Patience + Cat Stance
52 days of Self-Care to improve the quality of your life + 52 Nia Moves for Health. Fitness. Power. Beauty.
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
Carl Jung
Up early and oddly, tired instead of refreshed from my sleep. This quest, 52 days of self-care has given me the opportunity to spend time considering my personal definition of Self-Care. In that may lie the ultimate rewards of my mission. To Your Health, Julie
Self-Care: PATIENCE
Daily choice/action: Be patient ~ Be willing to pass up good for great.
Inspired by: Cheryl Richardson Self-Care Cards
Nia Move: Cat Stance
Daily practice: Stand in place on one foot and balance yourself. Press your lifted foot against your leg and rest into Whole Foot with your grounded foot. Keep the knee and hip joint of your supporting leg soft and spring-loaded. Keep your hips level. Imagine you are like a leopard ready to pounce.
Practicing Cat Stance improves balance, which improves your ability to move at various speeds.
excerpted from: The Nia Technique by Debbie Rosas & Carlos Aya-Rosas
Share: How did you choose patience or practice patience today? What was the result? How did you practice Cat Stances today? What benefits ensued?
In hind site, I failed, Day 1 of 52 days or Self-Care, considering SILENCE and the practice of it. I invited myself on several occasions to enjoy a silent moment, to let go of thinking. And at the next thought I was delightfully off following it.
It’s not that I’m not practiced at resting my mind and finding stillness there. No, I wanted to follow those thoughts … I didn’t desire SILENCE … I was only inviting it in that I’d said that’s what I was going to focus on!
Today, in the practice of PATIENCE, I found SILENCE. Together, they brought my attention to this poem by David Whyte:
EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease
into the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
Everything is Waiting for You
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
and EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
Poems by David Whyte
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press