Patience: Our Best and Dearest Friend

I am learning that a big part of my heart's work is cultivating deeper patience. My heart's been aching deeply, restless yet hopeful in her longing. Author and poet Alex Elle writes "as we wait for the downpour to cease and new light to emerge, patience is our best and dearest friend." I noticed recently that I've overlooked the potential for friendship with patience. My struggle with befriending patience is rooted in my desire to secure love, to know certainty, to get things done, and to be efficient. But these are fear based desires of the egoic mind. Feeling impatient can come from things not happening in expected, linear ways. As humans, we don't acknowledge enough that sometimes to take steps forward, we have to pause, slow down, or even take steps backwards or sideways. Not practicing patience imprisons our mind in its stories, keeps us from possibility, and takes us away from trusting our inner knowing. 

Learning more about patience as one of the paramitas, the perfections, of a Bodhisattva, it's become clearer to me that patience is worth practicing in order to see the light of sunshine come through again and again. Cultivating patience means deepening trust with what's unseen and unknown. Patience allows us to see clearly the truth of the moment, to be with it tenderly, accepting what is without wanting things to be different. Some unfoldments occur slowly, begging us to be patient, to give space, to love abundantly from afar, and to pay close attention to ourselves and those we care for deeply. These may be some of the sweetest unfoldments, and they will take however long they take. 

While I'm ready for the new light to emerge, as Alex Elle says, I am still learning how to dance in the rain.