Everyday grace

🎶 Soul song: A recommended listen while you read: 174 by Timo Krantz.

There is a very subtle form of resistance that can come up often in daily life.

Something happens or goes differently than our preference, someone says something we don’t like.

Inside we protest or contract:“No thank you, not for me, not like this.”

We tense up, or get angry inside. We pretend to be fine but something within has closed off. We don’t like what’s happening.

And we ache or feel stuck, wishing for things to be different, different than how they are.

What can we do with that tension?

One approach is to try to tidy up after life.

If you have a perfectionist streak, you know this route can take you surprisingly far - but it’s limited.

And also exhausting. Trying to control life, to manage what we don’t like, requires constant monitoring. You find yourself efforting, bracing, moving against the current. Overextending.

Life just isn’t that tidy. One way or another, the cracks will show.

The mess is always here. You can’t take just the neat parts and leave the rest to someone else.

The mess is the love, the love is the mess.

The other way is to soften inside, to let go and open to the messiness.

What if nothing is actually wrong? What if every part of life, even the parts we don’t like - what if those parts are just as essential as the lovely parts?

What if it all just brings us back to our humble, tender hearts?

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This passage from Siddhartha reveals the hidden mysteries of this path:

The world..is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment. Every moment already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men. All sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin1. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman2.

….Everything that exists is good. Everything is perfect,… death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary. Everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding, my turning toward……

I have experienced in my own mind and body that I was very much in need; I needed sensual pleasure, striving for possessions, vanity, and extreme debasement and despair in order to learn to give up resisting, in order to learn to love the world, in order to cease comparing it to some imagined world that I wished for, some form of perfection I had thought up, and let it be as it is and love it and be glad to be part of it.

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha as cited by by Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe3

We cannot separate the ugly from the beautiful. The ugly is the beautiful.

The young one day, will inevitably become the old.

Everything is beautifully alive, and everything is also tremendously dying.

Those who choose to open to walk this path of grace know - in the embrace of all there is a sacred peace, a resonant quiet.

There is surprisingly, deep rest. A holiness and unconditional wholeness.

Grace, grace.

We don’t even need to look so far. In the darkest of places and situations on this earth there is light, there are humans being kind, there is fullness, love. This is our natural state.

So we flow, onwards and onwards, with the beautiful, messy river of life that continues - whether we resist it or not.

To be here is to live fully, live messily. You can’t really leave any part of it out. Well, you could try, but where’s the fun in that?

If you missed last month’s Personal Roadmap workshop I’ll be teaching it once again this January, right in time to get set up for the new year. Space is limited, please register here ✨

Some comments from recent participants:

“It was absolutely wonderful and was a beautiful blend of spirit and practicality. It even got me doing my morning pages again this morning which hasn’t happened in over 2 1/2 years...”

“I recommend this experience, it’s good practice to do, it was a fun, focused and gave me good results. I feel that I am coming into the new year with more awareness, drive and direction.”

“When we did the roadmap workshop I was at a crossroads about a trip I was considering….after I got immediate clarity and that week I started taking action, and everything weirdly worked out - I was like what is happening, this is crazy!”