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Patience

Marilyn Young

This week when I asked what messages Spirit had for you, they again came in with one word – patience. At first, I thought they were asking me to be patient and wait for the answer to come. However, when the word was repeated several times with no further offer of a topic, I realized the topic for this week is patience! So here is the question about that topic – how big of a role does patience play in your life and why does it have the magnitude that it does? Do you find yourself constantly being challenged to be patient or do people describe you as “having the patience of a saint”? Let’s take a closer look at this big life lesson that so many are working through right now.


What is Patience?


Let’s start with defining patience just to make sure we are all on the same page. As most of

you would agree, I am sure, patience is the act of being patient and patient is defined as the following:


  • “bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint”

  • “manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain” (i.e. enacting leniency or not enforcing something even when under duress)

  • “not hasty or impetuous”/ impulsive

  • “steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity”


Do any of those definitions describe you when you are being patient? Does the reverse of the definitions describe you when you fail to be patient?


Patience has also been described as a virtue or desirable quality to have. The sentiment of “Patience is a virtue” goes far back to an epic poem written in the fifth century which told the story of the “Battle of Spirits or Soul War” with vice and virtue pitted against each other. Patience is said to be a virtue in the Christian tradition along with chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, and humility all of which are said to counter the deadly sins.

Have you developed the virtue of patience? In this physical world on our planet at this time we have so many opportunities to practice patience every day. For example, you cannot be hasty or impetuous if you are caught up in a traffic jam or a long line up at a grocery store or are waiting for a parcel to arrive in the mail. You may have the opportunity to sit calmly even though you might be in an uncomfortable position and listen to someone passionately tell a long-winded story without rushing them to “get to the point.” You may decide to repeat an explanation to a child about why they should not behave in a certain way versus disciplining them. You maintain your spiritual beliefs and state them calmly and confidently despite someone arguing against them or ridiculing you for having them. Do any of these situations sound familiar? How many times in a day or week do you wait to procure an item or reach a destination? How often do you wait for something you are involved with to come to completion? How often do you repeatedly try to reach a goal before giving up? How long have you waited for someone to see your viewpoint?


How Patient are You?


Do you “have the patience of a saint” which means you can wait and/or maintain your stand despite huge challenges with timing and opposition?  If patience is not an issue for you, then you have mastered it! You have found the secret to letting go of expected timelines and outcomes and trust that both will be just perfect for you. You are the person who is not ruffled by tardiness. You are seen as flexible and gracious when plans go awry. You are not stressed by deadlines or schedules. You understand everything happens for a reason. Awesome!


If you are challenged to be patient, you have chosen to learn a life lesson in patience during this lifetime. We can be challenged to learn the lesson in so many ways. Which situations present to you that create a difficulty or discomfort for you? Does the situation involve timing or understanding? Does it involve health? Do you need to be patient with your body and its healing regarding timing and how it heals? I remember just over a year ago now, when my body persisted in painful symptoms for months no matter what I tried to do to heal it. Finally surrendering to allow my body to follow the path it needed to, I started to heal. Do you need patience when working towards better physical shape – is it happening on your expected timeline? Do you need patience with how your body responds to food or how it responds to weight loss or gain strategies you are trying?  


Does your lesson in patience involve wealth or career? Are you tired of waiting for business to pick up? Are you impatient with your supervisors or colleagues who don’t see the “big picture” like you do no matter how hard you try to show it to them? I can recall several times in my nursing career when I found strategies very simple and reasonable to address a problem, but my supervisors could not see the same vision I had. I had to exercise extreme patience (and diplomacy) to continue to explain and wait until they “got it.”


Perhaps relationships are teaching you a lesson in patience. Do you need more patience

when explaining your point of view on something that your partner does not agree with? Are you tired of waiting for a child to reach their next developmental milestone? In my work I saw many parents impatient and frustrated with their lack of progress with establishing breastfeeding. It was only when they developed patience and calm that they and their baby could focus on what was needed to be done to succeed. Do you get impatient with a disabled relative with cognitive impairment who askes you the same question repeatedly within an hour timespan? Are you impatient with authorities who take extended periods of time to follow through on policy?


Most importantly, are you impatient with yourself perhaps because you have not met a deadline or yet accomplished a goal? I have several friends who are currently in a “holding pattern” in the development of their spiritual gifts or seeing the next steps on their spiritual path. They are impatient and anxious to move forward but are unable to. Spirit has a reason to keep them where they are and so they are currently exploring that. Does any of this sound familiar to you?


When you are struggling with patience, how do you respond to the situations or people that ask you to be patient? When you “lose your patience” do you become angry, disappointed, depressed, anxious, sad, hopeless, resentful, or blaming? These responses are common lower vibrational reactions and will attract more situations to keep you in that lower vibration until you understand how to climb out and into better situations.


How Do You Develop Patience?


When you have patience you have a calm acceptance of the Universe’s plan, its timing, and that it is in your highest good. In our fast-paced world however, it is often difficult to have patience when technology creates an environment where we need to work and live faster, harder, and keep to strict timelines.  Dealing with TIME seems to be one of the biggest keys to developing patience. I remember when my four children were younger, I was working more than full time travelling an hour each way to work and back every day, often rushing from one patient to the next, then rushing home to cook dinner for the family, do homework with the kids, get them settled into bed, then settle into several hours on my laptop to catch up on work tasks that I had no time for during that day. If my family had an issue that took more time, I did have patience for that because they are my ultimate priority. However, aside from them, if anything or anyone interrupted my plan on getting through the day, I became impatient because I did not feel I had the time to deal with it and it was delaying the timing of everything else following it.


In fact, I was such a prisoner of time, I used to joke that the song “I’m In A Hurry” by Alabama surely had to be my theme song. As I often belted out the lyrics on my drive home, I thought they perfectly described me and the life I was buried in:


CHORUS

“I’m in a hurry to get things done.

Oh, I rush and rush until life’s no fun.

All I really gotta do is live and die.

But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.

 

VERSE 1

Don’t know why I have to drive so fast.

My car has nothing to prove.

It’s not new,

But it’ll do zero to sixty in five point two.

 

VERSE 2

Can’t be late, I leave in plenty of time.

Shaking hands with the clock

I can’t stop.

I’m on a roll and I’m ready to rock.

 

VERSE 3

Oh, I hear a voice

That says I’m running behind.

Better pick up my pace.

It’s a race and there ain’t no room for someone in second place.”

 

With running such tight timelines every day, I saw my situation as needing more patience but was at a loss as to how to do that. Then one day I really listened to the lyrics of the song. The whole song talked about always being in a rush, a prisoner of time and not even knowing why! I suddenly realized I could have control of my life and not the clock. I remembered that my whole life I have believed everything happens for a reason and so I embraced that belief whole heartedly again. If things occurred that before I saw as annoying interruptions to my day, I now considered them put there for a reason and putting aside my self-induced pressure from time, I patiently addressed the issue. (Later, the last line of the third verse gave me a clue as to why I was running so hard and fast. The underlying issue was my lack of self worth – but that is a story for a different newsletter!)


So, in creating patience, the first thing we need to develop is a different perspective on is TIME. If we remember that we create our own reality with our beliefs, thoughts, and feelings then we can create a life where we have the perfect amount of time to do whatever we want to do. If we believe we will always have enough time, we can create patience for anything that requires what we might perceive as delayed timing. We also need to remember that everything happens on Divine timing for our greatest good. In other words, we have planned this lifetime, complete with timelines, before we arrived on the planet. Because we created the plan for this lifetime as a child of the Divine to learn the lessons we needed for our soul growth, we can trust that the timing of everything is in our highest good. So, when we are waiting for something to happen at the perfect time, we can be calm and patient knowing that the timing is for our highest good.


The second package of things to address when learning patience is ASSUMPTIONS, EXPECTATIONS, and OUTCOMES. When we enter a situation where we have certain expectations for a specific outcome based on assumptions we have made, we are setting ourselves up for a lesson in patience. If we look back to my work example, I assumed that no one else could take on any of the things I had on my plate each day and so I expected myself to keep up a pace to get through everything – patients seen and problems resolved; children fed, homework completed and in bed on time; emails answered, documents read, written and submitted, etc. It took me a long time to even recognize this pattern I was in and then to let go of the assumptions. I didn’t need to see every patient. I could delegate some of the files to my staff. I didn’t need to be the one to always cook dinner and help with homework. My husband was more than capable and willing. Letting go of the assumptions, I could reach out for help and release the unrealistic expectations I had of myself, and the outcomes would have been the same or even better. This would give me the room for patience. Looking back, this seems so simple, but while I was in this repeating cycle, I was a poor student and admittedly never fully learned from it except in hindsight. So, I acknowledge that not making assumptions and releasing expectations and outcomes can be a very difficult task. The key is to start with awareness and reach out for help.


What Good Does Patience Serve?


Why do we have life lessons in patience? Why do we want to learn patience? Because it is a virtue? Perhaps… PATIENCE CREATES SPACE FOR LOVE. When we are exercising patience, we are calm, lenient, unhurried, and strong but not oppositional. With patience we greet the gap in timing with love, knowing that everything happens in Divine timing. When we are allowing ourselves or someone else to learn or complete something at their own pace, we are doing it out of love and respect for their individual timeline.


Patience CREATES SPACE FOR SELF CARE. When we are asked to be patient, we are often being asked by the Universe to slow down our pace of living especially if we have been overserving others. Patience gives us the space to do other things than what we are waiting for and those other things will serve us well. Those other things may be simply giving us time to be present. It also gives us the space and time to go within, to reconnect with our higher self, or simply to rest.


Patience CREATES SPACE FOR BECOMING THE OBSERVER. As we practice being calm and patient, we may discover something right under our nose (metaphorically speaking) that we have been searching for or wanting to learn about for a long time. While practicing patience we can step back from our current reality and observe the information and experiences coming in to help us with our life lessons. We can gain a new perspective and understanding to help us move forward. We can examine the reason things are not happening as we thought they would; we can check into the reason for why there are happening as they are. This might lead us to reset our priorities in life.


Patience and Our Spiritual Growth


Many people right now are experiencing a life lesson in patience especially related to their spiritual growth. As the world is evolving so quickly around us some feel they are in a “holding pattern” and are being asked by Spirit to be patient about moving forward. This can be happening for a few reasons. The person may have come through a lot of trauma or intense learning and simply needs the time to recover and develop a deep understanding of what they have experienced. The person may need the time to gain perspective and appreciation for how far they have come. They may need to physically rest after body

changes brought to them through the ascension process. As they evolve and change, they may need time to get used to recent changes in themselves and in their relationships.


Patience is also required for our spiritual growth while the Universe lines up our next encounters and experiences which we had planned before we arrived here. Spirit is always listening, and they will help bring in the experiences we want to grow. However, we do need to remember that there is no such thing as time on the other side. So, what we might expect to occur in a few days has no meaning to Spirit unless we specifically include a timeline in our request of them. Even then, the timeline that will be honoured is the one that serves our highest interest. Patience also gives us the ability to appreciate and respect the timelines that others may have to proceed with their growth to “get on the same page as us.”


So, as you move forward in your life lesson of patience, know that everything is happening on Divine timing and is serving your highest good. Take the space that patience creates to reconnect with your light as completing this life lesson helps it grow brighter.


Sending you love and light,

Marilyn

 

Resources


If you would like to learn more about the topics discussed in this newsletter, here are a few resources I have found helpful:


Website


 

Photo Sources


Photos created by with Canva


Intuitive Counselling and Angel Card Readings

 

If you have the need for a helping hand with developing patience, I am offering intuitive counselling, angel card readings, and angel numerology readings online or in person (in Calgary).


 

 

 

 

 

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Unknown member
May 13, 2024

Marilyn, this article is such a great topic! And of course it arrived in my in box with perfect timing. Thank you for this great lesson on patience. 💜

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