A friend who meditates daily once told me a story about being stuck at O’Hare airport in Chicago during a layover. His connecting flight had already been delayed multiple times. Everyone was growing irritable and frustrated, but he chose to reorient and recognize the opportunity for people watching, one of his favorite pastimes. As he was sitting there watching the travellers, he noticed a familiar face. It was the surgeon who operated on his wife when she lost her battle with cancer a few years before. My friend was so devastated at the time that he never had a chance to properly thank the surgeon for all of his help. He and the surgeon ended up getting coffee together and my friend was able to bring more closure to that chapter of his life. He attributed the patience he felt that day to his regular inner work.
Step 3: Remember. The best indication of what’s going to happen in the future is what has happened in the past. In other words, people don’t change nearly as fast as we like to think they can or will. Remembering means we pay less attention to what people say and more to what they do. Then remind yourself to make necessary adjustments to your expectations of them based on their actions. If someone is a complainer, remember not to say anything that would trigger his or her complaints. If someone is always late, remember to give him or her a meeting time that’s 15 or 20 minutes earlier than you planned to meet. When caught in traffic, remember to take a different route, or leave at a different time, so it no longer feels like a nuisance.
Don’t expect people to make adjustments to accommodate your expectations of them. Expecting mangoes to fall from an apple tree only ever leads to more frustration. Instead, loosen your rigid attachment to your feelings of how people should behave. We have very little control of anyone or anything. The more you practice patience, the longer your window of opportunity will be for recognizing, reorienting, and remembering effectively.
Practicing the three “R’s” not only leads to more patience, but it also upgrades the quality of your relationships and builds upon your new status as a “time billionaire.” Let others rush around in a frenzy while reacting to every little change, demand, or pressure. You will flow through those same changes as gracefully as the Olympic champion swimmer Michael Phelps glides through water. You will also find that acting from patience puts you in the right place at the right time more often than not.
As with your slowing down inner exercise, feel free to choose more ways to practice patience, but give special care to recognizing, reorienting, and remembering. After each day, briefly describe in your exercise log where you practiced the three R’s and any valuable takeaways you received from those situations. If you don’t find any obvious takeaways, reiterate how you felt by being more patient with yourself and others.
Practice patience for five days before moving on to your final inner exercise. Continue practicing your other inner exercises as well. At this stage, meditating, writing gratitude statements, expressing written thanks, and slowing down most likely require some planning. While it’s best not to skip any of those inner exercises, feel free to make them easier by modifying. For instance, instead of writing out your gratitude lists, you may just say the list to yourself at the end of every meditation. And in lieu of sending a thank you card, just shoot off a quick thank you text or email to an unsuspecting friend. Slow down in one activity as opposed to two during these next five days. Meditation is the oil that keeps the other exercises lubricated and propels the engine of inner happiness forward, so remain consistent with that inner exercise.
By the way, you’ve meditated every day for almost a month now, which is quite an accomplishment. Congratulations on your rock-solid commitment to building happiness within, and continue to track your happiness levels each day you practice patience.
OUTER GYM EQUIVALENT
BEING PATIENT = NEGATIVES
Negatives are slow, downward movements of any exercise. They help cultivate the strength it takes to move through the full extension of a particular exercise. For instance, with bench press negatives, you lower the weighted bar down toward your chest very slowly and have your spotter lift the bar back up to your straight-arm starting position. Negatives force you to slow down and feel the weight of the movement, leaving you depleted at the end of each repetition. Ultimately, negatives give you more control and better form when engaging in the full extension of the exercise on your own. Likewise, patience requires you to hold the weight of change longer than you may like, but it also increases your tolerance to the peaks and valleys of future change, strengthening your ability to extend yourself fully in any direction you choose. Each time you practice patience, imagine that you’ve completed a grueling set of negatives.
EXERCISE LOG: PRACTICE PATIENCE
Day 21
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to ______________
Slow down activity __________________________
I overcame impatience while:___________________
____________________________________________
Discoveries: _________________________________
____________________________________________
Rate my post-patience happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 22
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to ______________
Slow down activity __________________________
I overcame impatience while:___________________
____________________________________________
Discoveries: _________________________________
____________________________________________
Rate my post-patience happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 23
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to ______________
Slow down activity __________________________
I overcame impatience while:___________________
____________________________________________
Discoveries: _________________________________
____________________________________________
Rate my post-patience happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 24
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to ______________
Slow down activity __________________________
I overcame impatience while:___________________
____________________________________________
Discoveries: _________________________________
____________________________________________
Rate my post-patience happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Day 25
Meditated for five to ten minutes
Listed my five statements of gratitude
Communicated a special thanks to ______________
Slow down activity __________________________
I overcame impatience while:___________________
____________________________________________
Discoveries: _________________________________
____________________________________________
Rate my post-inner exercise happiness level:
Very Happy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Very Unhappy
Continue on to your next inner exercise after day 25.
Kindness is the language which
the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
— Mark Twain
INNER EXERCISE 6
GIVE FREELY
(Days 26 to 30)
Olga, a native of Ukraine, received a full track scholarship from Abilene Christian University, and moved fro
m Eastern Europe to Texas.
When she arrived at ACU, Olga spoke very little English and kept mostly to herself. Whenever she wasn’t training, she hid in her dorm room watching television, both as a way to avoid the embarrassment of not yet being able to communicate, and to better understand conversational English. After four years, Olga graduated with her bachelor’s degree in fine arts, a handful of track trophies, and the ability to read and speak English fluently.
She moved to Los Angeles, couch-surfed with of some of her former teammates, and spent her days seeking employment as an assistant track coach. But she had a tough time finding work, as few employers wanted the burden of having to file the necessary paperwork to hire her.
I met Olga through mutual friends shortly after her move to Los Angeles and found her humble, curious, and good-humored. I showed her around Los Angeles, taught her meditation, and tried to help in any other way I could, including treating her to meals and offering to loan her money if she ever needed. Olga probably saw my offers as conditional, seeing as how I didn’t hide the fact that I found her attractive. Regardless, she seemed determined to succeed on her own, and my attempts to help were politely declined.
After weeks of scouring the city, Olga finally landed a job as the manager of a high-end sports store in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood. When she told me the good news, I invited her out to lunch to celebrate. Olga said she would love to come, but she needed to be extra-frugal until her first pay check arrived, which meant no wasting gas on non-work-related trips.
After getting off the phone with her, I felt the urge to send Olga some pocket cash, enough for her to get by until her first paycheck arrived. I knew if I asked her or tried to give her money in person, she would continue to refuse. So I got out a pen and paper and began to compose a letter thanking Olga for being such an inspiration by taking a leap of faith, leaving her native culture behind and, without being able to speak English, coming to America to pursue her dreams. I told her how impressed I was by her work ethic and determination.
I then went to the ATM and withdrew $150, which was a fairly substantial amount for me at the time. But deep within, I felt that giving to Olga was no different from giving to myself. I attached a sticky note to the cash, saying that this was an unconditional gift, not a loan, and that I only wanted to help make things easier until her first paycheck arrived. While writing the letter, withdrawing the money, and going to the post office to mail it, I felt an endorphin rush similar to the one I got from jogging.
A few days later, I received a text from Olga thanking me for my gift and saying how the unexpected cash came just in the nick of time. This feeling of helping out a friend in need was delightful, and reward enough for my efforts. Shortly after, Olga began to receive her paychecks, and establish herself as a professional in the American workforce.
Approximately three weeks from the day I mailed Olga the cash, I arrived home from my morning jog and I stopped to grab my mail on my way in. It had been about a week since I last checked it, so the small box was overflowing with the usual mailers, solicitations and bills. As I sorted through the contents, I noticed a thin envelope with a handwritten address buried in between two of the mailers. The letter was from Tamara, an old friend from my modeling days who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in months. We both moved from New York to Los Angeles around the same time, and lived not far from one another, but we had fallen out of touch.
One thing about living in southern California’s car culture, with its gridlocked traffic and scarce parking, is you can live within a couple of miles of someone and rarely see them. After not speaking with Tam in ages, I was naturally curious to know why she was writing. But I decided not to open her letter immediately. It was so rare for me to receive personal letters that I wanted to cherish it. I gently placed Tam’s letter aside and got ready for my day.
After my shower and meditation, I sat down to begin work. I noticed Tam’s letter resting on top of my other papers, and decided I couldn’t resist any longer. I opened it to find a folded piece of paper, and inside was a personal check for $750. Affixed to the check was a sticky note, which read, “Hey Light, thanks for playing in the Law of Circulation with me.” As amazing as it sounds, I had never spoken with Tamara about my theory on circulating resources. But I received her $750 freely, because I was in the habit of giving freely, as I had done with Olga, and understood the importance of keeping the circulation flowing.
When I had my first chance to thank Tam and tell her about the extraordinary coincidence, she revealed to me that one afternoon, out of the blue, she felt a yearning to pull out her checkbook and write me a check. She said the urge was too strong to ignore, and she even described the “high” feeling!
One of the reasons I like recounting this story is because it demonstrates an organic integration of all of the inner exercises at once. There was the expression of gratitude, the receiving exercise, slowing down and showing patience with opening the letter, giving freely, and everyone involved was meditating. The story may seem improbable, but remember that freely circulating your resources can—and will—result in amazing gifts coming to you too. Your inner exercises will make you even more aware of its prevalence.
What you’re going to pay special attention to over these next five days are those moments when you have the urge to circulate your resources. You must follow through on that urge without concern, knowing that anything you feel called upon to give from your heart will indeed be returned to you, often in the most unexpected ways, and in far greater amounts than you initially gave.
WHY GIVE?
Do you sometimes feel that you rarely have the desire to give, or that you have the urge, but you don’t feel you have enough resources to share—that you’re barely scraping by yourself? Or you may feel that you don’t really have the urge to give at all. If so, this is a valid observation. Just know that the call to give should feel more internal than external. One of the desirable side effects of daily meditation—another reason why meditation is so important—is that it strengthens the connection between us and everyone else. Surely we can feel traces of a connection without meditation, but meditation makes it more unambiguous and therefore undeniable. That connection will give rise to the feeling you’re looking for with this exercise, which is a spontaneous urge to give—even during inopportune times.
For instance, you may only have ten dollars to your name, and you feel an impulse to give away five dollars to someone who needs it. Or you’re in a hurry to get somewhere, but you feel the urge to stop and help an elderly person cross the street.
The urge to give is less of a passing frivolous desire for indulgence and more of a charming, internal, heartfelt invitation that, in the immediate sense, benefits someone else. The belief governing this circulation of energy states that by giving to others, you give to yourself and by withholding from others, you withhold from yourself.
Giving more is not a question of needing lots of money or stuff to give away, either. You can give a flower. You can offer a silent prayer. You can give a sincere compliment or even just a warm smile. If we feel that we don’t have enough material resources to share, just think about how many of history’s icons for giving were materially poor—Mother Teresa, Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus, to name a few.xx None of these great people were close to having wealth, yet all are synonymous with the spirit of selfless service and giving. King once said, “Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve... You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”xxi
Understand that both abundance and poverty are states of consciousness. Both influence our perspective on money, time, and resources. One person may see ten dollars as a lot of money that she must save, while another person may view the same amount as pocket change, and spend it without much thought on a short-term craving. Another person may have as their personal mantra
“time is money,” but may behave in ways that will ultimately lead to poor health, resulting in spending a lot of time trying to recover. Others may act as if they have all the time in the world. Who is ultimately right? Everyone.
Our state of consciousness, whether it reflects abundance or scarcity, is the lens through which we participate in and view our world. People who operate from abundance usually have an easier time seeing and understanding how money and resources need to circulate, and how spending actually keeps money in circulation, while hoarding money can lead to unwanted stagnation.
The world’s food supply is one example of where a lack of circulation turns an otherwise abundant natural resource into an experience of scarcity. According to World Hunger: 12 Myths, the world’s farmers produce enough wheat, rice, and other grains to provide every human being with 3500 calories a day.xxii That doesn’t include many other necessary foods such as beans, nuts, grass-fed meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits. There’s more than enough food right now for at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide. Yet in many parts of the world, there are food shortages, even starvation. The problem is not lack of supply but a lack of circulation.
Each of us has a unique relationship with the Law of Circulation, and that relationship positively or negatively influences the present degree of abundance we feel in every aspect of our lives. For instance, it may sound counterintuitive to a penny pincher that spending money is good, because lack and limitation have likely become dominant features of their reality. What they don’t understand is they’ve created the reality of scarcity by feeding into it with their reciprocal thoughts and actions. That’s why it’s good to become extra-mindful of your language around the subject of abundance.
The Inner Gym Page 7