Planting Zen

This month I’m choosing to focus on the virtue of patience both in my personal and professional life. Patience is defined as, ‘the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.’ To me, this seems to focus on the idea that acceptance/surrendering cultivates patience and brings peace to the Self. So…to expand on this – Whatever is happening in the moment is neutral; neither good or bad. Our mind creates the reactions, the emotions, the judgements, & the attachments to ideas that certain things make you feel certain ways. Getting swept up in the tidal waves of these things is extremely easy if you don’t regularly practice yoga, and even if you do it can still feel really challenging to resist this emotional undercurrent.

I strongly feel practicing patience with your Self should be the first step in working with this virtue. Understanding and accepting where you’re at in your own journey will help to plan realistic practices to strengthen the mind. For instance, if you know you have a difficult time sitting still you would know that sitting in a meditation for 20 minutes a day wouldn’t be feasible. Starting off with even just a 1 minute meditation each morning and building from there would be realistic. For me, I always find myself in this ‘on the go’ mindset, so it is harder for me to choose to be still. I have also always had a hard time with consistent personal practices, so my practice reflects that and manifests in different ways every day. That is the beauty of a yoga practice, it can be whatever you need it to be whenever you are able to dedicate time for it.

Here are some yoga practices that can help cultivate more patience in life that I am currently working on:

• Taking a few minutes when I first wake up to just be.. observing my body, my breath, my surroundings & just overall checking in.
• My Daily Tea Meditation: Preparing my tea with the intention of patience, visualizing pouring patience into my cup when I prepare the tea. Forcing myself to sit down for the duration of the cup of tea, tuning into the warmth as I sip it, just noticing the whole process, allowing my nervous system to relax.
• Meditative shower – Taking my time, treating it as a self care ritual, a lot of renewing my self visualizations and intentions.
• Walking around my yard, into the greenhouse, deep breaths drawing the fresh air in.
• Looking up a patience quote, pondering its meaning and how I can apply it to my Self.
• Cleansing breaths in moments of chaos.
• Tuning into the sensation of my body randomly.

Along this patience journey I recognize that I’m a spiritual being living a human experience & it’s okay to be my perfectly imperfect self. I own up to my shortcomings and choose again and again to face these things and practice being a better human. To be inspired, I only have to gaze outside and am reminded of mother Earths strength. I take a breath and reinvigorate myself.

You can follow my posts on my @planting.zen instagram or check in with the hashtag, #plantingpatience to tune into my patience journey.