I write this post with a certain apprehension.  You see this is the third time that I have written “Every Moment Grace.” The prior two entries written on consecutive days were mistakenly erased.  Ironic.  As the words vanished before my eyes I was confident that I would be able to retrieve them.  Alas, even the technological guru’s were mystified.  Thus I was given another opportunity to bow before the Divine, to relinquish my attachment. To let go. 

Truth:  What is intrinsic to who I am can never be lost.

I have been challenged by spirit all of my life to live what I know to be true.

To trust with absolute faith, that every experience of my life is an act of grace.

Grace is defined as“the freely given unmerited favor and love of God.”I have known this in joy and in sorrow, for grace is truly whatever awakens us to a deeper level of consciousness. Pain, suffering and loss are harbingers of transformation. These experiences take us to the marrow of our being, to the core of our human longing. They inspire and challenge our strength and courage and ultimately reveal that every moment is possessed with meaning and value. They connect us to the present and illuminate our true nature. I have never not known the “unmerited favor and grace of God.  In fact I have felt it most keenly in the most traumatic moments of my life.  I have been made whole and holy by“ill fate.”  

Sacred pain is the “great awakener,”and it is inescapable. It is the light that pierces the darkness of our ignorance. For it connects us to the truth of our circumstance, to the depth of our feeling, to the calling of the soul.  It carries us limp and lost into the sanctity of our interior.  It swiftly removes the superficial and the extraneous. We are left with what is raw and real, intrinsic and eternal.  In our naked emptiness we are liberated.  Pain is grace.  

The greater the adversity the greater the opportunity for transcendence.  When we exhaust our own “known” abilities and resources in times of adversity, we are forced to surrender. This surrender allows us to experience the deeper levels of our nature.  Here we are freed of all resistance, judgement, and effort.  Thus we access the part of ourselves that exceeds the boundaries and limitations of our usual modes of perception. We awaken. Adversity hones our virtue, inspires our innovation and creativity and fosters an endurance and perseverance that defies our own will.  It whispers to our reluctancy and fear… Rise! And so against all odds we do.   

  To live in a state of grace is to be in communion with the Divine. 

  I have awakened to this truth.  Life is grace. It is continually conspiring to choreograph our lives in a way that is awakening and liberating.  We must be willing to surrender our expectations, our attachments, our limiting belief systems, and our incessant need to control our experiences.  How is this done?  By radical acceptance and trust.  Faith in what cannot be known, rationalized or reasoned.  This requires a perceptual lens that sees the world in all its beauty and horror as ultimately benevolent. A desire to willing sacrifice the sovereignty of the ego to the sacred fire of consciousness.  This is a ritual we enact every moment that we wake up.  For in that instance we are no longer possessed by our conditioning, by our thinking minds. We allow the power of our own consciousness to illuminate our experience and define our path.

Remember whatever we bow to becomes our teacher.  Bow, bow deeply.

santidevi