Hello

What happens when you need more patience?

This is a crisis situation in relationships and parenting.  It’s Not a life or death kind of crisis, but it is a potential reaction habit patterns and un-mindful choices kind of crisis.

This kind of crisis event is such a great opportunity for changing your patterns and for creating innovation, if you can just stop and not react.

Practicing mindfulness activities everyday will help to give you think time to not react.  Remember what they are?  Yoga, meditation, focused breathing, and slowing down communication so that it’s not jumping from habit reaction to habit reaction.

But then once you can stop yourself from reacting the next step is to figure out what the best action is for the situation.  This requires figure-ground understanding of the whole picture and a degree of paradigm shifting to create an innovative change in action or behavior.

I have been talking about de-stressing how you live which includes nutrition, exercise, hydration, and sleep.  I think it’s hard to wrap your brain around how these obviously physical issues de-stress your thinking because they don’t logically seem connected.  Our logic tends to compartmentalize things into groups; and body-needs and thinking-needs don’t get sorted into the same group.

Spirit, mind and body are interconnected.  Being rundown physically can exacerbate an already difficult situation.  Just as feeling burned out can make a person feel lethargic and fatigued.

When you are stressed cognitively and/or physically is when you need more patience but have less; laughter and singing or just changing the mood of a situation increases your access to breath and then because of your mindfulness can really increase your own availability to patience.  And, having a mindful routine in your life helps to keep your body de-stressed and increases the level of patience available to you.

How to change the mood when you are at the end of your rope requires a deep level of mindfulness; an ability to actually see the figure ground from inside.  That’s one of the hardest perspectives.  It requires a kind of 3-D perspective from the inside out and an ability to step outside yourself while containing what’s going on inside yourself.

This is an internal paradigm shift that allows for a personal re-balancing.  Once you have done this, then you can see more clearly a path to the best action to the situation.

You have to personally re-balance before you can see and do that.  So patience is an outcome to all these actions.  It’s not that you need patience to get to mindfulness – it’s that you need mindfulness to get to patience.

Seeing more clearly allows the best course of action to present itself.

Try catching yourself in the act of needing more patience and see how you can both align with your frustration while turning that frustration on its head through a 180 degree shift in perspective.  If you know you are physically stressed – Just stop – See if you can get some food, water, sleep, exercise on board before you take an action.

You’ aren’t denying the situation you’re trying to view it differently.  It’s the adage of getting the same result when you do the same thing – to get a different result you can describe the thing differently therefore redefining it, or you can do a different thing to get a different result.  Mindfulness, figure-ground, paradigm shifting are required for both of these.

Try to catch yourself before you react and if you have the presence of mind just laugh and see if that doesn’t shift the situation.  (A great hint that you may be out of balance is if you have lost your sense of humor!)

See you tomorrow.

Beth