Retrograde Fixed Air Mars octiles Mutable Water Neptune
You know what you want, after all the dream has never left you.
You know where you need to be, as it too has been calling forever to you.
You also know what needs to happen to actualise your desires, as you can see everything within your central eye as clearly as the Sun on a clear day.
The challenge, however, is dealing with those sOuls in your life who claim they can support you; whose skills you do not possess yet you need to help you; and whose vision does not quite match yours, or worse again, could care less about what you are striving to achieve.
How frustrating is it to be within an arm’s reach of what you want but have to deal with people and circumstances that don’t quite get your urgency and continue to exist within a world without motivation and hunger. Yes, there is something to learn in it all, but until that penny drops, you have to contend with the virtue of patience!
Patience is the essence of spirituality, granting great strength. In Judaism there is a saying – ‘A patient man is better than a warrior’; in Buddhism, bodhisattvas train in this practice to become enlightened; both Christianity and Islam deem it a sacred virtue as patience is understood to endow you with faith in yourself and an illuminated capacity to deal with frustration and disappointments. Viewed through a purely materialistic lens, success means getting what you want when you want it. If you don’t, your impatience feels warranted. But from a spiritual standpoint, success means acquiring patience, feeling okay about yourself whether or not you get what you want.
Everything is about right attitude and knowing that your spiritual challenge is to transcend frustration may permit you to reframe and resolve the bruised feelings of being let down or derailed. Perhaps the real purpose of frustration isn’t just to frustrate you but to prompt you to align with your larger self? Perhaps the paradigm shift is to realise that disappointments aren’t necessarily failures or bad, after all the Dalai Lama believes, ‘When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.’ Of course, the lesson of surmounting frustrations takes considerable patience; but then that’s the point, isn’t it?!
Andrew Smith © 2018
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