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Patience

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I remember one of my early teachers emphasizing that the most important qualities needed for the spiritual seeker are sincerity and patience. On the journey toward self-realization, uncovering your true nature requires navigating through the numerous beliefs and other obstacles accumulated during a lifetime of conditioning. Your sincerity, your heart’s longing, provides the fuel for your search while patience becomes crucial as the process of overcoming obstacles often takes time.

 

Many individuals, when faced with a lack of immediate results, may feel  inadequate or frustrated. It’s important to be kind and gentle with yourself, avoiding self-judgement or criticism. It’s often said that one you embark on the journey of self-realization, the process never stops, that all is well and life unfolds in perfect order.           

Since we live in a society where patience is often in short supply, I've chosen a few quotes that might serve as reminders. 

 

Quotes

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Your heart knows no fear, it experiences no desire, and never finds the need to defend or justify itself. It is patient and undemanding. It nourishes our bodies in every moment. Little wonder then, that the mind - always impatient and very demanding - manages to dominant the heart so thoroughly. 

~ Archimandrite Meletios

 

 The ultimate mysteries are opened only to those who have immense patience. 

~ Osho 

 

What's important is the capacity to listen, to be quiet, to be patient so we can intuit the way that God or life wants to reveal itself to us.

 ~ Adyashanti 

 

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all being in the world. 

~ Lao Tzu 

 

The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full. 

~ Rumi 

 

The wise person, therefore, does not really look to change anything. They become quiet. They have patience. They work on themselves. They watch their thoughts, watch their actions and observe themselves getting angry, observe themselves getting depressed, observe themselves getting jealous and envious and the rest of it. Little by little they realize, "That's not me. That's hypnosis, that's a lie." They do not react to their condition. To the extent that they do not react to their condition, to that extent do they become free. 

~ Robert Adams 

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If we want spiritual development, the practice of patience is essential.
~ Dalai Lama

The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.
~ Swami Sivananda

Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

 

When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it. 

~ Rumi

 

The greatest prayer is patience. 

~ Gautama Buddha 

 

All is well. Continue, with patience, patience, patience to place attention outside all of it. Every story is mind, let mind do its thing. Know that mind will continue to appear to do its thing but let there be no ownership. It is not possible that thoughts are belonging to "you." Never claim ownership for this creates the idea that "you" exists. You are no more than an idea. Do not claim any thought as 'yours'.

 ~ Jac O'Keeffe 

 

The shift of perspective from conventional reality to fundamental reality is a huge, quantum jump from one universe to another. No wonder this Work is difficult! When we see just how difficult, we understand more why we need to be patient and compassionate with ourselves. 

~ A.H. Almaas 

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Pilgrims on the road towards God very often encounter obstacles and stumbling-blocks which are due to their own former actions.

In such cases one should pray, “Lord, gird me with patience and the power of endurance that I may be able to continue undaunted my pilgrimage on the path that leads to Thee.”

Keep your spirits high by reflecting that those hindrances and difficulties are breaking up your bad karma. Bear in mind that God is thus cleansing and purifying you in order to take you unto Himself.

~ Anandamayi Ma

 

Love comes to us in its own way, and part of the training of the lover is to learn the ways of love, to learn its silence and speech, to learn to be patient and wait for love, and then respond with immediate attention. The consciousness of the heart, the place where love speaks to us, is always unconditioned, because real love is fundamentally free.

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

 

Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.

~ Pema Chödrön

 

Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought "I am". The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally, without any interference on your part. 

~ Nisargadatta

 

Just like exhausted children in the back seat of a car on a long drive to a new home, our thoughts keep on asking, 'are we there yet? are we nearly home? how soon can we rest?', and life, in its infinite patience, keeps on reminding us that we are already home, that we never left home in the first place, that even when we move home, our true home, the ever-present inner stillness, never moves. In the midst of movement, total calm. So shhhh now, rest your little heads, sleepy ones....

~ Jeff Foster

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Inquiry? Do you really want to know the truth? Good! Ask and wait. All will be granted.

~ Byron Katie

 

Be very patient and loving with this beautiful character. He/she has believed there was something fundamentally wrong with her/him for a long time ! It is not true my dear Heart ! You are That ! Very passionately, with humor and patience keep up this conviction and welcome all the contractions and "children out in the cold" inside You into your Freedom!

~ Ramana Spencer 

 

There is an extremely important but subtle aspect of spiritual development that is often lost sight of. It is that in each case, depending on the makeup of each psyche, the development is taking place spontaneously according to nature and that any deliberate efforts on the part of the pseudo-entitiy only create hazards and obstructions. If this is kept in mind,  . . .  one automatically evades the greatest spiritual danger, which is the uprising of the ego.

What, then, is the individual to do?

Merely to let true understanding deeply impregnate his very being, passively and patiently, so that all illusions and obstructions gradually fall off by themselves.

~ Ramesh Balsekar

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Be patient where you sit in the dark, the dawn is coming.

~ Rumi

 

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