Patience as a Way of Bearing Witness

  • Patience as a Way of Bearing Witness

Patience as a Way of Bearing Witness

In my last blog, I wrote about the intentions behind my declaration: “I am committed to making decisions based on Love and Respect.” One intention was: “My intention is to have the patience to stay present and compassionate with myself until clarity emerges.” This inspired today’s post, where I explore patience as a practice of bearing witness.

In Buddhist mindfulness practice, patience is called khanti pāramī. Seeing patience through this lens highlights its deeper meaning: the willingness to endure, stay present, and witness experiences we may not want to feel. Khanti is one of the ten perfections of the heart, the pāramitās, which include:

  • Generosity (Dāna)
  • Virtue (Sīla)
  • Renunciation (Nekkhamma)
  • Wisdom (Paññā)
  • Energy (Viriya)
  • Patience (Khanti)
  • Truthfulness (Sacca)
  • Determination (Adhiṭṭhāna)
  • Lovingkindness (Mettā)
  • Equanimity (Upekkhā)

These qualities gradually transform the heart, creating the conditions for awakening. Cultivating patience, generosity, and determination helps release habits that fuel greed, aversion, and confusion. With this foundation, the four brahmavihāras—lovingkindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity—arise more naturally.

What Patience Teaches Us

Patience is about staying with discomfort, uncertainty, or pain without pushing it away. It also means restraining the urge to act out of avoidance or grasping. Practicing khanti has helped me:

  • Balance doing and non-doing, action and inaction
  • Discern when to wait and when to act
  • Trust my inner knowing
  • Move through discomfort without giving up
  • Meet challenges with courage and faith
  • Notice reactive impulses and respond wisely

We often think of patience in terms of its opposite—impatience—which brings restlessness, irritation, and frustration.  I learned to link the patience  to  constancy, resilience, trust, and believing.

Three Key Aspects

  1. Recognizing reactivity
  2. Enduring without losing motivation
  3. Accepting things as they are while still moving toward change

Practicing Patience Daily

  • Mindful Awareness: Observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judgment or the need to fix them.
  • Receiving with Kindness: Open your heart to difficult feelings with compassion.
  • Steadiness Amidst Change: Cultivate a grounded presence through the breath.

We can support our practice by drawing strength from spiritual friendships, meaningful texts, and connection to a more awakened heart–mind. Reflecting on difficulty—especially in relationships—helps us notice when our body interprets situations as attacks and transform them into opportunities for growth.

Ask yourself today:

  • Where could I benefit from being more patient with myself or others?
  • Where could staying present bring more clarity?

With time, as we move through layers of protection, we start seeing the gold in us.

With Warmth, Be

Living From Love & Respect: The Power of Intention

  • Living From Love & Respect: The Power of Intention

Living From Love & Respect: The Power of Intention

 Every moment offers us a choice:
to react from old patterns of fear or to respond from a deeper wisdom rooted in Love.

Today, I’m exploring a simple but powerful declaration that can guide daily life and inner growth:

I am committed to making decisions based on Love and Respect.

This declaration becomes a way of living when we support it with conscious intentions—inner agreements that anchor us in the values we choose to embody.

What Is an Intention?

An intention is a clearly directed focus of energy. It expresses how we choose to show up, rather than what we want to achieve.

Unlike goals, which are future-oriented and outcome-driven, intentions bring us into the present. They help align our inner world—our thoughts, emotions, and actions—with who we wish to be.

Lynne McTaggart describes intention as a directed thought with the power to affect physical reality. Her work suggests that deeply held intention is not merely a mental exercise, but a measurable energetic force that interacts with the world. When intention is held with emotional coherence—especially with the vibration of love—it becomes even more potent. When this intention is done with the feeling of Oneness, it amplifies.

Intentions are reminders that help return us to the heart.
They shape our responses, deepen our awareness, and nourish the qualities we want to live by.

Why Intentions Support This Declaration

To live from Love and Respect, we need internal structures that help us align with these values, especially in challenging moments.
Intentions:

  • Bring us back to presence
  • Soften reactive patterns
  • Invite curiosity over judgment
  • Encourage grounded, loving decision-making

They create an inner environment where behavior naturally aligns with our declaration, rather than relying on willpower alone.

Supportive Intentions

Below are intention statements that help anchor the declaration
“I am committed to making decisions based on Love and Respect.”
They are grouped by theme so you can use them as daily reflections, journaling prompts, or spiritual practices.

1) Self-Care & Vitality

  • My intention is to take care of my body in ways that support health, vitality, and a loving relationship with myself.

2) Emotional Awareness & Inner Hygiene

  • My intention is to regularly check in with my feelings, emotions, and beliefs, holding each with nurturing energy and non-judgment.
  • My intention is to have the patience to stay present and compassionate with myself until clarity emerges.

3) Healing Limiting Patterns

  • My intention is to notice when I am interpreting life through limiting beliefs, past wounding, or low self-worth, and allow a more loving perspective.
  • It is my intention to immediately, permanently, and completely release the trapped emotion of confusion so that my decision-making flows with clarity, confidence, and discernment.

4) Truth, Integrity & Courage

  • My intention is to cultivate the courage to speak up with kindness, honesty, and integrity.
  • My intention is to bravely confront the truth within me, without hiding, denying, or creating inner conflict.

5) Self-Compassion & Worthiness

  • My intention is to speak kindly about myself, acknowledging my worth and inherent goodness.

6) Presence in Relationships & Community

  • My intention is to remain grounded, flexible, connected to my inner strength, and clear in my focus when I am in groups or in partnership.

You can either just hope that you will make the decision based on Love and respect or you can actively engage in small broken down intentions that support you being in the right space to do so. In this blog I have offered some prompts for smaller intentions that can support your path. Use them as prompts to create your intentions, in a language that resonates with you.