SPIRITUAL GRACE
Whereas the soul is said to ascend, grace seems to descend upon us, and lift us up. It is explicitly not arising from the ego, unless the ego is in service to something vastly larger than itself. Grace is connected to the sense that there is a higher purpose to life than self-gratification and that there are forces that support our higher selves on higher pathways.
We experience that there are some places – in nature, in our own bodies – and some moments and memories in our lives – which feel sacred. Such places become peace-bestowing locations. Such moments are ones in which linear, uni-directional, chronological time has seemed to stop. We experience, as Blake said, “eternity in an hour.” Or we may feel that the present moment has been infused, directly connected, to a past such that time makes a circle rather than being a uni-directional timeline. We are all illuminated by certain special sacred moments, as guiding lights, from our past.
It is said that, since we are structurally basically vertical living creatures, that our energy accordingly runs vertically between heaven and earth. In Zero Balancing bodywork and in various spiritual traditions, this flow of energy is primarily identified as flowing through the deepest and most dense structure in the body – the skeletal system.
When I first attended a lecture by Dr. Fritz Smith, the founder of Zero Balancing, he correlated the main layers of anatomy with successively deeper layers of energy and life function. The energetic flows around the body, the skin, and the muscles were associated with more superficial layers; the bones with the deepest. Then receiving Zero Balancing sessions gave me a direct experience of that truth. Deep inside us is conveyed an energy linked to the palpable sense that it is a act of grace to be alive.
And this gift is received. You do not create your life, you shape it and the skeleton is the armature around which you shape this life - shaped like the vibration of air though a flute played with your mouth, air, and fingers’ movement.
The most ancient music is that played through instruments made of bone.
40,000 year old flute made of bone
My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well
that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang "Abide With Me."
—Maxine Kumin from “Morning Swim”
Bones, unlike muscles, are not subject to voluntary control. They live quietly, peacefully, deep within us. They are not subject to mood swings. They don’t tense up when we’re anxious or angry. They abide.
Spirit is present, you can’t go out and find it. But it does seem to reside within us and we have the gift to be aware of that. Perhaps humans are the only animals to self-consciously become aware of spirit (however, much we can sometimes lose that connection with tragic consequences). We reveal our sense of spirit with the expression, “I just know that in my bones.”
Any direct contact with spirit is accompanied by the descent of grace and the presence of whatever you experience as the sacred in body, mind and spirit In this moment there is no sense of body as separate from emotion or mind or spirit. The whole self becomes the container for grace.
During the sensation of grace being present, time becomes something different; it slows down or seems to stop. In our lives grace does seem to come and go. Yet the deep memories of grace in certain places and times in our memory become living talismans, fulcrums, guiding lights with which we can remember deeper things, deep aspirations and inspirations that make our lives more meaningful to ourselves and more of a living blessing to others.
For further exploration of these themes:
Life-in-the-Bones – David Lauterstein
The Spirituality of the Body – Alexander Lowen
Gravity and Grace – Simone Weil
The Fall to Grace - quotes and images
