Shadow of Impatience
impatience, n. – the tendency to be impatient; irritability or restlessness. (Google/Oxford Languages)
The Shadow of Impatience is described by Richard Rudd as a “deep distrust of life” and “the fear that there is no underlying order to the universe.” Oof. On the slightly less heavy side, it is the faith or lack of faith in divine timing and that things will find a way to work out. It is a fear of time running out.
Not stated in the Gene Keys book, yet how it feels to be is how each of us as individuals have been traumatized and conditioned into fearing life itself. It’s the worry about when the next shoe will drop. Or in believing that only bad things will happen. That life is happening TO you and not FOR you. This is how most of the people in the world operate.
To be clear, not everything that happens in life is “meant to be.” People who experience assault, racism, and other forms of harm and random violence are not meant to be. Those experiences do happen to people.
Rudd states that “if you are feeling impatient, your breathing has become shallow and your nervous system is overactivated.” #trauma To extend beyond what is stated in Gene Keys, there is a more scientific aspect of this to explore. I was listening to Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Daniel Maté and Gabor Maté. To provide an extraordinarily brief summary to such a book, this book is about how trauma and the cultures we live in can make us sick.
Our genetics are an interesting thing. Some people can have the genes for an illness and the gene never clicks on, but for others it’s a death sentence. Some people may not have the genes for something, yet seem to get sick anyway. Despite all the work that has been done on the human genome, science is finding that our environment (external and internal) plays the larger role in whether we get sick or not. Our traumas, our conditioning. Our external environment can be our home life, but also our socioeconomic status, exposure to abuse and racism. Our internal environment is how we have internalized those events or continue to internalize these events. A helpful video is this one by The Trauma Foundation – Trauma and the Nervous System: A Polyvagal Approach.
What does this have to do with the Shadow of Impatience? Nothing. And everything. First, the Shadow of Impatience, from my optic, is something we learn. We aren’t born with it; we are taught it either consciously and, more than likely, subconsciously. At some point we learn not to feel safe or that bad things happen often from people who have also learned the same thing. We pass it down through our lineages much like our genetics. Second, the Shadow of Impatience is “a…human response to a particular set of environmental conditions. Third, the Shadow of Impatience feels alone. People often feel alone in their suffering. That they are the only one.
The Repressive Nature of the Shadow of Impatience is “Pessimistic.” Ah, yes. My Pessimism, my old friend. I lived from a state (and occasionally bounce back into it) of sarcastic pessimism. Assuming the worst for everything. Everything was terrible. Rudd states that there is no real way of healing from this until life creates such a terrible crisis that the only way to get to the other side of it is to have hope for something, anything, to be on the other side of that crisis. It forces a person to develop of trust that there’s something out there pulling strings and that if just one of those strings has some good in it, then that is worth having faith for.
The Reactive Nature of the Shadow of Impatience is “Pushy.” These are the angry, forceful, bull-in-the-china-shop types. Always angry. Always lashing out. Eventually, these people snap…. And that’s when they get to choose how to start living their life again. The same as before? OR that there’s more to life than being angry all the time.
How to Work with the Shadow of Impatience:
- One thing Rudd says is: “When you find yourself moving through a difficult period, it means that all of life is moving through a difficult period.” No one is ever alone even when it feels that way. In Buddhism, there is a practice called Tonglen. It is a meditative practice of giving and taking, or giving and receiving. The basic premise is that when something is troubling you, you do this meditation and imagine that you can see the other people who are experiencing a similar situation/feeling as you. For every in-breath, you inhale the pain, hurt and suffering of everyone going through this “thing” at the same time as you. For the out-breath, you exhale the love, support, and caring that you and they need. You can Google Tonglen meditations if this feels resonate to you. Tara Brach has a great one here.
- Explore your relationship to time. How do you experience time? What does time mean to you? What is your relationship to feeling rushed or feeling impatient?
- When you read the short descriptions of the Repressive or Reactive states of the Shadow of Impatience, which sounds more like you? It could be both. (There are some shadows that I’ll explore further in the Gene Keys text where I definitely had/have attributes of both.) How does it feel knowing that one of the only ways to heal from this shadow is to hit a rock bottom? They say that people don’t change unless have to. While I have found that isn’t always true, it does feel true to me for this shadow.
- Slow down. Learn and adapt to taking things slow. Are you clumsy, bump into things, drop things, etc? I take these things as little hints from the Universe to slow the fuck down. There was a saying that I’ve heard before: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
- What does faith and trust look and feel like to you?
- I won’t try to convince you to believe in a higher power if you don’t already. (Though I do believe that your lack of belief is a spiritual path in its own way, but I digress.) If you do already believe in some higher power or higher consciousness (God, Goddess, Gods, Allah, Spirit, Divine, Source, Universe, etc. – To me, these are all just different cultural interpretations of one higher consciousness or archetypes of that same higher consciousness; All are valid; All are personal to each individual), what is your relationship to this consciousness?
- Where are some places in your life that you could being to practice patience? Pets? Family members?
- What meaning have you placed on time? How may your relationship to time be different from someone else’s? Where do you make that person wrong instead of addressing your own attachment to time?
- The concept of time is manmade. If people weren’t here, there would be no “time.” Things would just exist. How does that feel to you to hear that time does not really exist or wouldn’t exist if we weren’t here? (… Even if you think “that’s bullshit”)
Not sure how to work with this? Check out this Blog Post here to see how to work with the Shadows. Also, feel free to check out my courses Honoring Your No and Owning My Sh*t here to help work on that self-awareness piece.
Disclaimer: What I find unhelpful with the Gene Keys text is that it is more spiritual than realistic, especially when these states are resulting in mental illness. Maybe all mental illness has a root in shadow, but that isn’t for me to say and it is super invalidating for people who experience these states. So as you read through this, or any of these shadows, know that your own experience is valid regardless of impersonal spiritual texts. This goes for Gene Keys, Human Design, and any other spiritual text even from world religions. If these texts invalidate a person’s humanity, then it’s the text that is the problem and not the person. Always use personal discernment. More of my two-cents on spiritual and religious dogma, modalities, and texts here.
