End Impatience Now

Patience is faith in living in the present moment, without pushing or forcing anything to happen. Patience is accepting things as they are, but this requires some clarification.

Things are not the way you think things are. People are not who you think they are. You are not who you think you are. Your child is not who you think your child is.

Your thoughts give you a representation of reality, like photos. Your child is not your photo of your child. Your life is not your photo of a scene in your life. You are not your photo. This goes without saying. Yet, we don't live this way until we experience a most significant level of awakening.

Your emotional reactions occur in reaction to your mental representations of reality. When you feel angry or impatient with your child or your mate, you feel that way in response to something you are thinking or imagining about your child or your mate. When you feel impatient with any condition in your life, you feel that way in response to something you think or imagine about that condition.

Basically, an impatient reaction expresses a belief about reality. So your belief causes your impatience, not your child, your mate or your life. When you feel stressed out over how much time something or someone is taking, your belief makes you feel that way.

Believing is an activity. It is something that you do when you do it. You believe yourself into impatience. So the question is, "Does impatience pay?" How does it impact you? Since it is a condition that you give to yourself, it makes no sense to give it to yourself unless it is constructive to do so.

The fact is that impatience hurts you physically. The stress of anxiety it causes harms your physical organism. If you have a health problem and experience much impatience, your health problem will worsen. If you are in the peak of health, feelings of impatience will cause or contribute to a deterioration of your healthy state.

Impatience also hurts you emotionally. You can only experience so much impatience before the frustration of it makes you feel increasingly angry and depressed. Impatience also leads to a lowering of self-esteem, because your inability to make things happen more quickly brings about feelings of inadequacy.

Impatience hurts your relationships because it makes you short-tempered, irritable, and insensitive toward the feelings of others. It blocks your ability to relate compassionately with others. This causes others to distance themselves from you, to feel an urge to retaliate and rebel against you.

Impatience also hurts those to whom you expose your impatient attitude. If you spend much time with someone who expresses much impatience toward you, you quite like lack self-confidence, which lowers your level of competence. Further more, since our feelings radiate to those around us, who then absorb some of what we feel, your impatience causes those around you to feel impatient, the stress of which imposes the same negative impact it has on you, including harm to their health, their happiness, and their ability to relate well with others.

We have thus far established four important facts, then, about impatience. First, you cause yourself to feel impatient; more specifically, your beliefs cause you to feel impatient. Second, your impatience impacts you in a destructive way. Third, you impatience impacts your relationships in a destructive way. Fourth, your impatience destructively impacts those you feel impatient toward and around.

Impatient parents, then, undermine their children's ability to feel and to function as well as possible. In other words, it slows their children down! Impatience slows down every process, because it lowers your level of functioning, which produces your results. The lower your level of functioning, the longer it takes to achieve the highest possible level of results.

You worsen whatever situation or relationship in which you feel impatient. To produce the highest level of results in any area as quickly as possible, relieve yourself of your impatience as quickly as possible. Replace patience with a calm, clear focus of your attention directed to the present moment. Patience provides you with the inner space to do this.

But as long as you believe that you feel impatient because of the pace of your child's action or the pace of life's delivery of your goals to you, patience remains beyond you. As long as you believe that impatience is helpful, necessary or responsible, you won't let it go. Another obstacle to freeing oneself from impatience is the unconsciousness of its presence. You can become so busy, so absorbed in the busy-ness of your life or thoughts that you don't even realize you feel impatient. So let us address each one of these obstacles and see how to overcome them.

We have already addressed the first one by making it clear that you cause yourself impatience through a belief that you hold. You believe your child should move more quickly and therefore feel impatient with his pace. You believe that your mate should already understand you and thus become impatient with him when he doesn't seem to get what you want him to. You believe that you need to improve your financial quickly more quickly than it changes and then feel impatient with it. In all these instances, you cause yourself your impatience by a belief that you hold onto.

Some of us are not ready to give up the beliefs that make them feel impatient. They believe that they need to feel impatient, that there is no other responsible way to be. But we have addressed this obstacle as well by pointing out how destructive impatience is. Impatience is unhealthy for you and for those you expose your impatience to, including your children. It causes you to function at a lower level, which means it hinders your ability to achieve the best results as quickly as you otherwise could have.

At some point you have to choose between your belief and your wellbeing. Focus your attention on how you feel in the present moment. The moment you feel impatience setting in, realize that you are doing this to yourself, you are making yourself feel this way, you are robbing this moment of the joy you could feel within it.

Patience equals joy. Patience means that you impose no pressure on yourself to function more quickly than you can in a peaceful, harmonious state. Patience frees you to feel the joy of life in the present moment. It frees your heart to open with compassion. It frees you to function in a healthy way and it frees others from the negative impact of your impatience. Patience is really the foundation of a healthy relationship.

When you feel impatient with another person, your relationship with that person has drifted into an unhealthy zone. This has nothing to do with that other person is doing. It has everything to do with how you are handling what that person is doing. Impatience is a negative, destructive habit, and you can free yourself from it, as long as you are willing to do it patiently.

The key to overcoming impatience is to overcome it patiently. Each time that you feel yourself growing impatient, don't fight against the feeling. Just allow it to be there. Try to avoid blaming your feeling on your situation or on any other person. When you feel impatient with your child, try to not blame your child for this feeling, if you can avoid doing so. Just look at the feeling. Be patient with it. Don't try to seize control of the situation to rid yourself of the feeling. Just let it be there.

In this way, by being patient with your feeling of impatience, you shift into patience. As your state of impatience softens or weakens through this practice, which it will, you will find your ability to release yourself from it growing stronger. You will find that you can relax your body, let go of the idea that you need yourself, your situation, your child to hurry up, and simply be present without pressure in the moment.

A crucial practice for patience to expand into your life is the practice of being aware of how you feel in the present moment. This requires directing a portion of your awareness onto your present feeling state. Often we habitually overlook our feelings, so this takes practice to develop. Notice how you feel right now. Do you notice any trace of impatience within you? The sooner you notice how you feel, the sooner you can make the necessary adjustments to feel at least somewhat better.

Entering patience is like exiting the constraints of time. You just live with your attention focused on your present experience, until you feel a sense of deep, harmonious connection with the present moment, with your life. Patience is truly life-giving, and the joy of life it gives you, you give to others through your presence with them.

When you feel patient with your child's progress, you avoid causing your child to feel insecure about himself. The child who feels secure about himself functions at a higher level than the child who feels insecure about himself. Nervousness lends itself to mistakes and mishaps. And yet, under the twisted spell of impatience, we react to our child in a way that is guaranteed to make the child more nervous, because we feel so nervous in our spell of impatience.

Patience relieves you of your conflict with time, with reality, with life. You stop telling yourself that things need to happen more quickly than they happen, and then you realize that they really do not have to happen any more quickly. This moment offers you the opportunity to enjoy your life, right here, right now.

In patience you eventually discover that no condition in life offers you any greater opportunity for happiness, fulfillment and a true feeling of success than the present moment. You lose your impatient eagerness for things to change because you realize that nothing ever really changes. Only the form changes, not the essence. Your ability to experience fulfillment equals your ability to live fully present in the now, without resisting or pushing.

Patience permits you to feel harmonious within. Inner harmony permits you to receive constructive perspectives that inspire faith, because your feelings attract your thinking. When you feel anxious, you can only think thoughts that reinforce your anxiety. When you feel impatient, you can only think thoughts that reinforce your feelings of impatience. So when you find yourself feeling any trace of impatience, try to not think. Focus your attention on the present moment instead of thinking about the past or the future. Try not to figure anything out when you feel impatience, because all you will be able to figure out is more reasons to feel impatient.

Allow the harmonious, balanced state of patience to be your sure foundation for thought, speech and action. Make a patient state of inner peace your first priority because it is only from that state that you can think, speak and act in a healthy and constructive way.

Patience relieves you of the feeling of desperation that impatience fills you with. Under the spell of impatience you believe you need things to change more quickly in order to relieve you of your desperation. But the longer you live in impatience the more desperate you feel. Your desperation leaves when you shift out of impatience and into patience.

Patience permits you to function with your optimum level of compassion, confidence and competence, and the influenced of it rubs off on others, helping them to function with similar grace, including your children.

To the extent that your child seems impatient, your child probably reflects your own condition, since we lead children by our example. The impatient parent creates the impatient child. To help your child function more patiently, pay closer attention to your own feelings throughout the day, on the alert lookout for any trace of impatience within you. When you feel it, apply the method you have learned here. First, just patiently and consciously experience the feeling of impatience. This will gradually weaken it, allowing you to let it go and return to a peaceful state of patience.

Complaining to your child about his impatience will do nothing to help him to become more patient, because complaining usually expresses impatience.

We may need to spend a bit more time in understanding why the belief that tells you things need to change more quickly is always wrong. The belief is wrong not only because it makes you feel wrong, and not only because it actually impedes your highest level of healthy functioning. It is wrong because it blinds you to what is actually happening right now, including your present opportunity for making the most of what is happening.

You are looking at fearful ideas and images in your mind instead of seeing how you are actually living in this moment. You imagine what you do not want to happen, which directs the creative power of your imagination to work on bringing it about.

You impact your body with your thoughts and feelings. Many of us are concerned about what we eat, how much we exercise, getting enough sleep, breathing fresh air, but we overlook the destructive impact of our nervousness upon our physical condition. Become aware of how your body feels right now. Try to relax a bit and see if you can intentionally feel harmonious, tranquil, positive feelings flowing through your body. Think of your body as a guitar, vibrating harmoniously as beautiful music is strummed on its strings. Relating with your body consciously in the present moment does much to keep it healthy and vibrant, and a health, vibrant body helps you to think more constructively and act more effectively.

Patience permits you to live, to function, to relate with positive power. Patience frees you from the false belief that you need to do more than you can right now, or do things more quickly than you can.

To make things as clear as possible, let's distinguish between patience and alacrity. Sometimes we need to act quickly to take advantage of an opportunity or to avoid a danger. However, all too often, we live in a rushed, impatient mode for no good reason. An occasional burst of speed proves helpful, but if sustained habitually over a long period of time, it becomes increasingly counter-productive and destructive.

Impatience is an inner, emotional state of nervousness not to be confused with a robust sprint. Impatience includes feelings of annoyance, dissatisfaction, resentment, frustration and fear. Those are its unhealthy parts. When impatience has you in its grips, deal with it patiently.

Impatience sucks the quality right out of life. It turns the present moment in a conflict, ruled by fear. You don't want to feel impatient, but under its influence you believe the only way out is to get things to speed up. But impatience slows things down. It slows people down. It increases the distance between you and happiness, between where you are and where you want to be.

Patient is how you feel when you are not at war with time. It's how you feel when you leave thoughts of the future and permit yourself to live in the present moment like a child. We usually associate impatience with childishness, and children do develop that trait as they lose their trust in being out of control. But the child teaches us the wisdom of true patience when she pauses on her path from the house to the car to gaze at a spider web in perfect stillness. The child teaches us how to live in the present moment, which is the only way to experience the joy of life. If you sacrifice the joy of life for any goal you give up the value of your life.

Nothing you accomplish in the future can provide you with more deep pleasure than the pleasure of connecting with this present moment with a child's awareness and openness. Just being where you are, consciously, soon reveals that here and now lies your path to fulfillment. Adults sacrifice the precious joy of simply being for the charade of happiness that a future acquisition or accomplishment promises.

The future may never happen, and the time you have left shortens to the extent that you live impatiently. Do you believe that you have to be impatient to be responsible? If so, you overlook the facts of impatience, how it ruins your health, wrecks your relationships, and harms others. The more impatient you feel, the less successful and the more unfulfilled you feel. Also, the less efficiently you really function.

Impatience wastes your energy in internal strife. Patience allows your energy to flow freely through your body, vitalizing your organism as a whole. Patience occurs as you let go of your attempt to force things forward to extent that you experience the frustration of resistance and delay.

In a patient state you are not imagining doom. You are not filling yourself with anxiety. You are able to live in love, which is not only fulfilling but perhaps equates with the ultimate level of life success. In a patient state, you don't have to make things happen. You can live in the fullness and freedom of what is happening.

Patience does not mean utter passivity. You can work for what you want in a patient manner or in an impatient manner. You can create your own destiny within the pleasure of patience or in the self-torture of impatience. It's up to you.

Dealing with an impatient person challenges us because human beings are contagious. In other words, his impatience can rub off on you, and the impatient person will do everything he can to make you as impatient as he is. He believes he wants you to move faster but what he really wants is for you to take his impatience from him. When dealing with an impatient person, there, remain self-aware. Pay extra close attention to how you feel. If you feel yourself growing impatient with her, stop trying to control her and focus instead on maintain your peace and poise. If you lose your peace, go through the experience as patiently as possible. Don't fear fear, anxiety, frustration, impatience. If you feel those conditions, feel them consciously, without resisting them or trying to get them over with in a hurry. If you feel impatient with impatience, be patient with that. Remember that to be patient simply means going through the present moment consciously, without trying force things to move more quickly than they move without your stress and strain.

Applying patience permits that process to progress at its best rate. You cannot rush learning, communicating, or doing any task without increasing the "friction" of conflict, resulting in a loss of energy and, ultimately, time.

Patience is really an expression of self-respect. Do you respect yourself enough to allow yourself to live in the peaceful, pleasurable delight of a harmonious, balanced connection with the present moment? Do you feel worthy of the love of life this present moment offers you? If not, be patient with that. If so, welcome home.