Learning to Give Yourself Grace
Finding self compassion in a difficult year
I don’t understand how it’s only April. Each week feels like a long month and, just like in 2020, it’s easy to tire of the platitudes about <gestures to the context>.
And yet… here we are. Grains of truth in the dueling experiences of having to rise again each day to live on in tension with the feeling that everything is irreparably changing (and not for “the better”).
Perhaps you, like me, are going through a simultaneous personal struggle. This year has been overwhelming in nearly every possible way. The end of a long-term romantic partnership. The death of a loved one. A deluge of work and travel. It’s left me regularly reeling: how is it only April?!
With it has also come the laundry list of what I’m not getting to. Abandoned marketing campaigns. Scraped social media initiatives. This substack languishing.
What I have learned through all of it is to meet myself with grace and humility.
Each morning on my meditation cushion I open myself to the Universe and ask to be lead to authenticity and growth, to live with intention and actualize on my unique gifts and opportunities. I thank the universe that I exist. I also ask “may I meet my challenges and struggles with humility and grace”.
Only in the last few weeks have I realized the extension of those virtues isn’t external. When I first began to practice this morning ritual I thought of humility and grace as something I’d demonstrate to others when given feedback or challenged. I now see that finding humility and grace means finding them as an experience inside myself.
Just like other emotional practices - gratitude or joy, for example - practicing humility and grace means finding those emotions in me as a keynote, then looking for opportunities, connections, and even happenstances that bring out that emotion in me. Practicing humility and grace has meant connecting with them first. Understanding their nature and then cultivating opportunities to express them.
This year has been humbling in so many big and small ways. And it’s only April.
This year has also shown me, and I hope you, much grace. The grace in kindness from friends and family supporting me in the breakup. The grace of colleagues excited about work but also willing to give good feedback.
BUT the most profound grace I’ve connected with is inside myself.
The grace to ask for help.
The grace to fall apart.
The grace to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon.
The grace to admit how less-than-perfect I truly am. And then put it on display.
Grace, ease, forgiveness, and kindness have all come to me in a moment the world is increasingly harsh and sharp. What has come with it is an ability to extend grace to others with a deeper authenticity than I have known before. Perhaps that’s the essential ingredient of humility ~ of the genuine belief we’re all in this together and we can only get through it that way.
I share this because I want you to know even the “experts” are in it.
There is no escaping this human experience. No opting out. If you live long enough you will know suffering. You will know failure. You will know loss. The person who claims not to has never deeply loved and never truly lived.
Yet we can choose how we meet that suffering and struggle.
I choose to learn from it.
And I choose to learn with as much humility and grace as I can muster each day.
Perhaps you could use some help in your own journey towards grace, authenticity, and contributing your unique gifts to what matters most. If so, please join me for the Root to Rise Retreat:
Root to Rise’s focus will be on deepening our relationship to ourselves, one another, an dour interconnected world so that we can show up fully for what matters most. It’s an opportunity to step back from the intensity and overwhelm so many of us face and work within ourselves to create the stable foundation that flourishing grows from.
You can find full details on Root to Rise here.