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Practicing Patience

As we stay with something, an idea, a person, ourselves, we start to understand an allow it. Staying power and the practice of patience requires some skill.

At my yoga retreats I do a tantric eye gazing practice where we look into each other’s eyes for 5 minutes. We find that after a few minutes the external tension and layers of judgement and conditioning fall away, and we can see the perfection of God in another. So then, we can see it in ourselves.

I went to a spiritual lecture on the yoga sutras this past weekend. Immediately I had a bias and judgment about the teacher because well, he was not the teacher that I had come to love and know that I had moved away, and he could never be. I wanted to leave. Thoughts ran through my mind of asking for a refund. But, knowing that my mind is not always right, I decided to stay and sit and see if perhaps there is something that I can learn here.

Sure enough, by the end of the lecture, I loved the man.

He also had a wonderful technique of teaching where all of us contributed and we sort of fleshed out the ideas that he presented. To do this it required that he held space, and we stayed with the topic maybe a little bit longer than other kinds of lectures. By doing this, everyone in the group was engaged, and we made the truth he was presenting our own. This took some patience, some staying power, as well as some ability to hear opinions that might not necessarily align with our own.

I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Whereas my mind wanted me to leave in the very beginning, by choosing to stay and recognizing that my mind isn’t always right, I was able to have a very rich experience.

The same is true for my relationship with my husband. I wanted to run away so many times, and actually in the beginning I did. But there came a point where I decided to stay and see what happened. I pushed my judgments to the side, and there are many because at that time I was very harshly judging myself. And now here I am married, and we have both grown so our spirits are intertwined, we understand and love ourselves, and as I have stayed with him, I have learned how to stay with myself and accept myself more deeply.

This is a skill. Patience is a skill. Especially for an addict in recovery, we are not used to sitting with our feelings, we are not used to sitting in the fire. We want to just fast forward and get to the end part.

There is a perfection to you under the layers as you stay with yourself you release the stuck energy and see yourself the way you truly are.

Namaste

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