How To Live With More Grace
What is grace? Do we need more of it in this culture where grit and grind are celebrated? Does grace work with progress, or does it operate counter to momentum?
Grace is the inexplicable, yet necessary ingredient in life, especially when the daily becomes messy, difficult, rough.
Yet if we wish to cultivate grace when it’s hard, it is essential to practice living in grace on the daily. Otherwise, when the hard comes around we will be thrown down to darkness without a path of light to follow back upwards towards our ever-present ascent.
Grace is allowing. Allowing what is to be as it is. Allowing yourself to be as you are.
It’s the feeling of spacious cushioning around yourself and whatever situation you find yourself in so that the darkness feels embraced with softness.
How beautiful is that? For every moment of darkness to be embraced with softness? Then darkness wouldn’t be something to run from or become buried underneath. It would just be another texture, sensation that your life-dance carries to gift you depth, true understanding, and compassion.
When I was newly postpartum, it felt easy to grant myself grace, particularly in the first few weeks. It was easy to hold myself in grace with my aching abdomen, sore breasts, fatigued eyes. Not only because I had a beautiful baby boy to love fully, but because my body still held the pains of this huge transformation. I noticed once the physical pains subsided, culturally-familiar thoughts rose to the surface. These aren’t specific to me personally, but to the collective female, child-bearing identity. “When will my body look like itself again? Shouldn’t this swelling in my abdomen be down by now?” Grace was subsiding and ego was seeping into its place.
Gratefully, these thoughts don’t hurt or wreak havoc on us. It’s only in the belief of them, in the wearing of them as an identity, that they can affect our mood, how we speak to our loved ones, and whether tears of emotional frustration weep from our eyes.
The other option is to hear them for what they are. Just thoughts. It doesn’t matter if they entered your psyche from a collective female pain, or the language of our parents, or the confidence of our friends who are struggling, or hormones, or just because. What matters is that you hear them, see them, and bring grace to them. Allow them to be there. Chuckle at the fact that they seem small, and hysterically insignificant when you are filled with so much light.
In this instance, and all instances, grace allows us to move forward in joy, with darkness. The “pushing-against” force that holds pain in it’s place on the inside softens and then ascent becomes the natural movement.
Grace, and presence ride in tandem. They can be easy to hold when darkness is big and obvious or new and raw.
But what happens to your grace when the obvious and raw subside to the mundane and ok?
When you dance are you pushing-against what is? Or can you hold your body and mind in grace? When you live are you pushing against your situation? Or can you hold yourself in grace?
Be curious. See what happens. I’d love to know. Please share. It inspires us all.
