Patience is the Art of Hoping
May you be safe.
May you feel loved.
May you have hope that better days are coming.
-tinybuddha
As I thought about my theme for today, I kept coming back to patience. Maybe it's because when I stop throughout my day to think, I keep asking myself, "How can I get through this? How is this for me? Will this end? I know I can survive today and likely tomorrow, but can I survive weeks more of this?"
Today’s class will be centered on patience. As we continue our stay at home order, and the adrenaline has worn off, we are all certainly being called to lots of extra patience. As I sat down to think about patience in our yoga practice, I realized this is also a fitting theme for the season we are in. After a long winter, we anxiously await spring. Spring however, comes in its own time, the cold days become less and less frequent, the darkness turns bit more to light, and the buds begin to form. So how can we take a cue from nature at this most difficult time, and find patience within us as we go through our day to day and in our yoga practice?
-Holding on through the tough times, knowing it will get better. Part of being patient is holding onto HOPE that better days are ahead.
-By being patient we aren’t resisting what’s happening in our lives right now, we’re moving through it.
-Patience is a form of presence, noticing the little moments, the small joys, and reminding yourself that this is part of your journey but not the whole journey.
-When we don’t know where we’re headed we can make the choice to focus on what could go wrong, OR we could focus on what could go right.
-Allow yourself to enjoy the things that are going right. So often we don't fully allow ourselves to embrace the positive parts of our day.
In our yoga practice tonight, we’ll work with being patient with ourselves in our poses, finding the breath in transitions between poses, and we’ll end with a few restorative poses with longer holds to use our breath as our anchor.
Throughout your week, I hope that you allow yourself to feel emotions as they arise but with an underlying sense that this too shall pass.