I hope you are well and enjoying the summer. For todays post, I wanted to focus on the topic of patience. Most of my students and clients often ask me, “How can I become more patient?” Patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. Impatience, the opposite of patience is a flavor of anger. I wrote about the various flavors of anger several weeks back. When we listen and honor our impatience, we can sense what is at the root of it. Impatience arises for all types of reasons, but often it is because we are expecting a certain outcome or goal to happen faster than it actually is. Do any of these sound familiar?
- You are stuck in traffic and really want to get to where we are going.
- You have a deadline that we have been told needs to happen today, but there is a hold up.
- Your vacation is just around the corner, just 2 more days, but we can’t wait to get there.
- You have committed to too many things and haven’t been realistic about how long each task for responsibility takes.
“Why am I always in such a rush?” This was a thought I often asked myself, especially when I found that I was rushing to a yoga or even a meditation class to slow down, pretty ridiculous, right? 🙂
Patience is a quality I have been growing more and more in my life and I find it such a gem. May these exercises be supportive to you.
Patience Exercise
Bring to mind or write down a situation where you felt impatient toward someone. Were you responding only to the incident at hand or can you trace contributing factors that might have helped lead to impatience? Were you late to something? Unable to find a parking spot? Were there consequences for you or the other person based on your impatience? How do you feel about what happened?
Now imagine yourself, going into the same situation with more flexibility, calmness, and let go of needing to get something, just be. When we can let go of the goal or expectation and be with what is, we often can have an even better result. Our world needs patience. We need caregivers, parents, friends, spouses, and most importantly leaders who are patient. Patience is the wisdom of compassion to the moment at hand. A sledgehammer is not the best tool for most situations in life. Every person I have come to encounter in my life (including myself) is much more sensitive and fragile on the inside than we realize, “He might be hard to get along with at first, but once you get to know him more, you’ll find he’s really a kind and soft person on the inside. The prickly pear is tough and thorny on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside. A compassionate, direct, yet gentle encouragement often works best.
As a way to support growing more patience, we have to set our lives up so we create conditions that foster more self care and slowness. When we are investing in our well being we have so much more to give and can relax our expectations and pace for the moment we are in. How are you taking care of you?
Have a healthy and happy summer,
Carley
PS- I am always open and interested in supporting this community the best way I can, if you have topics or questions that you would like me to write about, reply here and I will do my best to answer them on the next blog.
