Episode 218: Deep Patience and Presence
Introduction
You are listening to Live Creative, an intentional podcast with practical tips for living your life on purpose. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson, and I believe in creativity, adventure, curiosity, and the magic of small moments. I hope that every time you listen, you feel empowered and free to live the life that you want.
Hey, welcome back to Live Free Creative Podcast. This is episode number 218: Deep Patience and Presence.
I am excited to pull some portion of this episode out of my bonus episode Archives years ago. I mean, this podcast is growing up. We are in season five, so this bonus episode never has aired on the main feed for general listenership.
I recorded it a few years ago in 2019 as one of my bonus episodes for my Patreon membership. I thought that it would be a fun one to pull out, add some additional information and framing, and then share with you today.
The ideas of deep patience and presence have come up over and over again for me, the last four years. The importance of being able to find a place of mindfulness and presence and deep patience has been hugely impactful.
In fact, in my studies these last few months, one of the biggest takeaways that I’ve had has been the critical nature of mindfulness in our lives as humans. As life gets busier, technology gets faster and more pervasive, our ability to find a space within ourselves that is peaceful and whole is absolutely critical.
At the beginning of this episode, I’m going to share a few of the benefits of mindfulness and presence and patience, and then I’m going to share the bonus episode where you can hear some really great examples that I shared and really candid stories about the ways in which fundamentally shifting my viewpoint of patience has changed my ability to be the person who I want to be.
And then at the very end, I will share a guided meditation to help you establish a little bit of a connection to that place within yourself where patience resides.
Before we jump into all of that, I’d like to get started with my favorite segment: Pause For a Poem.
Pause For a Poem
When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders. I lose my place. Water turns pearly. Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.
In your presence I don’t want what I thought I wanted. Those three little hanging lamps inside your face, the ancient manuscripts, seem like rusty mirrors.
You breathe; new shapes appear, and the music of a desire as widespread as Spring begins to move like a great wagon.
Drive slowly. Some of us walking alongside are lame!
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.
I would love to kiss you. The price of kissing is your life. Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.
Daylight, full of small dancing particles and the one great turning, our souls are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear? They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual? They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul and you are that. But we have ways within each other that will never be said by anyone.
Come to the orchard in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.If you do come, these do not matter.
A great wagon written by Rumi
That is such a beautiful poem. Thank you for listening. One of my classmates shared a piece of that in one of our lectures recently, and I had to hurry and look the whole thing up.
It just feels like exactly what this episode is hopefully going to invite you to feel, this moment of intention and attention and presence in your life.
Sponsor
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Main Topic: Deep Patience and Presence
As I mentioned, I want to begin today by telling you about some of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation and presence that gets to the heart of this idea of deep patience.
I know that sometimes it’s perceived as sort of spiritual or woowoo, but meditation practices are actually incredible scientifically backed exercises that deepen and develop awareness.
The benefits of meditation include specific neural enhancements throughout the brain–including increased attention, increased working memory (I know I can use that as my kids would also attest), and cognitive flexibility.
Meditation actually increases your ability to learn in different ways. It can help you have better emotional management.
This is really ties into that idea of finding that deep patience and being able to regulate your emotions in spite of stressful times. And it also helps with the integration of divergent ideas.
This one–integration of divergent ideas–I think is so impactful, especially right now in our world where data shows that we. If you’re participating in any way online, you’re pretty much living in somewhat of an echo chamber that the things that you see and hear really support your preconceived ideas, and that when you see or hear something divergent, it can feel really obtrusive.
We are almost having an outright rejection of ideas and beliefs and practices that don’t fully align with our own. Rather than having the sensibility and the ability to integrate these different ideas into our world, to hold two opposing things that may both be true depending on your perspective.
Of course, empathy and self-awareness and kindness are also increased with regular meditation practices.
Beyond all of those neurological benefits of meditation, it simply feels good. Do you remember the last time that you were able to just sit, still, breathe deeply, and feel at home in yourself? Not that often in our frantic world do we make this space for ourselves, do we create this place of rest and recovery.
I want to share just a quick overview of mindfulness and meditation, because those two words I think we use interchangeably and they are somewhat interchangeable, but think of mindfulness as the umbrella term of any time that you’re paying attention to the world around you.
You can eat mindfully by noticing the textures and tastes and smells and what things look like. You can walk mindfully. You can live mindfully in a lot of ways, and meditation. sort of tucks underneath that umbrella as paying attention specifically to the present moment with an outlook of non-judgment, being able to pay attention to the present moment in stillness, and with non-judgment, non-attachment.
I like to think of mindfulness as a state of awareness and meditation as this specific and deliberate practice of that state of awareness.
So, to put it another way, mindfulness is what we are seeking to reduce our stress and enhance our wellbeing. And regularly practicing meditation is one way that we exercise that skill and get there.
I also want to mention this great research that shows that mindfulness can actually increase your overall wellbeing because it creates this openness, an open perspective, an open mind and heart to things that we may not expect happening in our lives.
Just being curious and open to those things is an upward spiral that we may notice things that we didn’t notice before, things that bring us joy, things that make us happy, things that give us this sort of question and curiosity, that then we explore more deeply and we’re inspired greatly.
These are all things that can bring such wellbeing and joy into our lives, and one way that we can get there is through this.
I’ll mention that my personal introduction to meditation probably happened years and years ago, but more formally about three or four years ago, I was introduced to the Headspace app, which gave me the tool in the palm of my hand to have a regular meditation practice that was guided, it was accessible, it was interesting, and I fell in love with it.
I’ve started using regular meditation as a tool to be able to help build some emotional muscles in my life, like gratitude, like this presence and centering, like non-attachment or being able to, as often as I can, accept reality as it is, yet retain hope for my ability to change the things that I can change.
We so often recognize the importance of physical activity and exercise and you know, many of us probably pay for gym memberships or for a personal trainer or for equipment, nice running shoes or something to be able to exercise and keep our bodies healthy.
Meditation is one of the things that we can use to exercise our mind and our emotions. It’s a daily or regular practice. Pump up those muscles so that we feel better and are stronger emotionally and psychologically.
Now with all of that introduction, I’m going to turn you over to my past self, talking specifically about the idea of deep patience, giving some examples of that and some of the ways that you can think about it, and then I will come back at the end to lead you in a short guided meditation to help you invite some of this presence and deep patience into your life today.
Excerpt from Bonus Episode
I mentioned the phrase “deep patience” several times in my book, More Than Enough. There’s a whole chapter about patience and the idea of developing patience. How our family in particular developed a greater sense of patience during our year of not buying anything, our experiment with minimalism.
And as I was writing that, a couple times the editor came back with: “Does this describe what you mean? Deep patience is not something I’m familiar with. Like what do you actually mean?”
And she wanted me to interchange it with other words like resilience or adaptability.
And while I think those are really great words, I mean absolutely. Resilience. What a fantastic word and principle. And the same with adaptability and flexibility.
Deep patience feels like exactly what I mean to say. Words can be funny that way. Actually, just a few minutes ago, Dave was home for lunch and I was explaining, I was just going to record this podcast on deep patience, and he said, “What does that mean? What does deep patience even mean?”
And so that’s what I want to share.
I want to explain what I mean when I talk about deep patience and how I think that it can be transformative in our lives.
Deep patience means that this is something that settles down as like a baseline, a base understanding, a base place from which we make decisions and act. It’s not a surface principle.It’s not something that bubbles up and down.
This is a reliable foundation upon which we build our lives or can build our lives. This deep patience, I believe, is akin to presence. If you have done any work in the space of meditation or mindfulness, there’s so much there about the idea of presence and being in the moment.
At the moment, Eckhart Tole is one that comes to mind, who has great works about this. His books, the Power of Now and a New Earth, have been really insightful and transformative for me, as I’ve learned from his teachings, presence simply means that you are inside your body in the moment and that everything you recognize, that everything right now is as it should be.
That where you are, who you are in your body, in your life, that you are okay right this very moment. And when you’re in the moment, you don’t feel all of the anxiety and worry that you have when you’re thinking about the future. And you also are distanced from some of the sadness or depression that people may have when they live in the past.
Presence is what’s happening right now. Right this very minute, and I believe in my experience, deep patience has felt a lot like presence. It’s what exists as a baseline.
When I check in to where I am right now and I find that place that says everything is okay, everything right this moment is just as it should be, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I like all of the circumstances of my life at all times.
There are definitely lots of times when the circumstances are out of my control and there’s things happening in my life, or I may say to me, even things happening to me that I don’t love, I didn’t ask for. Things I’m not super thrilled with, but when I check into presence or deep patience, I check in. I recognize that it’s going to be okay, that in the moment it’s okay that I can control how I respond and how I think.
The external circumstances don’t have to control me, that I control me. It is with this belief and this base understanding that I begin to understand patience as something that can be inherent to my life. It’s something that can be a. and that what happens when I don’t feel patience is that impatience has arisen that impatience, this fleeting emotion, not a stalwart foundational principle in my life, but the idea that something has gone wrong, impatience to me, feels like the belief that something has gone wrong or is going, and that can cause a bunch of other emotions.
Now think to yourself, what does impatience feel like? Because I don’t think that impatience feels like its own emotion. Impatience arises and brings with it sort of a swirling of other recognizable emotions. For me, that can be frustration, irritability, anger.
It can be sadness, it can be powerlessness or hopelessness. Those are some of the feelings, the negative emotions that impatience brings up. Impatience in and of itself, I think of as pretty empty Impatience is more like the vessel to carry all of these other negative emotions up into our thought process and up into our belief system in the.
The fantastic thing about thinking about patience and impatience this way is that we can always recognize and release the emotion of impatience. When we do, what we are left with is our foundation of patience and presence. That is what deep patience looks like. That is the inherent belief that everything is going to be okay regardless of the circumstances that are popping up, that we didn’t ask for.
I’m using the emotion of the feeling in my belly, like a gut feeling that it is going to be okay, that things are going to work out, and that internal hope and faith and trust. Presence for me, that also definitely looks like a connection to a higher power. That my patience and presence is rooted in a belief of my connection to the divine, that the universe has my back. I speak about this in my own terms as God or as the spirit or universal energy.
I believe those things can help ground us in this patience and in the inherent belief that things are going to be okay. I really do believe that. I really believe that things are going to work out. Things are going to be okay even if in my life circumstances are not always what I hoped for or what I expected.
I can cling to this hope and this understanding in this presence, this kind of deep-rooted presence that things are going to be okay. One thing that is really interesting to note is that a lot of times in our life our feelings of impatience arise with kind of frivolous things like the line taking too long in the grocery store, or maybe a toddler taking too long to put their shoes on or traffic. We get impatient with having to wait for someone or something.
In my life, sometimes impatience has arisen when I’m considering the trajectory of where I’d like to be versus where I am.
So here’s a good example of this. When I am thinking of the future of where I’d like to be, and then I compare that to where I am, the feeling of impatience can arise. What impatience in that moment would feel like is anxiety or restlessness or frustration that I haven’t gotten as far as I thought I should.
When I recognize and start to release those feelings. So these are the keys, recognize and release the feelings of impatience. What I’m left with and what grounds me is deep patience or presence, which is the belief that everything is going to be okay, and that where I am right now is just right for now.
Oftentimes, impatience is associated with timeline, with waiting, with thinking things are happening too slowly or that we want things to change quickly. Impatience has a lot to do with time, and I have definitely talked about time several times in the regular podcast over at Live Free Creative. There’s a couple episodes that if you want to dig a little deeper into this idea of time and how we can start to shift our mindset surrounding time, there’s two particular episodes I want you to listen to.
The first one is Episode 12: Goals versus self-imposed deadlines. This one is really helpful if you find a lot of your impatience arising in terms of your own personal development, your own life timeline.
The second one is Episode 33, Time and Seasons. This episode will be really helpful if you find that in general you want to accomplish or do more than you find yourself able to do when your own personal timeline for your life and the season that you’re in doesn’t align with what your expectations are for the time and season that you’re in. That episode will hopefully bring some peace and clarity to you.
Now I want to jump back to the idea of patience and impatience really quickly.
I mentioned in the book that as I have taught my children, and you know, of course myself as well, because as I teach my kids, I find that I’m often the one learning more than they are.
When they were very young, and I wanted to teach them about the idea of being patient because I find myself using that word like, let’s be patient. Twould ask, you know, what does that even mean?
I mean, they didn’t ask that because they were toddlers. But I would explain with this definition, patience is waiting happily without asking questions. Patience is waiting happily without asking questions.
Now doesn’t that sound like presence? The idea that everything right now in this moment is okay, that you don’t have to be worried, anxious or frustrated or angry or stressed out.
You can simply be okay and accept what is, knowing that everything good is coming.
I think the reason that I felt that I wanted to define patience in that way for my own family was that I have experienced personal experience, both as myself, the one waiting, and with others waiting without being happy, and having the self-restraint to not ask all the questions.
We sometimes think we’re being patient, you know, gritted teeth patience or very surface level patience when we are waiting, but we are super annoyed the whole time we are waiting, but we are blaming other people for the situation we are in. We are waiting because we have because we don’t have another option, but we are certainly not going to be pleased about it.
Does any of that ring true to you?
Whether you are the one who has often felt like that or that you can see other people who are so put out by what’s happening in the moment yet they, you know, want to feel like, well, I’m being very patient, or I’m exercising all of my patience, right?
I want to remind you that my definition of deep patience is presence and the underlying belief that everything in the moment is okay. What does this do to the idea that, as parents, we will run out of patience? When we say My patience is gone. I’m done. I’m at the end of my rope. What does that actually do?
Well, what it does for me is it flips the narrative. It helps me remember that patience is always available to me because it is the underlying state of being. When I am present and mindful that patience is something that I don’t have to drum up, what I have to acknowledge and release is the impatience that arises when I’m not being present or mindful.
Do you see how that switches the narrative a little bit? That I don’t have to build up my patience necessarily. What I have to get good at is recognizing and releasing the impatience, those negative emotions that come into my life, trying to distract me from my underlying belief that everything is going to be okay.
I remind myself that, in fact, as I step into a place of mindfulness, a lot of the things that were frustrating me or annoying me or making me feel like the timeline wasn’t going fast enough–a lot of those things I can simply release because it’s either not that important or what matters more to me is being engaged in a connective relationship.
It means that whatever the particular circumstances, whether it is the taking too long to eat or to put on the shoes, or that I’m not immediately as successful as I think that I should be, coming back to a place releasing those negative emotions and coming back to a place of deep patience where I know that I am okay, that I am enough, that what I’m doing is just right.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to have any boundaries set up for self-care and nourishment. I absolutely believe that, especially as a mother, it’s imperative that I have systems in place for myself to be alone with my thoughts, to move my body, to have the self-care practices that I need in order to feel that presence and mindfulness.
We absolutely can run ourselves ragged to the place where accepting and releasing our impatience becomes really difficult because we haven’t taken care of ourselves, and so getting to a place of mindfulness can be even more difficult.
So I’m not saying that we should just by absolute default all be able to exercise perfect patience and presence all of the time.
But I think that it is more helpful to think about patience as being our default emotion and then recognizing and releasing impatience when it arises in our lives, than it is to think that we have to try really hard to be patient, that it is something that we really have to work on or that only the strong can deal with that.
Instead, I believe that we all have the ability built into us inherently to be hopeful and to have presence and to feel okay.
Something that I think is really important to note when we’re talking about the idea of patience and impatience is that these are all states of being or emotions that we feel, and usually neither one of them does a whole lot to change the circumstance.
Let me explain that. For example, you can sit in traffic and have the feelings of impatience, causing frustration and anger and anxiety. Or you can sit in traffic and release the impatience and feel present and mindful and understand that everything’s gonna be okay because this is a circumstance beyond your control.
Either way, you’re sitting in traffic. Either way, your thoughts about the situation can’t change the situation itself, but the way that you feel absolutely changes.
The same thing with your two-year-old not putting on his or her shoes. I don’t know. Do two-year-olds put on shoes by themselves? No. I can’t remember.
Mine are all getting a little too old, but I remember feeling very impatient, very impatient with the idea of shoes and children, even to the point that I remember buying Milo, who’s now 10 years old, he’s my oldest, buying him a pair of high top Converse, because I figured that if I put those on him in the morning and I tied them up, he would not be able to take them off for the entire day, which means that we wouldn’t lose them and we wouldn’t waste any time trying to get ’em on and get ’em off every time we went in and out of the car and in and out of the house and in and out of the park.
So I just basically strapped shoes on that he could not take off to avoid all of the impatience that would arise for me surrounding the idea of shoes.
So, you know, that’s an example of changing the situation and setting myself up for success because I could create some systems to help me feel more present and avoid that impatience because of the situation itself not arising as often that would trigger my impatience.
But on the days or in the situations when he was having a hard time putting his shoes on, or he had taken them off again and thrown them across the room or whatever it was, that was the situation, and I could have either felt annoyed, frustrated, and angry, allowed that impatience to arise and just take over, or to recognize that impatience, those feelings.
And a lot of times it helps to just even say it out loud. I feel angry, I feel frustrated, I feel annoyed. And breathe it out. Recognize it, and acknowledge it as a way to help it find its way back out the door. Take a couple big, deep breaths to find that deep patience down inside that tells you that you’re going to be okay, that everything is okay, the shoes are across the room, but that’s not that big of a deal.
Think to myself, What really matters most here? And finding that place, releasing the impatience and allowing yourself to find that place where it’s going to be okay. And the way that you show up to that situation is, is feeling better about it.
The circumstance has not changed. Just your feelings and thoughts around it have changed.
I want to share one more personal example. Several years ago, Dave and I had some debt. Both from medical expenses and from home improvements that we had done. At the time, I was not paying a whole lot of attention to our finances. That was sort of Dave’s job, or kind of both of our jobs. But everything was fine. We made enough money to pay the bills and to, you know, pay the monthly payments on the debt and things like that.
But I just wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to it. And so one day we sat down and had a budget meeting and Dave and I talked over the situation and what that debt looked like and what the plan was to pay it off. And because I hadn’t been super aware of the significance of it, I was a little bit caught off guard and I immediately felt this huge amount of impatience arise, frustration, uh, anger, annoyance, also hopelessness, and the feeling of worry and a lot of shame actually, which I think is not unusual regarding debt and finances in today’s world.
And especially maybe depending on the family you grew up in. I grew up in a family where debt of any type was not looked at positively. It always looked like someone being irresponsible regardless of the circumstance.
That was the way that it was kind of talked about and looked on, and so felt all of this shame and all of these emotions, and I have to say that for months it affected me on almost a daily basis where I would be going about my day and something would happen to kind of trigger this, this memory of, of the reality of our circumstance.
And I would, it would throw me into this spiral, this shame and frustration and anger spiral about our current life. I remember feeling the impatience arise, hoping and wanting to just do everything we could to just get rid of it. Get rid of it. Get rid of it, and try wanting to really effort through it.
And what was so interesting looking back now, is that in the week or months before we had had this conversation about it, the circumstance had been the same. We had had the debt and had been paying off the debt, and because I wasn’t paying close attention to it, it didn’t affect me emotionally. I wasn’t, you know, bothered by it.
My day-to-day life was normal and happy and hopeful, and as soon as I paid attention to it, I allowed it to cause all of these other negative emotions in my life, even though the circumstance was no different previous to my acknowledgement and awareness of this particular financial situation.
I had been, I guess you could say, blissfully unaware. But when I paid attention to it, all of a sudden I created this entire story about why I should feel so terrible. And I spent months and months feeling terrible, even though the circumstance did not change.
Now contrast that with a different time a couple years later when that debt had all been paid off and, you know, we had felt really good and then we chose to assume some debt for another investment.
Totally eyes wide open and maybe there’s something to the idea of being really aware as it all happens, but I thought how interesting that for the entire time that we shouldered the second investment, I was aware of the debt and as we paid it off, I felt hopeful and happy and present the whole time.
I didn’t feel the same shame, I didn’t feel the same frustration. I didn’t feel the same anxiety and anxiousness. I allowed myself to feel that deep patience of knowing that today it’s all gonna be okay. And I think part of that was allowing myself to look back to the months before we had had that big budget meeting before.
If I had wanted to, I could have felt that same amount of peace all through that first situation, but I didn’t allow myself to be carried by the feelings of impatience, shame, frustration, and annoyance. Even though those feelings were totally unnecessary, they did not serve me. They didn’t make paying off the payments any faster, any different. They didn’t motivate me.
They were disheartening and hopeless rather than what you find when you get to that place of deep patience, which is encouragement and support, personal support, supporting yourself, knowing that you’re okay, that the circumstances don’t define your worth, that you are doing a great job.
And from that place, you can be creative, you can be hopeful, you can be happy regardless of the circumstance that you’re in, whether or not you caused it, whether or not you asked for it, whether or not you can control it.
You get to feel the presence and the peace of that deep, deep patience. I know for sure that my entire life has been impacted by the idea that I cannot control all the circumstances that happen to me, but I can rely on this presence and this deep patience that tells me that it’s all gonna be okay.
It is okay. In this moment, it is just okay that everything is fine, even if things have just gone crazy. Now, a lot of people, if you’ve been following me on social media or on the podcast for the last year, know that just over a year ago I came home to water coming through all of the ceilings in the downstairs of my house.
A water pipe had broken upstairs. We had rainfall in my whole house, water coming out the door, coming through all my light fixtures, up to an inch of water upstairs on the floor. We had to immediately call flood control, rip out all of the ceilings. They took out all of the flooring. In fact, demolished the entire master bathroom upstairs, and we spent the next eight months living outside of our house.
We were living in Airbnbs and hotels and staying in a friend’s basement until all of the repairs were finished for our house. So many people asked me, how were you able to go through that without just being so frustrated? Or they said, oh, you’re doing a really good job of showing up on social media with positivity, but I’m sure it’s really, really, really hard in the background.
And what was so interesting. And I don’t mean to say this from like a high horse or a place of self-righteousness or anything, but just the idea that I think coming to actually have a belief that everything is going to be okay and that I can control how I feel. I can recognize these feelings, these negative emotions, recognize them and then release them.
I choose to believe that things can change and will change, and I will do my best to find great positive solutions for the problems I encounter. And in the meantime, I’m going to feel okay. I’m going to be okay. I’m going to work hard, I’m going to be kind, and I’m going to understand and believe that where I am right now is exactly where I am supposed to be, which is a good thing because we can’t change it.
We can’t hop from where we are now to where we think we should be. We just are where we are. That idea and trust in deep patience and the understanding that we are going to be okay and that in fact we already are okay, has been transformative in my life, and I hope that as you listen to this episode and you start to apply how this may come into play in your own life.
That it will be transformative for you too.
Guided Meditation
I ant to finish this episode with an invitation to get quiet and still with yourself just for a moment and breathe together. If you’re driving in your car and you have a couple extra minutes, I’d invite you to pull over to somewhere safe that you can just park for a second for three minutes.
If you’re bustling around doing laundry or dishes or working on something, and you have a couple minutes that you can give to yourself right now, then I encourage you to just find some stillness and settle into a seated position, and feel your body just relax.
You can close your eyes gently if it feels good. If not, just leave them open, but soften your gaze so you’re not focused on any particular thing.
Take a deep breath, fill your lungs, expand all the way up, hold it for just a moment at the top, and then release and feel yourself sink even deeper into the position that you’ve chosen, seated in a chair or sitting on the floor.
I want to invite you into the stillness of this moment.
Focus your attention onto your breath, entering into your body through your nose.
Keep your mouth gently closed and just focus on the sensation of the air passing through your nose, your nostrils, tickling those little hairs, filling your lungs.
Maybe you feel that in your chest. Maybe you feel it in your belly.
Notice how it feels for your lungs to be all filled up. Hold that breath and see if you can add a little bit. Take a little sip. Add a little bit more, fill to full, and then release and gently breathe all of that air out.
I want you to just notice the way that your body feels. See if you can feel your heartbeat. See if you can notice the weight of your body in your chair or in your seat, allow yourself to just pay attention to you and to notice the sensations of your breath moving in and out at a natural pace for the next minute.
And I’m going to leave you to focus on your breath without interruption for 60 seconds. Give yourself that time and attention to be present with.
As you notice, your mind drift away and your thoughts start to wander. Simply pay attention to that and notice that.
Acknowledge it.
Don’t judge it. Don’t feel badly about it. Don’t berate yourself for it. Just notice it and try to bring that attention back to stillness and back to your breath.
Notice how it feels to be still and to be with yourself and to feel centered. And when you are all filled up with air, how it feels to be.
I want to remind you that this stillness is a place that you can discover within yourself at any time. This wholeness and sensation of being filled with life and the rhythm of your heartbeat and the waves of your breath is available to you at any time, in any moment that you need a little presence.
It is available any time you need to remember that you are whole now as you are, that you don’t need to do or be anything more, that you’re worthy, that you’re loved, that you’re held, that you’re alive.
If it feels good to continue breathing, give yourself another minute or two.
If you’re ready, flutter your eyes open. Allow yourself to stretch a little bit, roll your head around and just acknowledge the gift of presence that is constant in our lives if we simply seek for it.
Conclusion
Thank you so much for tuning in today to Live Free Creative podcast. It is truly an honor to share with you every week. Thoughts and ideas and inspiration and invitations to step more fully into a life that you love and to share some of the tools for applying the science of wellbeing to your everyday life.
I wish you flourishing now in this holiday season as we close out the year and joy in the year to come. Thank you for being here for your time and attention. I hope that this message has felt important for you. I’ll chat with you next time. Have a beautiful holiday. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. I’ll be back before the new year.
See you later. Bye-bye.
