Exercise Patience

Patience - an attribute the Dalai Lama once likened to a muscle - is the key to a committed and meaningful life.  Like any muscle, he points out, it can be significantly strengthened through exercise.  If your ambition is to acquire tranquility and calmness, an enhanced ability to farce adversity, and greater tolerance and acceptance of others, “Put the practice of patience at the heart of your daily life,” the Dalai Lama urges.

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Impatience and inattention reduce the quality of our personal lives.  Having been conditioned to spend most of our waking hours in the fast lane - desiring to do, see, and achieve as much as possible ion the shortest time permissible - we deprive ourselves of rich pleasures that have served and sustained human beings for centuries.  “Between friends,” an ancient Chinese aphorism states, “the fifth cup of tea is the best.”  But today who has time for even the second cup?

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Patience is the key that enables us to sense when “ripeness” occurs.  Patient people appreciate the importance of timing and won’t allow themselves to be pushed into a decision or an action against their better judgment.