A few weeks ago I was visiting a friend who recently moved to Bangor. We first met when she started cutting my hair ten years ago. I like her honesty and value her insight. She said to me, "Sharon, you were always looking for something." I chuckled and agreed. We talked about how unhappy I was with my hair when I first started seeing her and how hard she worked to find a style that worked. In the beginning she wasn't sure she would be able to help me, which I didn't realize. I am glad she stuck with me. I think grace stepped in.
Early this week I revisited Anne Lamott's thoughts on grace. In Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith she writes, "[Grace] is unearned love - the love that goes before, that greets us on the way" (p. 139). Then Anne shares, "I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us" (p. 143). I love that I don't need to understand grace to have it enter my life.
Grace has been at work in my life again. The first clue was last week when I had a full night's sleep for the first time in months. This happened after I started watching the webcasts of Eckhart Tolle with Oprah about A New Earth. I began to focus on my breathing. With each chapter I was better able to observe my thinking and stay present.
Yesterday came the shift I have prayed for - I could feel it.
A year ago I lost all that I thought I was: my function as a mother, my role as a student, the home I had known for over 28 years. I was not any of those things. I also was not the racing thoughts or extreme emotions that seemed to take over my life. I knew something had to change but I couldn't make it happen, no matter how hard I tried. And now I know why.
Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth, "The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn't a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that. You don't have to become worthy first....Only the first awakening, the first glimpse of consciousness without thought, happens by grace, without any doing on your part" (p. 259-260).
I am grateful for this time in my life. My days of doing, doing, doing did not get me anywhere. It is only through stillness I have caught a glimpse of who I am. Again, quoting Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, "So while you are perhaps still waiting for something significant to happen in your life, you may not realize that the most significant thing that can happen to a human being has already happened within you: the beginning of the separation process of thinking and awareness" (p. 262-63).
The journey continues.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Breathing is completely underestimated, and totally taken for granted by most everyone. About a week after I started on my CPAP last year, I was at a work retreat where they had us do some deep breathing excercises, and it was amazing what happens when you just stop for a second to enjoy taking a relaxing breath. Oxygen is good.
Post a Comment