Responding to Grace with Gratitude
There is only one response to Grace and that is gratitude and surrender. Nityananda said, “Surrender everything that keeps you from Śiva,” and that’s an absolute requirement for true spiritual growth.
Here’s a secret: It’s not what you’ve surrendered that qualifies you; it’s what you haven’t surrendered that disqualifies you. And it is only gratitude that makes our choice to surrender a real possibility, because only from gratitude do we gain the capacity to face the perceived adversity we live with day after day. With gratitude, we can actively look for the changes in ourselves that are required, and we can dissolve all our resistance to making them.
When those poignant moments of inner transformation are made available to us, we won’t change if we’re not grateful for the opportunity to have some part of us that binds our awareness to be removed, and to be freed from that. Our tendency to fight and struggle reflects our resistance to growth. Those are defense mechanisms we put up against the opportunity and possibility for the change that Grace has made available to us.
So often, we imagine the descent of Grace as angels, twinkling lights, and fairy dust. We like to think that when Grace finally shows up in our lives it will make everything perfect, give us everything we want, and eliminate all our problems.
Yet my personal experience of Grace can be summed up simply as the request for me to grow and to change. Grace requests that we change our awareness so that we might receive something we aren’t even looking for, something bigger than our current capacity to accept or even to understand. And what could be a more profound gift than the opportunity to transform our limited understanding and suffering?
Why We May Face Difficulty
Nityananda said, “Devotion is not intended to eliminate difficulties. There is no relation whatsoever between devotion and difficulty.” The same can be said of Grace. This is because it is only Grace that frees, and in its own freedom Grace may take whatever means necessary to do so—even means we may perceive as difficult.
Grace is available to us at every moment of our life, but so often we don’t recognize it in all its varied forms. Part of the intensity of Grace is that it slaps us around for a while, pushing against our resistance, and if we still don’t get the message, it finally drops a mountain on us in the form of some life-altering, traumatic experience.
Who are we to judge which experience is Grace and which is not? The important thing is that Grace is attempting to wake us up, and as Rudi said, “Pain is God loving you.” Perhaps Grace has already spent thousands of years sprinkling fairy dust on us and we just hadn’t noticed!
It has always been extraordinary for me to watch Grace show up in people’s lives and how they proceed to discount or reject it because it doesn’t look the way they think it should look. We must find gratitude even while facing our resistance.
When you find yourself wrapped up in tension, ready to fight, needing to control, reacting to the way things are because they aren’t the way you want them to be, just stop, take a breath, open your heart, and feel the gratitude for the possibility that you can be changed. Not that the situation or the other person or people involved can change, but that you can be changed.
If you come up against that tightness and can’t find gratitude, go find a closet, get inside, close the door, and start doing the double-breath. When you find that simple openness and gratitude, then open the door and reengage your life. And remember that the metaphorical closet is your own heart.
Gratitude is the Resonance of Openness
The willingness to simply stop, let go, and find openness and gratitude is our greatest defense against the ego. The ego is never grateful, so when we don’t feel gratitude and openness, we can be certain that we’re functioning from ego. These are such simple clues, and our capacity to be aware of our state is what lets us know when we feel gratitude and when we don’t. If we feel openness, simplicity, and joy in every experience, then life flows simply and easily. It is complete and full. Where was it written that life should not be about abundance, celebration, simplicity, and joy?
Gratitude is the resonance of openness. We find refuge is our own heart, which is also God’s Heart. In the midst of any experience, we must find openness and gratitude because only then can we understand that the experience is not happening to us but from within us in order to reveal to us our misunderstanding.
This is how we become responsible for our experience in life, as we can no longer blame anybody or anything for that experience. Without taking that responsibility we will not grow. It is our response to and awareness of Grace in our lives that we must be cognizant of, in all its forms.
Grace may come to you in the form of angels or in a powerful vision of a saint, or it may come in the form of someone asking you to take out the trash. Only the mind draws a distinction, and the mind can never feel gratitude. It can perceive it; it can think about it; it can detail what life would look like to enable it to feel gratitude, but true gratitude is the resonance of an open heart.
People fail in their spiritual effort because they lose sight of what they’re attempting to achieve. It is our response to that awakening power that is the expression of our gratitude, and it is our commitment that gives us the strength and clarity to sacrifice whatever ego, whatever limitation we are fortunate enough to have revealed to us, instead of fighting that revelation. We must open, receive, and surrender to that truth. In that state of stillness and surrender, we are freed from ignorance and delusion, and God reveals Himself.