The Art of Patience
By Sharon Sklar, BFA, LMT, CAR
W
e, as a society, are impatient. We want everything NOW, if not sooner. I am guilty of this myself, and as I grow older and as our world speeds up, it has become clearer to me that patience truly is a virtue and a learned behavior. We all need to learn to flex that muscle and keep it fluid in our lives. The Waiting Game Last April, I decided that I very much wanted a new door to my home, and very much needed a new door for my office entrance. I jumped right on it—beautifying my surroundings has always been important to me and I was ready for change. It took five weeks to get someone to come to my home to measure for the doors. Upon ordering, I was told that my walls were extra thick (I think that’s a good thing!), which would require special custom-made door jambs. I was quoted a six- to eight-week time frame and was assured they were running on time. The due date was July 8, which came and went. The new due date was July 27, then August 10, then…well, I stopped trying to figure it out. The realization that I had no control over this became somewhat of a metaphor for life. I had to be patient. I was told the installation process was quick—it wasn’t. I had to wait over two more months for that appointment. I was now getting used to the way it was, with no influence or control—just acceptance.
There is no rushing the process of getting back to a neutral state through release, change, growth, and shift in integral balance.
A miracle occurred and I was called with an earlier time slot. At the time of this writing, I am days away from this transformation. Update: That appointment ended up being cancelled the morning of, because it was raining. Now scheduled, yet again, for a couple of weeks out. I am seeing all the lessons involved— hurry up and wait, stay calm, be patient, and be thankful. Patience is a virtue—one I do not naturally have, but a skill set I can and will continue to practice, acquire, and one at which I wish to become an expert! Transformation Doesn’t Happen Overnight As a Rolfer, working with people and their own transformations for the last forty years, I have always seen that all things take time and personal transformations are worth the wait, time, expense, and effort. To restructure a body is an event that has no presumed schedule, no guarantee, and is largely out of anyone’s control. We all have a history with traumas, injuries, and dramas in both the physical and emotional realm. There is no rushing the process of getting back to a neutral state
through release, change, growth, and shift in integral balance. It may take up to six months from the moment a person contacts me until our work together is completed. I ask people to be patient and trust the process, which is difficult if they are in pain and have been for a while. I ask my clients to ride the wave of the journey and to accept a new understanding of how their body works to avoid the same pitfalls and eventually the same outcome. I continue to be in awe of the resilience of the human body and how it wants to heal, be freer, and maintain itself. I recently finished working with a client in his thirties who, as a father, farmer, physical laborer, martial artist, and alwayson-the-go kind of guy, could not tolerate the pain he was in. There was not one specific thing that happened to him, but a series of events over time that shifted his body out of whack, which then caused enough physical imbalance that he was left in chronic pain. He had tried nearly everything to get better, had limited his activity and reduced the impact of the physical stress from his job. Nothing was working. He began the Rolfing process of ten sessions and somewhere around session 5, he began to be out of the constant pain he had been in and was able to experience his full life again. We finished our sessions in late www.NaturalNutmeg.com
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