Practicing Tolerance

Tolerance is hard. It requires being uncomfortable and making space for people and experiences that push us to the edge of our familiarity and comfort. Even those of us who preach tolerance still have to practice it! This is a guided meditation on working with habits of intolerance and cultivating clear personal awareness and tools for remaining with challenging interpersonal dynamics and working with differences skillfully.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

The following is a guided meditation by Renee Seals,

A somatic movement educator,

Energy worker,

And astrologer.

This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.

If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,

Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.

Please also note that the content of this meditation sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,

And sometimes guided visualizations.

You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.

If any of the guidance Renee offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,

Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.

These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.

We hope you enjoy.

Hi everyone,

This is Renee.

Thanks for listening.

This is a guided meditation on tolerance.

In general,

I think tolerance is a word like compassion that is used a lot and is rarely really examined or struggled with.

It's one of those words that can be kind of like a blanket statement and we all have our ideas and assumptions about what it is and rarely do we really look at what it requires.

Tolerance is not easy.

To tolerate something is to basically be uncomfortable and to work with the discomfort and to do the things that are necessary for you to do in order to accommodate whatever it is that you're tolerating.

Tolerance is probably not a state of being that arises from innate trust or open-heartedness.

It's probably a state of being that arises from mental discernment and understanding of the need to get along.

And to tolerate,

To have tolerance,

Can be a really joyful experience but rarely is it joyful if we haven't had some kind of foundational training in ourselves either through previous experiences or through examples from our possibility models like parents or family or other kinds of teachers or leaders that it is joyful.

A lot of the examples that we have culturally are about exerting dominance and proving rightness.

We don't really have that many examples that we can look to for collaboration and reaching out across difference not only to come together and to work together but to really understand and make space for difference.

That's something that I think is a pretty evolved quality and that many humans have and do regularly but it doesn't really reach us in terms of popular media and examples that we have in that way in terms of pop culture.

So when we tolerate something,

Generally what we're doing is we're enlarging the container that we have.

Often what we're tolerating is something that is,

For whatever reason,

Threatening or uncomfortable to our stasis,

To the place where we feel stability and comfort.

Kind of a classic example is with religion,

With religious tolerance.

When there is a strong belief system in place such as someone who is religious might have a belief system around spiritual practice and the right ways in which to practice,

The iconography or the names that should be used for God or for the notions of God.

That state of being can become fundamentalist and therefore someone else who has a different worship practice,

Different names,

Might be felt as a threat.

That threat is very you know it's it's frightening and real and enraging and terrifying and you know that example is kind of across all spectrum of relationships.

So if you're in a love relationship and the object of your affection likes somebody else and that person is around a little bit,

How do you tolerate that?

How do you tolerate your own possessiveness and jealousy?

Or if your lover or your partner has a hobby or habit that you don't like so much,

How do you tolerate it if it makes them happy?

If you're a parent and your child is really into something that you just think is stupid and disgusting,

As many children probably are,

How do you tolerate it?

How do you understand that they have their own cultural preferences and they're of a different age and generation than you were?

And so their choices aren't going to look like yours did.

How do you make space for them?

And within all of these questions is the necessity to examine the experience and to understand whether or not you need to have the boundaries that you do.

And one thing that's true anytime that we feel intolerance is that there's a kind of very deep biological kind of like reptilian brain response that comes up to fight and to squash and to exterminate or diminish whatever the opposing forces.

And it's a protective mechanism,

It's part of our ego structure that we want to be right and therefore someone who's presenting something else is a threat.

So when we feel intolerance towards something,

It's often a cue to examine the foundational reasons.

And many many times,

Nine times out of ten,

You'll find that your state of intolerance is rooted in some kind of insecurity that keeps you back in many other areas of your life.

So it might be manifesting most presently or most often in one particular area of your life,

But chances are good that you exhibit this tendency in other areas of your life as well.

And the somatic effect of intolerance is really toxic feeling.

It's an internal feeling of mistrust and control.

So when there's intolerance,

There's obviously a dislike of something else and a mistrust of it,

And then there's some kind of seeking to destroy it.

And that might be through gossiping or through speaking in some kind of demeaning way.

That might be through belittling or undermining.

That might be through setting some kind of rules and structure and restraint.

There are all kinds of ways that we can enact our intolerance,

And there are all kinds of ways that we can work with ourselves to become more tolerant.

And becoming more tolerant is uncomfortable work.

It is part of how we dismantle systems of oppression when we find that we're a part of them.

And so if you're someone who's trying to understand white supremacy and dismantle it within yourself,

Part of doing that is understanding how intolerance has been entrained into your cells,

Into your fast twitch muscles.

That when you see someone that exemplifies a certain thing,

That your entire body goes into a state of mistrust.

Even if you're brain says there's nothing to fear.

If you're a man and you're freaking out right now with the way that things are happening in terms of the Me Too movement,

In terms of the rise of feminism,

And therefore the kind of de-emphasis of male supremacy,

And a lot of anger that's being directed at men.

How do you tolerate the current conditions in a healthy way?

When we're faced with adversity,

We very quickly become intolerant.

And this doesn't matter who you are or what side you're on.

When you feel that another group of people doesn't tolerate you,

You immediately probably react with more intolerance.

Rarely does a human respond to intolerance with an open heart.

That's not what we do.

We respond to rejection with more rejection.

So part of what we're doing with practicing tolerance is having compassion and empathy and recognizing when other people are in states of intolerance that we don't necessarily need to meet them there.

We can still include them in our experience.

Tolerating is a choice and it's a choice made from discernment.

And by no means do I wish to promote any more emotional labor or self-sacrifice from people who are very adept in those spaces.

So if you're someone who tolerates a lot,

This meditation will also be informative for you around your boundaries.

And tolerance isn't necessarily something that is it's not martyrdom.

It's not the same thing.

It's being aware of what we can include and what we actually need to differentiate from and make space for.

Okay,

So as always you can practice this meditation in any physical configuration.

You can lie down,

You can sit,

You can stand,

You can move.

Wherever you are,

Take a moment to investigate comfort and just check in with your body and your surroundings and ask,

How comfortable am I?

How comfortable are you?

Make whatever changes you need to make.

This is a way that we can practice tolerance is simply by checking in with ourselves and noticing what we ask our own bodies to tolerate.

That it's probably really normal and habitual for many of us to be in states of tolerance with pain and with suffering and to ignore them.

So I want to encourage you right now to do whatever you need to do to make yourself comfortable wherever you are.

And then allow your eyes to close and start to take some deep breaths.

And if it's not comfortable for you to close your eyes and just let your eyes soften.

And as you inhale and exhale,

Feel the movement of your breath as it enters and exits your body.

And don't force it.

So just allow your breath to be as it is.

Allow it to arise within you.

Reviews

Thank you. I needed this check-in in on tolerance!