What Ashtavakra knew about impatience that I had to learn the hard way
Some years ago, I started a quiet experiment. Every time I caught myself doing something I was not proud of, I would sit with it long enough to ask: what was underneath this?
The answer, almost every single time, was the same.
Impatience.
Not anger. Not laziness. Not poor judgment. Impatience was the root. Everything else was just its expression.
I am fond of reading Indian Philosophy. I keep revisting the Ashtavakra Gita for years. It is one of the more demanding texts in Indian philosophy, it is not long or compex, but its straighforwardness is unsparing. There is no gradual path in Ashtavakra. No stages, no rituals, no teacher-student warmth. Rishi Ashtavakra speaks to King Janaka, who comes asking about knowledge, freedom, and non-attachment, and the Rishi answers with the kind of directness that leaves you slightly stunned.
Verse 7 is the one that settled into me like sediment:
eko draṣṭā’si sarvasya muktaprāyo’si sarvadā ayameva hi te bandho draṣṭāraṃ paśyasītaram
You are the sole witness of all. You are always almost free. This very conviction is your bondage: that you see yourself as anything other than the witness.
The teaching is deceptively simple: you are not the doer. You are not the beneficiary. You are the witness, the observer, the one in whose awareness everything is happening. The moment you forget this and begin to identify as the actor pulling levers, or the sufferer being acted upon, you have stepped into illusion. Avidya. That forgetting is the source of all our turbulence.
I will not claim I have understood this fully, let alone lived it. But I have found something practical at its edge: when I sit back and watch rather than grasp, I stop being in a hurry. And when I stop being in a hurry, I stop making the mistakes that cost me most.
That practical edge is patience.
The Four Faces of Impatience I Know Best
My experiemnt with studying my impatience brought me to recognize four distinct forms of impatience in myself. They do not always arrive loudly. Sometimes they masquerade (A new word I learnt and love it) as energy, decisiveness, even passion. But beneath the surface, each is the same animal.
The impatience to prove yourself right. Someone says something you disagree with. You know you are correct. Instead of listening, instead of letting them finish the arc of their own thinking, you cut in, correct, position. The truth is, even if you were right, you lost something. You turned a conversation into a contest. The wiser move is almost always to stay curious long enough for them to reach their own conclusion, or for you to discover you were wrong.
The impatience to escape hardship. You are building something. It takes longer than you expected. The results are not arriving on schedule. So you start cutting corners, or you pivot too early, or you simply give up. The hardship was not the problem. The impatience to be out of it was. Most meaningful outcomes live just on the other side of the point where impatience wins.
The impatience with boredom. Every significant pursuit has its tedious middle: learning a skill, completing a long project, building a relationship, developing a habit. All of them pass through stretches that feel unremarkable, even pointless. Impatience in these stretches is what kills most ambitions, not the difficult beginning or the uncertain end, but the boring, unglamorous middle.
The impatience with fate. Sometimes you are not fighting a person or a process. You are fighting time itself, circumstances you did not choose, a season of difficulty with no obvious exit. The danger here is severe. Either you collapse inward into depression, or you rage outward with misdirected force, burning through resources and relationships you will need when the season finally turns. The people who come through intact are almost always those who learned to wait actively: staying engaged, staying present, not forcing what is not yet ready to move.
Patience Is Not Passivity
“Patience” can sound like doing nothing. That’s not what I mean here. I want to be precise about something, because patience is often misread as surrender. I have seen unhesitantly declare me as a loser or coward because of the patience but I am experimenting life so never felt like contesting.
The patience I am describing is not resignation. It is not folding your hands and accepting whatever comes. It is the patience of the observer in Ashtavakra’s verse: fully present, fully aware, not grabbing at results, but not absent either.
The witness in the Ashtavakra Gita is not someone who has checked out of life. They are someone who has stopped confusing their identity with the noise of the moment. That is an extraordinarily active state. It takes more steadiness to watch without flinching than to react without thinking.
When I manage to find that steadiness, even briefly, something shifts. The conversation I was about to force into a fight resolves itself. The project I was about to abandon reveals a path forward. The difficult season I was about to panic over turns out to be shorter than it felt.
What I Keep Learning
Even after all this, I still find myself slipping back into impatience. Here’s what I keep rediscovering: by temperament, I am an impatient person. I’ve spent years learning to work with that, rather than pretending it isn’t there.
What Ashtavakra keeps reminding me, and what my own quiet experiment confirms, is that almost every mistake I regret traces back to the same root. Not to lack of talent, effort, or intention, but to the moment I stopped witnessing and started grasping.
The verse is impossible to perfect. But the attempt, I have found, is exactly where patience begins.