Returning home to yourself is akin to standing before a door. Your only job is to stand there and return to it over and over again, especially if you find yourself wandering away in forgetfulness.
Because the door to true healing is only opened from the other side.
You do not hold the key. Grace is the one on the inside. It is She who decides whether and when to open the door and welcome her beloved in.
We cannot ever truly know what causes us to shift our state of consciousness, or what the exact cause of our awakening and healing is. We tend to believe it is all just a matter of accumulating enough knowledge; a matter of collecting as much information as we can so we can add it to the coin pusher of our minds …just a little more intellect and maybe those pennies will fall into our body and become cellular.
Nothing comes to us until we first come to it with sincere humility.
Like a mother who cannot let her child through the door before she knows they won’t leave again (or raid the penny jar), grace waits for us to show up sober, mature, and willing to leave our knowledge at the door.
Showing up for our doorway home is a mellowing of the will, a gentle folding in towards the heart, a gradual thinning out of our mental afflictions so that we can stand before our own unlimited potential in our best dress.
In truth, our highest act of free will is surrender.
You would not be here had you not been led through a door. And not everyone is lead. Not everyone is called home in the way you are. Some are fine to live in the world and be of the world, suffering the ways inherent to forgetfulness. But you are not. You know that there is something else to this life, and it’s ‘a something’ that longs for you in return.
Grace doesn’t open to the good and worthy but to anyone who is sincere in leaving the idea of good and worthy behind.
Grace comes to us when we are truly available, truly done with struggle, open to losing what we think we know in order to become an apprentice of uncertainty. It’s the space we create inside us that grace loves; she needs room to roll up her sleeves and get to work.
It’s often our most difficult moments that are the very moments that open our hearts and minds to grace. Grace has found me in places I couldn’t find myself. She has been both gentle and fierce in her presence, making herself known in moments that have been most painfully human.
I remember once sitting in the bathtub in the middle of another unbearable episode of dissociation. I couldn’t feel the water on my body. I couldn’t see clearly because I had tunnel vision. I hadn’t eaten for days. I was stuck in perpetual freeze mode, unable to touch life, unable to take the clingfilm off my skin to feel the world. In the darkness, I decided to let go of the fight to feel, I gave up the will that wanted healing to look a certain way.
And from that space I managed to free up inside, I started to sing. It was not my own voice, although of course, it was. And it was a song I have no recollection of, nor can I remember the words now. It was Grace’s song. It showed me that I could in fact feel something. I could touch sound. There was refuge. And the more my mind told me of all the ways it was wrong and that I was crazy, the louder I sang.
That moment subtly changed the dynamic of my interior life. It gave the Self back its authority over a sub terrain of fracture. It was the first step on the pathway home, walked by the greater part of who I was.
A body in defiance of mind. A moment of resilience against the stronghold of the past. Grace.
Grace is what opens the door. Surrender is what knocks.
And evolution doesn’t end with the door of grace opening. It starts. Living inside the home of a new perspective is the start of living in a completely different world, a world you want to love because of its fragility.
When we understand that so much of our path is unfathomable, our chances of awakening, the depths we reach, not in our own hands - we cannot blame others for their doors not being opened. Only understand that they had their reasons for not showing up, for not believing that surrender could yield such power.
It’s not up to us how tall we grow or how far we make it. But it is in our power to stand before the door of our own homecoming and patiently surrender to its will. It is in our power to do the work of psychological, emotional, and spiritual maturity so that when we surrender, we do it fully from the heart, not the mind.
And what we wake up to, what the door opens to – is ourselves. Because it is always opening us more and more to the home that we are.
How to meet grace;
Surrender your path to full collaboration with grace. This means leaving space inside you for not knowing. If you dedicate a space within you where your thoughts, emotions, ideas, philosophies, ideologies, and conclusions do not enter, then grace will be a guiding force in your life.
Choose this moment. Everything in your life has brought you here, to this exact place for a reason. Can you find that reason and see what your life is truly asking of you right now?
Reflect on your recent shift in perspective and question how it happened. Can you say with certainty what caused it?
Show up for your door by loosening your mind’s egoic grip through self-inquiry. Question your thoughts and beliefs. Gradually build a relationship with your body through somatic work so you have full access to your intuition. Relax your longings so that life’s plan can move through you.
Question: Where has grace shown up in your life?
Love Sez
A Personal Note
I will be returning to Denmark in July for the first time in 3 years. I’m incredibly excited to be back in the cabin that we built on the north coast and will send reflections and photos of the journey in next Thursday’s newsletter.
I’m currently compressing my recent journals into a self-guided course (out in August) and find it incredibly interesting to go back through them.
One thing that comes up for me is that we know. Despite everything, we know what to do, and what’s right for us. Even if we doubt it, ignore it, even if it takes us years to actually make the changes, even if we have valid reasons not to follow our deeper voice…we know. Instead of investing our energy in self-doubt, we can put all our energy into accepting that deeper knowing, and move just one inch towards it.
Do you journal? What is your medium for making sense of life?
Grace & the doorway home