It’s Time to Be Still – Remove Your Tolerations and Breathe Again!
Your life is filled with activities, work, more work, juggling multiple responsibilities, meetings, deadlines, networking events, managing your finances, family, friends, responsibilities, hopes, desires, wants … and more wants. Mine is too. Do you ever feel exhausted? When do you take a breather?
Think about it – when was the last time you were really still?
Being still is the pure pleasure of doing nothing. Just being. Feeling the ecstasy of simply being able to breathe. It is the feeling of being ‘enough. Enough in your own eyes, not simply in the eyes of your partner, your children, your friends, extended family, your colleagues … and the list can go on. Are you enough for you?
I am so grateful to have learned to take a step back in my own life and simply be me for myself and it feels good. One of the wonderful things about being a Coach is that I am able to take a step back and be objective for others too. To help them clear the clutter in their minds.
What is the first step to being still? Remove the tolerations in your life. So, what are those tolerations? They can be small daily ‘nigglers’ or they can be great big whopping, irritating tolerations that make us feel guilty almost every day.
Conduct a “Tolerations Audit” of your life and write down absolutely everything that may be an issue. These issues can be as small as the flickering light bulb in your office that needs replacing, the tiny torn patch in the leather of your desk chair to the pile of documents that needs filing, the emails that are semi-urgent (or are they?), to the colleague who interrupts constantly, or the manager who doesn’t listen, to constantly working late into the night, lack of time to exercise, people whom you don’t want to speak to so you cross the road to avoid them when you see them in the street and the list goes on.
You’ll start to feel much lighter once you’ve been very honest with yourself and have written down every single toleration. Do you need to deal with any of them? Of course that is up to you however, if you don’t, they will continue to irritate, annoy and drain your energy. Decide how you will deal with them and when you will deal with them. Take charge of your life at work and at home. For those things that cannot be changed, accept them as they are and let go. Then you will be still. Then you will be able to breathe and you will be enough.
I’d like to share this from Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Stillness Speaks’:
” ‘What a miserable day.’
‘He didn’t have the decency to return my call.’
‘She let me down.’
Little stories we tell ourselves and others, often in the form of complaints. They are
unconsciously designed to enhance our always deficient sense of self through being ‘right’ and making something or someone ‘wrong.’ Being ‘right’ places us in a position of imagined superiority and so strengthens our false sense of self, the ego. This also creates some kind of enemy: yes, the ego needs enemies to define its boundary, and even the weather can serve that function.
Through habitual mental judgment and emotional contraction, you have a personalised, reactive relationship to people and events in your life. These are all forms of self-created suffering, but they are not recognised as such because to the ego they are satisfying. The ego enhances itself through reactivity and conflict.
How simple life would be without those stories.
‘It is raining.’
‘He did not call.’
‘I was there. She was not’ .”
‘I was there. She was not’ .”
Be present, accept every situation for what it is, not what you interpret it to be. Remove your tolerations. Then, be still.
Jane is Director of Style Success. For more information on coaching or training for your organization visit: www.janejacksoncoach.com or email: jane@janejacksoncoach.com
