“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?” – Tao Te Ching
Whenever I’m creating a new guided meditation, it gives me the opportunity to work with my own experiences with the subject matter. I had plenty of time to explore my experience with impatience last week – with a stomach bug that is going around – that’s for sure. I was trying to rush things and trying to move a little too fast before my body was ready… until I realized that I could just “breathe myself back
to this moment” and not worry so much about the future. This helped me relax and get back into the natural flow of my life and let my body heal naturally. I notice when we’re impatient, we are really just trying to make things different or better than they are.
When we want to change our lives in some way, we tend to focus a lot on the future – how awesome it’s going to be when we reach that goal. We look to that immediate result. It’s like when we’re riding a bicycle… we’re always pedaling past the present moment. Say we want to go from Southie to Cape Cod… we’re in Southie, but our attention is really focused on how great it will be when we get to the Cape. We feel that things will be so much better when we get to the Cape, so we push and try to pedal as fast as we can to get away from Southie.
Our present moment patience is also constantly being hijacked by our smart phones, autopilot choices, and our knee jerk reactions to the speed of our lives. We constantly react to stressful situations and become way too ridged and inflexible in our choice making ability. Mindfulness can help us drop down into the actual feelings that are there, so we can reflect and get a sense of what’s really going on. Using the breath as our anchor, we breathe ourselves back to the moment. This helps us disconnect from that reactive panic button that we all have, and frees up a little space – allowing more thoughtful and creative choices to bring us back to the moment. Be patient… this takes time.
The next time you feel impatient, check in with your body. What do you feel? Chances are you’ll feel some irritation. Let yourself be with that. You might find that “breathing yourself back to the present moment” helps. Take a moment for yourself to recognize that your life can become your meditation if you choose to approach it with this kind of awareness.
As we move into next week, I put the challenge out there for all of us to meditate for 10 minutes every morning and anytime throughout the day you feel impatient – work on enduring the present moment by “breathing yourself back to the moment”!
I hope this helps!