March 8, 2011, https://johnsmallman.wordpress.com
Waiting is difficult for humanity, and many of you have very busy lives in which you are stressfully rushing everywhere and fearing that you will be late. Indeed it seems you do not have enough time to allow you “the luxury of waiting”; in fact, waiting is a penance, a sacrifice, a waste of time that you believe you cannot afford.
But if you were to be truly honest with yourselves, much of your activity when you are busy is, in the end, of no great consequence. In fact, quite often, things you get done have to be redone because errors were made or because new information that came up required it. You frequently find that if you had waited before speaking or acting you would have saved yourselves time and effort. And yet your need to be doing — a constant sense of urgency — seems to rule your lives.
This is why you really do need to take time out to meditate, relax, and unwind yourselves. If you do not, all your relationships become increasingly stressful, tending towards dysfunction, and so you try to de-stress by going to the gym regularly, working out, or jogging, and these extra activities take even more time out of your over-busy lives. Eventually something gives – a motor accident, a serious illness, a job loss, a bankruptcy, a divorce happens in your life – and you find yourselves forced to make time available to deal with these issues, further increasing the strain on yourselves.
These issues are not accidental. These issues occur to get your attention. Their intent is to slow you down so that you can take stock and spend time with yourselves, being kind and gentle – forgiving – instead of driving yourselves ever harder to achieve results that just seem to keep moving out of reach.
The stress of life in the illusion becomes exhausting, but as it is happening to everyone it seems normal, and so you will not admit it to yourselves because it is judged to be a sign of weakness, and in the stress-driven culture of which you are members that is unacceptable. So you struggle on until something does break, and further intensifies the stress. There is seemingly no escape and no respite from your personal treadmill until it breaks you, while the rewards that you seek provide no lasting satisfaction.
This is no way to live. However, you try to convince yourselves that if you try once more and put in a bit more effort, you will get to a point where you can start to take things more easily. And yet even as you think this, you know that you are deluding yourselves; experience has taught you that this never happens.
This is why I keep reminding you to take time out. I want to encourage you to meditate, to relax, to be kind to yourselves, because that is the only way to stand back from the intense stress of daily living and see, if even only for a moment, the insanity of it. That brief moment of awareness is enough to enable you to start changing the deeply held beliefs and opinions that have been driving you, and then you start seeing yourselves from a new perspective — with valid personal needs that deserve to be met and honored.
As you begin honoring yourselves you will realize that others should also be honored, and so your attitudes and behaviors change, and you begin to honor others too. To honor others you must first honor yourselves; it cannot be done the other way round, because until you start to honor yourselves you remain completely unaware of the need to honor anyone.
Now the divine spark within you will intensify and it will grow into a flame. The love it generates will suffuse your whole being, bringing you a blessed sense of peace and an intuitive knowing that you are where you are supposed to be. With that peace will come acceptance — acceptance of each moment as it occurs — judgment will fall away to be replaced by compassion for all and forgiveness for those who seem to have offended you. Then a deeper inner knowing will follow, showing you that you are on your way to awareness of your inseparable oneness with your divine Creator, whose Love for you is boundless.
With so very much love, Saul.