Grace Fierce and Sweet

Grace Sweet and Fierce                                                                    November 12, 2020 
It is said in many traditions that it is not the calamity or challenge that is grace but rather what arises inside us to meet it. It’s easy to see the hand of grace in the sweetness of life, not so much in the fire. We attempt to rationalize, saying bad things happen for a reason, but do they? We humans have a need to try and make reason in order to stay sane and sometimes we can make lemon aid from lemons but not always. There are unspeakable horrors in the world.

Grace is in our response. Grace is seen in how we meet both joy and challenge. Practice aligns us to the downstream of grace, always there, always available. It is the vehicle that enables the location of, and availability to what is our birth right: connection, direct and immediate, to the source of knowledge, insight and creativity. 

Neelakantha Meditation is natural, effective and simple to learn. And, at the same time, we do not mistake simple for beginner. Life is precious and it is short. We do not wish to linger at beginner levels. We want to proceed in our sādhanā in order to increase our capacity to be more fully human, to live life to the fullest as we make our unique contribution.

The Householder Sādhanā, is the sum total of an authentic, coherent set of sequential practices, that each individual chooses to engage with in order to support, inform and enhance life altogether. And yet sādhanā, as it brings both sweetness and fire, is inherently counter egoic. The fire of meditation brings light in the form of knowledge and also purification in order to reassemble limited ego in higher and higher iterations.

We are human and humans seek reassurance, a necessity in knowing, am I moving in the direction desired? This countering of the ego, is neither to destroy nor to gluttonize it, but rather to expand freedom. The freedom to respond in the manner we desire as opposed to what is programed via limited ego’s strongly entrenched self-preservation. 

As we nourish our understanding of what is happening, via study and discussion, we feed  and settle the mind. It is then more able to catch up to the truth of our experience in deep meditation. This nourishment also refines the very mechanism that understands and thus not only colors new experiences of every possible sort, but reaches back and pulls forward what was known, sharpening and deepening that too. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

As we refresh again and again the what why and how of practice, we make the mind our friend and in the process accelerate practice and our very experience of life altogether. Grace is in the response. Our capacity to draw on her, colors our response.

There is the field of karma on the relative and field of grace in the absolute. We have the understanding of the karmaśya, the storehouse of the sum total of every experience every had- positive, negative and neutral- and the metaphor of carefully tip toeing around the herd of sleeping elephants, so we do not wake the negative monsters up! But at a certain moment, we must face what is in there if true healing is to occur and fullness restored. We witness this in the world today. 
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The capacity of grace to move through the relative in increasingly known terms, is what drives the highest responses. Her invisible movement through the fabric of life is hard to discern. Practice increases our experience of the subtle and in this, to discern the mysterious movement of grace in our lives.