Patience

Hi and welcome to day one of the Patience pack. So before we get into the technique and what we're gonna be looking at over the next 10 days, I think it's really important to just reframe how we look at patience. I think there's the temptation because we experience so much impatience in our life, we might think we need to try harder to perhaps develop patience. But from a meditation point of view, it's not really like that. Patience is an inherent part of the mind. It's with us all the time. We only miss it or we only tend to notice it when we experience impatience. So from a meditation point of view, it's more about letting go of impatience than it is about developing patience. Otherwise we tend to end up with a, I guess, a mind which is always trying to ignore or resist the feelings or the thoughts as they are in that moment. So let's say impatience arises in the mind. And instead we think no, I must be more patience, I must be more patient. And all we're really doing is suppressing thought or we're suppressing feeling. We're ignoring the mind as it is. And although that might work in the short term, in the long term eventually, our filter will break and it's probably gonna be quite ugly when it does and suddenly we'll feel extremely impatient or we'll be unable to sort of hold that back. So it's really important as we go through life that we're not ignoring it, we're not wishing it away. Instead, we're clearly identifying it, acknowledging it, processing it and letting it go. And that way we get to walk through life feeling a lot lighter. Now, we're gonna use a technique over the next 10 days called noting. If you haven't done noting before, make sure you check out the noting video. But the idea of noting is that we create a bit of space between ourselves and our thoughts, ourselves and our feelings so that when these things do arise in the mind, rather than becoming them, we're able to see them, to see them clearly and in doing so, to let go of them. Of course, as always, I'm gonna talk you through the exercise as we go. All you need to do right now is to get yourself set up in the usual way. Make sure you're sitting comfortably. And we're gonna begin with the eyes open. So nice soft focus, just aware of the space around you. And just maintaining that soft focus, just take a couple of nice, big, deep breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. And with the next exhalation, just gently closing the eyes as you feel the weight of the body sink down. Just feeling the weight of the feet on the floor or the hands, the arms on the legs. And in closing the eyes, just being more aware of...