Fierce Grace

“Any deep wound or loss can be transformed into fierce grace when we meet the pain with a caring presence. Although the pain of trauma may lead us to believe that our spirit has been tainted or destroyed, that isn’t so. No amount of violence can corrupt the timeless and pure presence that is the very ground of our being. Waves of fear or shame may possess us temporarily, but as we continue to entrust ourselves to loving presence, as we let ourselves feel loved, our lives become more and more an expression of who or what we are. This is the essence of grace... 

-Tara Brach, True Refuge

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The devastation of trauma can be represented not only by scars in our flesh but also by the fragile scabs on our souls - so easily ripped off by the slightest bumps and sharp edges we stumble into. When uncovered, these deep, raw wounds so often become our identity as we move through life infected by the pain, shame, fear, anger, and self-loathing that that lies within them. That thick, dark sickness has driven me to commit unspeakable violence upon my own heart, and often on my body where healing was much more predictable and observable.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I realized that I was permanently and irrevocably hobbled by the trauma that I have breathed like air for most of my life. But I think that, even before it became a conscious thought, I was living from that understanding. Safety and love could not co-exist in that world. When someone spoke to me of healing, self-compassion, or grace, I just somehow knew that it didn’t apply to me – that I was far beyond the reach of those words and the hope that they might hold for others.

Metta (Lovingkindness) practices have really been the foundation, I think, for bringing some care to the painful, exposed wounds on my heart. It seemed so silly at first, and then, I started to like it (well, okay, I liked the teacher’s soothing voice and usually fell asleep in the middle of the guided meditation for the first couple of weeks – breaking a raging cycle of insomnia that had been going on for over a month). Then, I started to hate it. Everything in my system went into resistance mode, rejecting all notion that I was deserving or even capable of being loving or loveable or loved.

And then one day, I turned it on and, somewhere deep inside, it connected. So much sadness and compassion welled up in me with a sudden awareness that I am not what happened to me — a sense of relief, a loosening and relaxing deep in my chest, and an understanding that those things that happened to me brought so much harm and pain to me, but they didn’t happen to me because I was bad, and they didn’t make me bad. They just made me hurt. And my heart broke open, and broke open, and broke open. For the first time, the words, “I am not bad” and “I am not ruined” finally felt like truth. That was the day that I stopped believing that there was something in me that could never, ever heal.

It wasn’t like I suddenly woke up to loving myself unconditionally in that one sitting, but I had, in that moment, come into contact with the gripping, aching suffering of hating and judging myself . . . the violence of self-loathing that I was still, after so many years, inflicting — tearing off the scabs over and over so the wounds on my soul could never close up. Looking into a mirror and really feeling that pain planted a seed of intention in me to be more kind, more loving, and more present and to allow love to flow into my heart from every direction. It reconnected me to my true being.

Fierce grace.

It isn’t perfect. My teacher often says that practice is nothing more than a process of forgetting and remembering and I think that really is the ultimate truth of it. The goal is, I think, to simply to remember one more time than you forget — get up one more time than you fall down — maybe to do it just a little faster than the last time.

I recently read a poem by Hafiz that touched and inspired me, he writes:

You don’t have to act crazy anymore—
We all know you were good at that.

Now retire, my dear,
From all that hard work you do
Of bringing pain to your sweet eyes and heart.
Look in a clear mountain mirror—
See the Beautiful Ancient Warrior
And the Divine elements
You always carry inside.

May the wounds of every soul be soothed by the balm of lovingkindness and may every heart know the healing of fierce grace...

Namaste.