Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering

Many people think that this dimension of consciousness of peace, stillness, and well-being is something for which you have to work very hard to attain—that somehow it’s far away and that you must earn it in some way. But all these conclusions are just more thoughts in the mind, so as with all thoughts, you can choose to no longer grasp at them. You

by relinquishing our need and desire to control, explain, and believe the way that our minds talk to us about what was and what is, we find a capacity to open to a new state of consciousness.

The great sages of our collective history have all told us that what they realized is meant for each one of us, that it’s not unique to them. It’s not something they own. It’s something they realize is inherent within everything and everybody, because really, it’s not you or I who wake up. It’s life that wakes up. Your life becomes an expression of

the true expression of our spiritual nature is love, and love isn’t what we think it is. Love is synonymous with this fierce embrace of life. Love is seeing yourself as everything and as everybody, and that seeing is not for your mind. It’s not meant for your ego. You can never see all as one with your ego. You can only see it from your essence.

What it revealed to me was that even in the deepest states of darkness, even in the most intense states of loss, grief, or depression, we can find some measure of happiness and well-being when we really open to the difficult feelings, when we really let go of our resistance, when we completely let go of trying to contain those painful experiences,

Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these two aspects as separate, but in fact, when we’re in deep states of suffering, we’re usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it

What if letting go of suffering wasn’t possible tomorrow—that today, even right now, was all you had, and you had nothing else but today? All of a sudden, you would look at your whole existence through completely different eyes. See if you can feel what it is to exist only now. See what it’s like to completely take tomorrow, and yesterday, out of t

So waking up is a bit like what an alcoholic or a drug addict experiences when they are coming out of their addiction. Most addicts only let go of their addiction when they’ve really seen that there’s no possibility of being happy and being an addict. Up until that time, most addicts are in a constant process of negotiation with life. They think, “

Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence.