Firstly I'd like to say thank you for your 'W0nd3r' posts. They are always thoughtful and inspiring. Something that I'm constantly being tested on is Patience. Patience with others, myself, and all areas of life. I'd like to hear your views on this topic?
Thanks
Dear Jess,
First of all thanks again for your kind words and your excellent question.
It's interesting that you asked this because I am not a very patient person :)
I believe each one of us has specific life lessons we have to face, things which keep coming back again and again in different disguises until we see the patterns and learn the lessons. Patience is DEFINITELY one of my life lessons.
That is the one thing I have found that cures impatience - non-judgmental awareness.
There are three things that come to mind which will hopefully help illustrate what I mean:
1) Acceptance as Patience
A few months back I found the audiobook of Eckhart Tolle's Practising the Power of Now on YouTube (it has since been removed) and I must have been in the right space for it because it really hit home.
I began to notice how often my mind resists what is. It's one thing to decide we are going to change something and take positive action. However mentally pushing against things which we cannot control or the behaviour of other people when we either have no business controlling it or influencing it is a waste of energy. And arguably stupid.
"When you accept what is, every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment."
Eckhart Tolle, Practising the Power of Now
Once I accepted this idea however it was both a blessing and a curse. It meant that if I had integrity then I could no longer get frustrated over all that stuff which part of me loves ranting about (eg the rubbish on tv, the rubbish on the radio, the rubbish in newspapers etc) ACCEPTANCE or ACTION. The answer is so simple. Simple but not easy...
It's a sunny Saturday morning in July and I'm awoken at 7am by the ear-splitting sound of an upstairs neighbour drilling. I've only had 3 hours sleep and I'm not nice when I'm tired, my habitual knee-jerk mental reaction in these cases is to think: "What the $£!&% is wrong with that woman???" but then a pattern-interrupt happened...I remembered Eckhart's words, I remembered the conversation I'd had with Audra about acceptance the day before. And I let go. I let go of my frustration, I let go of my judgment of the drilling as bad. I let go and allowed the jarring sound to just be without adding any interpretation to it...it was still loud, in fact it seemed to get louder at first as I went into it but then I began to find a strange sense of ease within it. I wasn't free of the sound but I was free of my mind fighting against it and that was strangely liberating. I lay in bed smiling with my eyes still closed. 5 minutes later the drilling stopped and I felt great, I'd passed the Patience Test this time.
NB. I realised it was either leave the warmth of my bed and go upstairs or accept it so I decided to accept it, but if it had continued on for much longer I'd have been up there...
I discussed this acceptance business with my friend Paul and sent him the link to Practising the Power of Now and a week later he was cursing me over the phone - since he decided to focus on acceptance Life had thrown him numerous people and situations to get on his last nerve.
"When you ask for patience God gives you a long line." Anonymous
"When you ask for patience God gives you a long line." Anonymous
A few days later Paul wrote this: #35 - Acceptance Part 1: The Poetic Paradox by Paul Jones
2) Acceptance as Love
I often say my girlfriend was sent to me to teach me patience. It sounds like a bad joke from a stand-up but I've come to realise it's just one of many things she was sent to teach me. The two of us share certain core values which make us a good match and yet we are SO different in some ways that it often tests her patience and mine.
What hit me like a ton of bricks around this same time that I was focused on acceptance was how much more she accepts me than I accept her. I realised how often I'd try to correct her or want her to be interested in the things I read or study. I thought about how I am this complex, eccentric loner at the core and an absolute nightmare to live with but she just allows me to be. And I realised there and then that if I don't accept her fully then I don't love her do I? So while I know I have taught her a lot of things I realised that she has taught me how to love someone. And what could be more spiritual than that?
My ego quite likes the idea of being this super-spiritual, highly evolved being so it's good when I have experiences like these which humble me and send me to the back of the classroom.
3) Self-acceptance
How do you love yourself? Ralph Smart says to love yourself is to simply accept yourself fully. I think that is very true - again simple but not the easiest thing in the world. I can't say I'm there yet but what I have noticed is that the more I accept myself the more acceptance and patience I have for others. Automatically. To that I would also add that I have learned that keeping my word, particularly to myself is crucial in terms of self-respect and self-image.
Has this been useful Jess? Please let me know how well this has answered your question (on a scale of 0-10) and feel free to contact me if there is anything else you'd like to ask.
I sometimes feel like I'm in the dark as to whether what I'm writing is going to connect so I really enjoyed being able to tailor a piece to a specific person and query. Thanks.
I've left some links below to stuff that has helped me with acceptance/patience - I've featured most of them in previous posts.
If anyone else has any questions please email me at sterling.to@gmail.com or leave a message in the contact form to the left, If I can't answer your question I'll do my best to find someone who can.
Dx
-Link to The Art of Effortless Living by Ingrid Bacci - AMAZING book, everyone I know that has read it has got something out of it. The inspiration for (#20, #21, #25)
"Intense presence is needed when certain situations trigger reactions with a strong emotional charge, such as when your self image is threatened, a challenge comes into your life that triggers fear, things go wrong or an emotional complex from the past is brought up. In those instances the tendency is for you to become unconscious. The reaction or emotion takes you over, you become it, you act it out. You justify, make wrong, attack, defend, except that it's not you it's the reactive pattern, the mind in its habitual survival mode. Identification with the mind gives it more energy, observation of the mind withdraws energy from it."
Eckhart Tolle, Practising the Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle, Practising the Power of Now
No comments:
Post a Comment