Many of you know that I've gone to New York twice this year to receive training in the Enneagram Psycho-Spiritual model. This has been a reality altering experience for me. I feel that the faith I've had for much of my life has come to life. I have been blessed to have this opportunity to engage in this deeply meaningful learning process about the nature of humanity and the relationship between us and God. This experience has brought my passion for my spiritual life and my passion for the human condition together by acting as a bridge between the two. I would like to write more about this process and will over time for those interested. I just have so much stirring in my soul that I have to write. Today I just want to start with a little something that came into my heart as I felt a gratitude for grace that was so much more vivid than anything I had experienced in my life:
Grace is an endowment of the true nature-an endowment that provides us with guidance, peace, truth, the experience of holy love, real freedom . . .
At the point at which I knew I was closer to understanding what I truly am I knew I was closer to experiencing grace. An emptiness precedes the openness. And openness is a way, a manner of being, a something that you can only notice has temporarily eluded you and reclaim. The grace, itself, is God’s work. My work is to meet it where it extends lightly toward me, urges me toward itself with committed longing.
My body responds, my visceral nature knowing someone . . . everyone . . . is here, always comfortably, instructively here. I acknowledge every cell in my body with my body itself-the whole-and each cell grows its own ability to arrive and connect, to receive and to reply. I am.
And as I am I feel.
I feel my measure-my measure of love, of anguish, of joy of comfort, curative sorrow and peace emanating from the single source-the source from which all experience them knowingly or unknowingly. My measure-floating effortlessly in freedom, liberated from the falsehood and subjectivity that birth confusion and resistance. And I could linger here
. . . and sometimes I do.
And as I feel I see
And I see with no words, no shapes, no colors. I see where the humanity wakens to the divine and I can see that freedom whisks the anguish along and glides it almost imperceptibly past the form, that incarnate impression.
. . . and then I know with every part of me seen and unseen.
And in that moment the bends and curves in my body dissolve and the whisp of a heart’s cry liquefies into the hunger of all and the spoken outpourings dissipate. And all that remains is a straight line from here to the fullness of reality.
With gentle forewarning I return to my numb slumber with the promise to sleep more placidly and just a moment less than last I slept. And when I wake . . . grace . . . grace will have awoken me with that sweet sound that is the muse of hymns and grace will turn me within and without toward the source and into the light.
Much Love, Barb
