Finding Power in Patience with Roger Teel

Josh Reeves (0:01)

Hey, this is Josh Reeves, you're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast.

On Friday, October 23rd, we're thrilled to welcome Lyssa Rankin and Jeffrey Rediger. They're going to be speaking on the topic of their new book, Relationsick, and it's about how toxic relationships can affect our health. The next day, Saturday, October 24th, they're going to bring all their great healing wisdom that we've read about in their many books, to a workshop from 9 a.m. to 12 So you can get tickets to one or to both of these events on our website, milehichurch.org.

Roger Teel (0:34)

I want to start by sharing that I have been blessed with many wonderful spiritual teachers throughout my life, and it seems that they came along at just the perfect times. And there was one particular spiritual teacher that was a lifelong teacher. And I must admit that I've had a love-hate relationship with this teacher. And this teacher is patience.

Anybody who's hung around me for any length of time knows that I've had to sit at the feet of that teacher many, many times to chill and balance my impatience. And, you know, I still have to work on it. The things that trigger me now are computer technology problems and stuff. TV streaming stuff. Constant demand for passwords that I just can't master. So, you know, I consider myself an authority on this topic of patience as one who needed to learn it and continues to need to practice it. And I often would define patience as idling your motor when you'd rather peel out, you know, and and haven't we all heard, have patience, have patience, have patience, you know. And then there's another axiom that we heard a whole lot. And I like how Mario Andretti put a tagline on this. It's that all things come to those who wait, except the cat. And so there's no patience beyond that. That's for sure. And I would sometimes declare I'm, I'm not impatient. I just have a very precise idea of when things ought to happen.

And so I used to define it that way. But it wasn't until I got into the Science of Mind application and decided I better use this wonderful stuff in this area of patience. It's only then that my I made any progress at all. And I discovered then that there really is a power for us in patience and that we'd better find it and have it if we want to unfold all the good that is available to us all. Now, I want to say right at the beginning that there are times when it's time to move in the moment. There are times to be assertive and to be proactive, to be sure. And I know of and have witnessed many, many examples of impatience and a need for immediate gratification. Sabotaging lives and projects and situations. Now, what underlies this impatience we can all fall prey to? Well, it's this sense that there may be forces interfering with our good or with our progress or with our security. And when we have that sense, we shift into fear and then into struggle and into limitation. We begin resisting the way things are, forcing and manipulating people, and worrying that things aren't going to turn out the way we want or need them to turn out. And so this thing of impatience, it can absolutely undermine us, our peace and best outcomes in our life. Now, I know we all have our moments of impatience, and many of them are kind of natural and benign. It's like having to wait in long, long lines or waiting in traffic. You know, we all have that feeling. I think we could grow through that a little bit, I suppose. Mark Nepo wrote, often when we are inconvenienced, we're being asked to slow down, slow down. And I would add to that and open up, slow down and open up to the bigger picture, into the greater good that's all around us. But it seems like those who can embrace and demonstrate patience, they acquire a peace and a power that supports them, that opens them, that grows them. It's part of life, it's part of nature. If you plant a garden and plant some seeds, you don't come back in a week or so and start yanking on the sprouts and saying, grow faster, hurry up.

Don't do that.

At least most of us.

Erica and I have become really enticed with the beauty of the desert. We weren't in touch with it before we moved to Arizona, but it's extraordinary. And the terrain in Arizona is the most diverse in many respects of anywhere in our country. It's a myriad of delights. And one of the key things that's like the redwoods of Arizona are the saguaro cactus, you know, the big long stem and the cactus. We were really stunned to find out that they often live for 200 or more years. That's a space of time. And they don't grow their first limb for 50 to 80 of those years. So the cactus has got to be pretty patient. Bamboo, you plant a little bamboo seedling, you're going to have to take really good care of it for at least four years. And then all of a sudden, in around that fifth year, it will burst up 15, 20 feet, expand its trunk size many times. And the thought was nothing was happening, but it was actually putting down that deeper root system to support this possibility. Seems like that's going on in nature and probably encourages us to slow down and open up. Emerson said, adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience, patience. Sensing the deeper or higher rhythms of life and maybe getting out of our restlessness and aligning with that. Now, the time a number of years ago, quite a long time ago, I ran across a quote, and that was the time that the switch of clarity was flipped for me about this thing called patience. And it was in reading a quote by a Zen master, Suzuki Roshi, and I think it's so important I'm having it put up on the screen for you. And he wrote, the problem with the word patience is that it implies that we are waiting for something good that will come. A more accurate word for this quality is constancy, a capacity to be with what is true moment after moment, to discover enlightenment one moment after another. I love that. Constancy. That shifted things for me. It's like the patience is being faithful to something, devoted to a process we're discerning that we're a part of, but that is bigger than any one of us. Constancy. And I would encourage you to consider developing and applying this constancy in three specific areas that are foundational. And first, it's constancy in consciousness. That's really what we're all about in this work, is to consistently cultivate that panorama of our awareness we call consciousness, which is our current surface thoughts, our habituated, etched in subconscious thought, our feeling tones, and then the frequency or the energy of our being. This is the whole pie of consciousness. And to discover more about our prevailing consciousness, and to in constancy, cultivate it, refine it, build it up, and anchor it in the infinite abundance, and the all-givingness of the divine life, of the one life that we're all a part of. It's daily upleveling our tendencies, our thinking, our reactions, our judgments, so that we're more in alignment with the nature of truth and love, so that we can then be an outlet for more and more of the good of God that we all deserve, all of us. The real work is constancy and consciousness. And the key is that sometimes we want results, but we haven't developed the consciousness that can naturally manifest them or be an expression of them. That we work on. We work to bring our consciousness into alignment with our dreams. A great, great teacher and a partner in the forming of the science of mind a partner to our founder, Dr. Ernest Holmes, was a great author and minister, Dr. Raymond Charles Barker. Created an enormous work at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. And he was not only renowned as a minister and writer, but he was a tremendous practitioner. And people would flock to him and have him do prayer work, pay him to do prayer work. And he writes that at one point, a lady here had a commotion in the outer office. He was just in his office quietly doing his thing. And there was a commotion. This lady burst into his office and threw down a $100 bill on his desk, a lot of money at that time, and said to him simply, Get me a man. And she turned and she left. So Raymond writes that he did his faithful prayer treatment work for her, and she was clear on what she wanted, and she pretty quickly got it. And then he writes that almost exactly a year later, she stormed into his office and flung a new $100 bill on his desk. She said, Now get rid of him.