Self Love: Patience With Ourselves

Join Britta Eskey this week and in the next few weeks for a quick self-love boost. These videos can be used at the beginning of your meditation to usher yourself lovingly into your silent practice and/or afterward to help you take the fruit of your meditation into your life. Self-love is important because we all need to learn to become our own best friends and we deserve to tenderly embrace ourselves.
This track contains ambient sounds in the background

Transcript

So today in our exploration of what self-love is, The quality that we want to take into our meditation is patience. This is beautiful biblical verse, Love is patient, Love is kind. And then it just speaks about all the different qualities of love and the first one it mentions is patience. And don't we often get so impatient with ourselves? So let's explore what it's like to be patient with ourselves. Let's close our eyes. Find a comfortable physical posture. Give yourself time for that. Be patient. It might take a little bit. We might need to move the pillows around or wiggle or squirm a little bit to find that place that just feels good. For our particular body, Maybe our body needs something like a pillow underneath the knee or in the lower back. And we'll just be patient and kind and we'll listen to our body. And meditation by its nature does not come natural to many of us. Going into silence, Closing our eyes, Being still. It takes a while to get used to that because most of us are so stimulated. Our minds are running a million miles an hour. So it takes patience and a certain kind of loving waiting for the mud to settle. There's this beautiful image of meditation being like a glass of muddy water that you shake or that is shaken by life, By the movement of life. And when we sit down, What we're really doing is just waiting for the mud to settle to the bottom of the glass so that we can just see that clear water. And can we be patient with that process, With that mind that wants to talk about dinner or how somebody doesn't like us or how this is really uncomfortable to sit like this and how much longer is this going to go on? And these kind of thoughts that might be arising. And can we just be patient? Can we just be kind to ourselves and not judge these thoughts? Our poor little minds don't know what else to do than to keep thinking. That's what they're made for. Can we just be patient and just sit here with our sincere intention to be available to something greater, To grace, To love, To truth, To beauty? Can we give ourselves that? Can we trust our sincerity, The goodness in us? And trust those wise teachers that have come before us and told us, Just sit here, Just sit here, Just be patient. There's an innate intelligence inside of us that knows how to take us home. And then there may be more disturbances, More thoughts, Big ones or smaller ones tugging on us. But just stay patient. Let's not do anything. Let's just keep being patient and wait for the mud to settle, For that grace that can arrive any moment to take us into stillness, Into silence. No need to do anything. So if you are planning on a longer period of silence now, Just pause me and turn me back on when you're ready to come out. And just before we open our eyes, Just making a commitment to stay spacious and patient with yourself. Even as you're opening your eyes now, Just stay for a few moments and receive your environment and remember to take that patience with you as you're going into your day to day life. It might speed up again. And just keep that spaciousness, Keep that patience, No matter how many times you forget today, Just come back to it.