Hurry up and wait. It might sound like a humorous oxymoron, yet in our hyper-connected world perhaps it’s truer than not.
Here’s an example – have you ever had someone send you a text message and a couple minutes later they call you to see if their message was received? Or maybe you caught yourself getting frustrated after waiting a minute for a webpage to load.
It seems that our patience threshold has lessened as life has sped up. If you think about it, practicing patience can really help to reduce a lot of stress in our lives.
Impatience can have great costs. Not only does the stress caused by impatience erode our health and well-being, but it has other consequences too.
Impatience can lead to things such as: miscommunications because someone is only half listening and feeling pulled to the next moment; poor decisions because hurried ambition overrides our intuitive discernment; disconnection with others because judgment, anger and other byproducts of impatience can preclude our true care and the higher expression of our heart.
A good way to practice increasing our patience is to start with the common day-to-day events; the long lines at the store, being put on hold during a phone call, traffic jams and no cell phone reception. These common occurrences are opportunities to exercise our practice of patience.
Try this Heart-Focused Breathing™ technique from HeartMath, as a quick and simple way to reset whenever you start to feel impatient.
- Focus your attention in the area of the heart.
- Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
Tip: Inhale 5 seconds, exhale 5 seconds (or whatever rhythm is comfortable).
A great resource we can recommend for learning simple exercises to increase patience and ease is the new book, Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart.
The practice of patience allows us to approach situations with more care, kindness and understanding- the very attributes that make life enjoyable.
