Watching Impatience Patiently

Have you ever observed your own emotions and asked yourself why you are feeling this way? Take impatience for example, why do you feel impatient right now? Impatience means that you don’t want to experience what life has to offer at the present time. You get anxious and wish it could be over with. As soon as you get impatient, you are not "here and now". You get impatient when you have to do something that you are not so familiar with, or because you have to do something which you dislike. You also get irritable when you have to interact with people you don't care for.

Be friend with your feeling and just accept it. When you are one with your impatience and when you truly observe what is going on, your negative feeling will vanish. Impatience is looking down from a higher plane on something or someone and judge them. Yet, spirituality is not that way. Everything that is in your life is here to help you to become one with it. So next time when that feeling arises in you, remember this note and just observe what's going on beneath the surface. You might still feel restless; you might still feel irritable, but for the first time you accept the situation you are in as a learning opportunity to transcend.

We picked impatience as as an example, but this method really applies to any emotion that demonstrates that you are "out of it". Life is here to help you and to show you who you truly are. So just be aware when you do not feel at peace in the "here and now". As the saying go, either be here now or be nowhere! Feelings and emotions are there to alert you. Whenever serenity, joy and love have been replaced by something else, look for the spiritual insight to help you to reconnect to the Way. Perhaps you are just overworked; perhaps you need to step out of the negative energy field of others. Perhaps your ego has again gotten the upper hand. 

Feelings and emotions come and go just like clouds in the autumn wind. The trick is to let them go without standing in the Way. Impatience, just like any other negative feeling, vanishes with mindfulness. Just watch impatience patiently and see it disappear.

By Christian and Su Zhen