What are your demands or challenges right now? Reoccurring demands and challenges can be particularly frustrating.   Everyone knows what it feels like to go two steps forward and one step back. Your frustrations are actually the key to finding inner freedom. Each one requires surrender and acceptance. Each one is a stepping-stone, a jewel that is the fuel for the fire of transformation.

     Surrender and acceptance are gateways to the state of grace. Wherever you have to surrender, whatever you have to accept, is how you realize grace. You may often think of grace as something outside of yourself, which is mysteriously bestowed upon you. You may think it is good luck, or an unexpected bounty. You feel good. But somehow there is a sense that it happens to you, from the outside in.

     Gracefulness (being full of grace) is the result of how adaptable and flexible you allow yourself to be as you rise to any situation without resistance. In order to live in a state of grace, you must accept everything, because grace is born from the places that are the most challenging and the most difficult. 

     You have the power to choose the consciousness which gives birth to the flow of grace. By sustaining the inner practices of surrender and acceptance you open the door of your heart. As you open the door of your heart, you will find that grace has been living within you all along. Grace is the natural result of living life in the spirit of acceptance with an open heart. 

     Accept everything, just as it is, as you cultivate living a life full of grace. 

Once a clear choice to do so has been made, every encounter and interaction becomes the fuel for deeper spiritual awareness. Every moment becomes the potential for clear insight and pure awareness. 

     Before that choice is made, you may face your challenges with resistance, negativism, martyrdom or victimization. At the very least, disdain. This choice is so big because it requires that you take responsibility for yourself and everything about your life. When you do not take responsibility, your reactions are held inside, allowing an internal struggle to set up camp in your body and mind.  Your mind may engage in ongoing chatter as you defend, justify and project your thoughts onto the situation and person.  Each thought is designed to entrench yourself in righteousness concerning your own feelings.

     While the mind is busily engaged in self-terrorism (terrorizing others as well, as we know that our thought forms are real and affect the object of our focus), the body is also under fire. The intensity of reaction can result in muscle tension, a stomach ache, a tight chest or a lump in the throat. The longer we engage in suppression, the more serious physical problems  manifest.  Without the ability, or CHOICE, to let go into the light of consciousness, you are in the full ravages of suppression.  Repeatedly indulging in karmic reactions to life causes great pain physically, emotionally and spiritually, yet, most continue to do so. 

     The commitment to spiritual growth, and to bring more consciousness and awareness into your life, can purify and transform these reactions into a more subtle response, which allows your energies to continue flowing in your body, and allows the mind to retain an emptiness (space if you will), for awareness without judgment.  It is like turning the ugly duckling into a swan. From the compost of challenge emerges the fertile soil of awareness, communion and growth. It is the stuff in the deepest part of yourself that you yearn for. You want to see and feel the beauty all around you. You want to shine your light in joy.

     In conscious awareness you witness or watch everything. You witness your emotions rolling through the body. You witness your thoughts streaming through the mind. From the place of witness you experience everything while practicing becoming nothing.  When there is no holding of an emotion or thought, it is free to flow through.  Paradoxically, you see and feel everything, but hold nothing.

     Through this ever-deepening practice to allow life to move through you, all of the holding of the past slowly starts to melt and release, making room for more awareness to meet every moment more fully.

     A peaceful grace is the result from the willingness to engage in surrender. Surrender is the practice of allowing spirit to do its will through you. Practice this by surrendering to the situation, surrendering to the thoughts and feelings, surrendering to the moment. While you may feel the charge of reaction and anger, you can simultaneously allow yourself to witness and not hold.  This practice becomes the fire which burns through your suppressions and holdings and purifies your being with its heat.

     With commitment and practice, the seeds of allowance, acceptance and peace begin to grow within your heart and mind. As you realize the everyday irritations and challenges are the fuel for transformation, a natural willingness emerges to accept, look forward to, and be thankful for every single moment of every single day. Surrendering to what is, allows spirit’s light to shine upon you. This infusion of light penetrates the depths of your open heart. Your open heart is the gateway for grace. This is how you live a life full of grace and realize the circle of continued blessing. May you be full of grace.

     Maresha Ducharme is a unique combination of mystic, teacher and author, and a dedicated practitioner of unity consciousness. She is the resident teacher of The Snow Dragon Sanctuary and author of “The Way Home to Love: A Guide to Peace in Turbulent Times”. Read more of her discourses at www.snowdragonsanctuary.com