In this week's installment of the Yoga Living Project, Debbie Lacey (Cambio YTT Graduate and Hot Yoga Teacher), shares her take on grace and divine initernvention from the perspective of a self proclaimed "science-minded" yogi. Read below and if you have your own thoughts to share with our audience, we'd love to hear - reach out to
Debbie currently teaches Hot Yoga at Cambio Pikes Peak, Wednesdays at 5:45p. Join her in person to respond to her article and share your inspiring life moments with her, as reequested in her writiing.
Grace
Cambio’s theme for December is “grace.” When I googled for a definition, a Merriam-Webster definition started with: “unmerited divine assistance.” I realized then that I have a gut-felt sense of grace that is my personal definition. For me, grace is found in those times when I have felt a communication from “Something,” through unexplained and unexpected small events, that seemed to be a reassuring message to me, to renew faith and hope.
I am a fairly science-minded person and at the same time as being a very intuitive person. When I am experiencing a really tough period in life, I love to read and re-read about other peoples’ experiences of grace to lift me up and remind me to look for and appreciate the moments of grace given to me that I may be overlooking due to my own preoccupation or worry.
My favorite book for this is by Larry Dossey, MD, a physician who has written about many experiences of people that were very powerful to the individual yet might have been dismissed by others hearing about them. The book is One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters (2013). In his acknowledgments at the very beginning of this book, he tells of an example of grace, using my definition. He explains that, as he would go to write the book, in his home in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, while at his computer, he would look up and see two or three coyotes peer at him through the windows of his study. Over the two decades he had lived there, this had not happened other than during the writing of this book. He explained that he understood the coyotes to be ambassadors of the greater web of life, part of the One Mind he was seeking to document. I love hearing personal experiences such as these as I experience grace through sharing with someone who is willing to risk telling me.
Recently, I found another book that used interviews of people from a very wide variety of spiritual pathways, to find similarities among the pathways, regarding transformations of consciousness. This book is called, Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (2008) written by Schlitz, Vieten, and Amorok. The insights throughout the book are helpful, but I will mention here the thought that we can participate with “grace” and prepare the way to experience more moments of grace in our lives. The authors note that, from the practitioners of the many paths, it is important to have four elements in one’s practice: intention, attention, repetition, and guidance.
As we move through December, and this winter, I am seeking to incorporate these, to prepare the conditions within myself to invite grace into my days. If you are inspired to read, I hope you enjoy, and I hope you let me know what you think of either of these books. If you are inspired to share your moments of grace, I will love to receive them. By sharing ourselves, I believe we create grace for one another.
