My friend Leslie and I were indulging in a bit of supercallafragillistic … dark chocolate. The kind that makes your eyes roll up in the back of your head. Okay, exaggerating – it was very yummy. The last piece was close upon us.
Leslie passes it to a homeless man on the corner.
Whoa! I gasp and sputter. And then realize, ah… This is Leslie creating healthy wealth in her life. No, she’s not in the zero to six figures in sixty seconds club. She’s not driving the sexy sports car, or eating often in fancy restaurants. Yet she’s so loved, so esteemed, and amazingly, her needs get taken care of. Plus, there is so much beauty she creates in her life, this creative vixen everyone wants a blessed piece of.
Aha! THIS is – the vacuum before grace. This empty space she created by not finishing her supercalla-chocolate plate.
Grace needs room to land. Grace likes places spiced with trust. Yet, it’s not easy in our work/play twelve hour days – finish your plate – lack of slack world – to create a grace-inviting vacuum.
Want more grace in your life? Let’s play with this idea.
THE UPS AND DOWNS OF SNOW HIKING
It’s the in between time for hiking in the Rockies. Snow drifts tall as people get hard enough to walk on in early morning hours. Once it warms up, your leg punches through deep in a frustrating fall called “post-holing”. You pull that leg up, hoping the other won’t follow suit. You try to walk fast and light, especially when on sunny snow.
Eventually, it’s time to put the snowshoes on. Even then, I still had an amazing snowshoe-d left hook/curved leg post-hole that took two of us to dig me out of. Phew!
It was worth it. Four miles in, a stop at a lake was windless, ever so warm and astonishingly quiet. Mount Audubon had our backs. An amazon skier told us of his amazing journey to the peak beyond that, Mount Toll.
With the walking and the trees and the fresh mountain air, my mind, body, heart and soul get cleansed and rebooted. The housecleaning and food prep waits. The inspiration and ideas flow freely, and my core smiles again.
THE WAYS THAT DON’T – LEAD TO WAYS THAT DO
Many are clearer on what they don’t want, versus what they do. Let’s use this. Name the things that you’d guess don’t invite grace, and turn them into practices that do.
What crowds out grace in your life? Some might include:
- Too full schedules – even fun things can feel a burden when over-scheduled
- Lack of breaks in the work day, and the general sense of do do do til you drop
- Inability to say no when intuition has already made the case for it
- Lack of taking time to plan, to prioritize, to schedule the self care
- Repeatedly doing the mindless things you know don’t work to decrease stress
All righty then – let’s turn these around from grace crowd outs, to grace inflators:
- Use the timer to take a break every working hour – touch in with grace and intention
- Morning practice that clarifies your priorities, what you’re inviting and creating
- Just saying no – before worrying how you’ll say it or explain – (that won’t work, sorry)
- Food or alcohol or sugar cleanses / breaks
- Friday/Sunday eve or Monday morning planning rituals (add chocolate or favorite chai)
- Unscheduled time – unscheduled time – say it again – unscheduled time, even minutes
- Dancing, cafes, creativity – creatively dancing in cafes? Singing in the car. Walking.
- Mindfully doing the mindless, while inserting self love, compassion and curiosity about how this works, and what else might work
YOUR MISSION
Take a moment when you can, and breathe and center. Connect with your emotional state, your heart right now. Invite in the divine, the great white light of higher intelligence, or the great spaghetti god of your choosing. Ask to be filled with the higher quality of Trust, or something similar.
While you are thusly connected and grounded, ask to see six ways you can create more vacuums for grace.
Mine: Nature, getting outside in the yard in the morning for movement practice, hourly breaks and movement/boogie shake outs, weekly planning session happy hours, planned café work time, and “hammock time” – e.g., scheduled unscheduled time for reading, resting, musing.
I don’t yet have a hammock, but I can visualize can’t I? (That sturdy woven hammock is part of my Hawaiian beach visualization template though).
Write those six ways down. Email them to me or a friend – comment below. Try it for two weeks and let me know how much more grace gets sucked into your life. This sucks – in a good way.
Cheers to your grace-creating vacuums,
Denise