Patience

A.
A teacher is determined to teach a mentally retarded girl breathing exercises (Read here: Help Someone Else and Breathing) as a help for her to better take care of herself and calm herself in difficult situations (Read here: The Brain’s Alarm Centre and How to Calm the Brain’s Alarm Centre).

They practice daily for 3 months. The girl still does not understand what it is all about. One month more and the girl understands the idea and begins to feel what it is.

After a total of six months of daily practice the girl uses deep breathing spontaneously for well-being and when she needs to calm himself.

Her teacher reflected that it´s important to continue to practice what is crucial to learn (provided it can be learned) and not to be tempted too early by another offer in ‘the educational supermarket’.

B.
It is late afternoon in a supermarket and we see a tired mom with a full trolley and a long queue ahead of her towards checkout. She has a very tired and grumpy small child who constantly says: ‘Mom … Mom …’

The mother gently touches the child’s head and says quietly: ‘I fully understand you are tired, it’s good you are so patient my dear’. The child calms down completely.

If the crying child had said, ‘No, I’m not patient at all!’ then a good response could for instance be: You don´t feel patient right now, but that´s okay. Let´s practise it and find out how to grow patience within us.´

All people have patience inside and we need to practice in order to find out how patience works.