The gift of Patience

Patience.

There is something special about cultivating patience. To me, patience is a more challenging quality to cultivate, because it requires me to invest and wait without gaining any result right away.

And it’s not necessarily the lack of  immediate results that is challenging for me, but rather the time in between the action and the result that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. What do I do when I’m not doing? What do I do when I’m not performing?

Help. I don’t know.

For the past few years, I’ve been on a Soul retrieval journey. I spent my days healing my wounds and remembering what/who I am underneath the physical layer. With this journey, a lot of changes came. They were gradual changes, but profound and lasting ones. I found more purpose and creativity and I started to build the life I had always dreamed of.

Now, a couple of years later, I feel like a new cycle of change has started. And even though I have experienced that profound change takes time, I find myself feeling uncomfortable with the pace of this new cycle once again. It feels slow. Maybe even slower than the previous cycle. It requires more stillness and more patience. And that makes me feel uncomfortable, because the part of myself that is used to getting things done, is not behind the steering wheel anymore. A deeper, more wise part is. And I have to wait a lot longer than expected for the things I want.

I used to look at patience as a bother, as a ‘not so important’ quality, as something that was lower on the priority list. But lately life has been asking me to re-evaluate my relationship with patience. It’s been asking me to see the value of it and to use it to my benefit. It’s asking me to stop over-achieving and to see the time where all I can do is wait, as a golden time to rest, nourish and replenish.

Patience comes with waiting. With silence. With moments where nothing seems to be happening and nothing needs to be done. The work is done, the seeds are planted, and the results of my efforts will only come when they are ready to come. As someone who loves to keep busy, the silence can be quite confronting. It reveals the part of myself  that doesn’t want to stop performing, that can’t stop doing. I was always looking for the next thing to do, the next thing to achieve, but patience is showing me that a flower doesn’t grow faster if you give it more water. A flower grows in its own pace, and it doesn’t need to do anything in the meantime to grow quicker.

It just waits and it grows.

When I realized that this is what life is trying to teach me about patience, I started seeing the gift it carries. And this made me feel a lot more peaceful. I started realizing that my dreams will all come true in due time. And that sometimes, all I can do is wait. And I can spend the times of waiting differently. I can stop pushing and getting bothered that things don’t go as fast as I’d like them to go. It won’t bring me any closer to where I want to be anyway. Things only happen divinely timed when the wiser part of yourself is in charge. It serves no purpose to drown my flowers with more water than they need. So during these times of silence and patience, where no aligned action is needed from my side, I can choose to spend my time doing things that are nourishing for me, things that I like. I can get creative, spend some extra time on cooking a nourishing meal, and so on.

As I write these words, autumn is around the corner and I feel the importance of what this lesson of patience is trying to teach me for the seasons that are about to come. I can enjoy the stillness that comes when I stop doing; and surrender to the act of waiting. I can see the value of the space where ‘nothing needs to be done’ in between the moments of aligned action a little better now. It’s a valuable, golden gift of life where I can rest, nourish myself and enjoy the act of waiting.

After years of resisting patience and not understanding its value, I now understand its gift a little better. What a blessing to have to wait a little longer sometimes. The fruit only gets sweeter.

I hope my story inspires you and that you enjoyed reading it.

With lots of love and a little more patience than yesterday,

Light Of Lynn