On becoming graced

and the nature of meditation.

"The swelling of life when met by our senses,
a body anointed in the grace of its own wildness,
a child discovering boundlessness in the world,
the shattering depths of grief,
the endless longing to become that which I already am,
your hand upon my hand,
your gaze upon the star-filled sky,
the hibiscus-tinted sunrise,
the folding back into love,
dṛśyam śarīram,
this here,
this, now:
its all Śri."

It is spring. I am sitting in the garden, sipping on my favorite green tea. The air is sweet. There is a trace of frankincense in the space coming from my neighbor's house. The light is pouring in, dappling in streams through the olive trees, and my cat is quietly sitting next to me. I picked some flowers from my pomegranate tree, deep red and fragile. Persephone rejoices in being a maiden again.

I am sitting with my senses open and porous as I prepare my upcoming retreat in September, which will be an exploration of the nature of grace, the ways we yield to it, the ways we immerse in it.

I sit with the question: “What is grace?”

I find it is not something that can be articulated, but simply felt. It is not something we can grasp through the mind. Grace arises as a murmuration of sensation, a thirst that is only quenched through openness, through becoming saturated in the present tense, through allowing ourselves to remain unbridled, alive and spacious.

Grace arises when she is recognized as the mellifluous ground on which everything is held. Grace is what happens when we soften, when we become suffused with the simplicity of being. Grace is the inherent language of the self.

It percolates into everything we do, when we do it without controlling the outcome, when we do it softly, reverently, and slowly. I find her in every crevice of this ordinary life, pouring from the sense of spaciousness that can only be experienced when I allow myself to be human.

When I remain attuned, open and receptive to life, she is there.

She has become the pulsing ripple permeating my meditation practice.

After many years of meditating as a way to control my mind, as a way to focus, as a way to resist my propensities—after many years of practicing to become more rigid—one day I softened the effort. And when I did, I found I was already meditating—I was already graced.

One of my beloved teachers, Adyashanti, calls this true meditation:
“Instead of closing in on a narrow focus, I found my own way was just to be present, which was to become totally open. This is more like listening than focusing. In that listening I discovered a very natural state, a state that is actually the only state that isn’t contrived.”

When I softened my practice, I felt grace arising as a soft widening around my chest. I understood there that grace is the nature of meditation.

And furthermore, grace is the nature of the self—the self that we experience when we tenderly work on releasing our grip on life, when we humbly look at ourselves behind the curtain of our own fixations, when we yield to life as it is.

Life anoints us with grace when we dare to live with an open heart.

Recipe for a graced life:

• Trace light with your fingertips, even if you can’t touch it.

• Let yourself be held by space.

• Lift your forearm and bring your gaze really close to your skin. Is iridescence something that can be felt?

• This goes without saying, but drink tea. There is a language that speaks through the steam rising from a warm bowl.

• Do not take yourself too seriously.

• Notice if your spiritual practices are making you more rigid and unyielding.

• When meditating, soften to what is.

• When loving another, soften to what is.

• Let go of trying to control your experience.

• Shorten the distance between you and life.

• There is no such thing as a closed heart; the heart is always radiantly alive, the heart is always open.

• Rejoice in that.