Stumbling into Grace

Lately I have been embracing and enjoying the idea that anything that I dislike in someone else is a mirror for me of something I have not been recognizing in myself.  Not a novel concept for sure, but actually fun in practice when there is no judgment about what I see.  Everyone is a gift to me.  As anyone who has read my columns has noticed, my ex-husband is the gift that keeps on giving in this arena.  So when, recently, I realized that I was still furious with him and still could not forgive him for something, I could not wait to find out what it was.  It was not, I knew for sure, for leaving me for another woman.   That saved my life.  No, it came down to the thing I said to him at the lawyer’s office the day we signed our separation agreement almost 7 years ago, “I wish only one thing for you… (dramatic pause) that you WAKE UP.”  I realized that was still true somewhere, although my definition for that had changed dramatically.  Fascinating… why am I still so unable to forgive him for pretending to wake up, convincing himself that he was devoted to waking up and yet refusing to actually do it?

The good thing about checking in when you notice something like this is that you don’t have to keep going around and around in circles trying to understand it because the real answer is always inside.  So, okay, I asked my little girl, “are you furious with me for something like that?”  And of course the answer was “Yes. You tell me that you are committed to being completely there for me, for loving me, remembering who I really, how incredible I really am, but it is just talk.  You are nice to me.  You keep me comfortable but you are not completely there.”  I know this is true.  It is so easy for me to do for clients during sessions what I so easily forget to do for my own little girl.  I wondered what it would take.  Certainly NOT beating myself up to make me different! 

The next day, I was working with my extraordinary craniosacral healer Eileen.  She was working on my solar plexus, on releasing what I experienced as a painful metal lid, a disk that I had adopted to protect myself growing up.  As the disk softened and I experimented with how it felt being without it, I became aware of the two choices of the wounded self, having the disk or not having any protection and I knew that there would be a third way.  So I looked under the disk and there was a layer of anger but instead of getting lost in that, I remembered that anger was a cover too and I went down even further.  Under that, at the bottom of the well of my third chakra, I saw a scared little girl.  I reported this to Eileen who asked, “Is there something you want to do about the scared little girl?”  I went back, thinking I would just stay with her or do something Inner Bondingish.  But instead, as soon as I went back, as soon as I turned to her, I was blindsided by a gentle bolt of grace and a single word “Reverence.”  The scared little girl had vanished replace by an amazing sacredness, reverence and awe.

I know that was the next layer of learning to love my little girl, not as a job that I do not always remember to do, but as a way to be.  With that bolt of energy, the pathway in my brain between the idea of my little girl, of my essence, got fused with the experience of grace.   I can no longer imagine her without also feeling her sacredness. And it has changed the way I see others too, people I pass at work, when I look at them under the pain and darkness that they carry, I see their sacredness.  And, yes, I am no longer furious with my ex either.  It was never about him anyway, at least until the next gift shows up.