Question: How can we develop patience?

Sri Chinmoy: How to develop patience? In order to develop patience, we have to feel that we have launched into a spiritual journey, an inner journey, which has a Goal, and that this Goal wants us and needs us as much as we want and need it. This Goal is ready to accept us, to give us what it has, but it will do this in its own way at the choice hour of God. We must know that God will give us His wealth in time. Patience will never tell us that it is a hopeless task. Patience will only tell us either that we are not ready or that the time is not ripe. We may have the feeling that we are ready, but we have to know that our integral being, our whole being, is not ready. Our soul may be ready, our heart may be ready, our mind may be ready, but our vital and physical may not be ready to reach the Goal, which is Light and Truth. When our whole being is ready, the Goal itself will dawn within our aspiring consciousness. When the hour strikes, the Goal will draw us towards itself like a magnet.

When we are in the spiritual life we have to feel that patience is not something passive. On the contrary, it is something dynamic. In patience we develop our inner strength, our inner willpower. It is true that if we have willpower we can easily acquire patience. But it is equally true that when we have patience, our inner willpower develops itself in a special way.