This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one’s life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or giving up.
Patience asks us to go within, find the capacity for containment, and recognize that choosing non-action can be the needed form of action. We recognize, feel, and suffer the situation that has arisen, but resist the urge to immediate action in the external world. We search instead for discernment, containment, and meaning making in the internal world. It takes work to develop staying power.
The fairy tale heroine in Six Swans worked in silence for six years to weave starflower shirts to liberate her six brothers. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey spent years weaving her father-in-law’s shroud each day and undoing it at night. Like them, we may be required to work patiently on taxing tasks with uncertain outcomes. The gift of such labors is a sovereign self in relationship with the Self.
The quality of patience is central to psychoanalysis. Analysands arrive seeking solutions to urgent problems, but insights take time to unfold, and it may be longer before paths to meaningful change appear. The Jungian precept of holding the tension of opposites asks us to foster patience. We must neither collapse into despair nor take premature action. Patience is fundamental to inner growth and transformation.
Don’t forget to sign up for our free seminar on Saturday October 3rd 2026 at 11am ET: Dream the Dream On: A Dream School Taster on Active Imagination
Here’s the Dream We Analyze
I was sitting at a table opposite a real menacing man. We both had loaded revolvers in front of us. We were waiting for someone to come, not quite sure who, but at any time he could reach for his revolver to shoot me, and I had to be faster. At some point I woke.
Resources from the Episode
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
- Time & Truth About Its Use: An Interview with Oliver Burkeman – our interview with Oliver Burkeman.
- William Gibson, The Miracle Worker.
- William Goodheart (1980). Theory of Analytic Interaction. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. Vol. 1 (4), pp. 2-39 (for discussion of the ‘secure symbolizing field’).
- Grimms Brothers, The Six Swans fairy tale.
- James Hollis, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path.
- Edward C. Whitmont & Sylvia B. Perera, Dreams: A Portal to the Source.
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