Day 17 - Making Grace a Way of Life

Day 17 of my 21-day meditation experience, “Making Grace a Way of Life.” Wow, that’s deep! My first thought was, “Is it possible to manifest the power of gratitude every single day?” I have gone from the feeling of gratitude to a way of being in the world. I know as this happens trust, authenticity, and openness will emerge and embody grace in all aspects of my life. The more I practice gratitude the more grace gets easier and flows into my life. I believe it is time to open my heart even wider …

Building a life around grace is very different from most people’s daily life where grace plays little or no part. I have had very few conversations at the local coffee shop or chatting with my friends about grace. As I implement this new way of life, I will no longer question the value of trust, love, surrender, or faith. To make this last, it requires me to establish new habits. My inner work now includes dealing with the conditioned negativity of my past which was based on struggle and criticism. I desire the freedom to feel who I am really. I achieve this when I am with horses and it brings me joy and happiness. When I feel like life isn’t going my way, it is really easy to blame others. This is when I go to the barn and let the horses bring me back to the place of gratitude and into the present moment. This is the place where I can change my personal reality.

Some days, I feel like making gratitude part of all I do is like making sure I don’t ever eat junk food again. For me, meditation is like exercising my mental health. In the same way, I hike, ride, and do yoga for my physical health, I meditate for my mental health. That said, getting to the place of health that I desire and then staying there is challenging! However, through meditation experiences and creating daily practices, I have a foundation. I have tools in my toolbox that I can rely on when the going gets tough. And, I have the self-awareness to know that I am not perfect and I am not going to always feel like being “healthy” every day. I allow myself  “junk food” when I crave it, but I make sure I come back to my foundation that I worked so hard to create. It’s okay to have cheat days or take a day off, but always come back to now.
​
It is just like riding and training horses. When you do all of the foundation work and teach a horse the basics from the beginning, you can give them days, weeks, or even months off. Unless a bad experience has happened, nine times out of ten that horse will pick up right where you left off as soon as you put a foot in the stirrup. Horses don’t forget and neither will you! Just like I have to practice riding to get better, I have to practice gratitude to make it an everyday habit. My ultimate goal is to make the practice of gratitude a natural occurrence in my everyday life, which in turn becomes a life lived in the state of grace.