other skills, but we mistakenly expect to learn to quiet our minds and achieve balance in a fraction of that time. Research even suggests that even the "short-term" benefits of meditation may take up to eight weeks of regular practice to be realized.

And yet, here I am, beating myself up after about 6 weeks of intermittent practice. Thus showing my impatient side again.

I think I need to realize that I am still very much at the beginning. That the moments I do steal for some quiet contemplation are a gift to myself, no matter how small. And that it's going to take a great deal longer to make the headway that I've been seeking when it comes to "finding my zen".