What is Grace?

Grace (noun): Disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency or a temporary exemption : REPRIEVE

Grace allows us to not take things personally or get caught up in the meaning or emotion of things that don’t go quite as planned, or don’t meet our expectations.

No one is perfect. Giving yourself or others grace, is giving permission to forgive mistakes, poor judgment, things you regret…rather than regretting them and holding on, give grace; find the lesson, forgive and let it go.

I make it sound so simple, right? It seems hard sometimes, especially when we feel like we were wrong, or wronged, when we need to speak our truth about how something made us feel or be harsh with ourselves because we have higher expectations that aren’t being met.

So, how do we do this?

We let go of the meanings and stop giving our power away.

Things only bother us when we give it meaning. When we stop and think about it, if we could detach ourselves from the meaning we are giving the behavior in our head, we would not connect to it emotionally. The thing to realize here is that no one can MAKE us feel anything. It is only the meaning that we give their behavior that we allow to ‘make’ us feel something. As we view our own behavior, it only ‘makes’ us feel bad when we give it meaning.

Imagine, one day you choose to take a day and rest, restore and re-energize yourself and on this day, you allow yourself to feel relaxed and content: the behavior of not taking care of things is not a problem. Then another day, you don’t feel well, and you need to stay in bed to take care of yourself…somehow in this second scenario most of us will feel anxious about what we aren’t getting done, we feel like we should be doing more, which leads to all sorts of other emotions.

My question is: what is the meaning you are giving “resting” or”slowing down” in this second scenario that makes you feel bad? What other meaning could you give it that will give you permission to let it go.

When we give things meaning and we don’t like the way it feels, when we say that someone else “makes us” feel a certain way, we are giving our power away. We are giving away control of our emotions to the person or thing that “makes us” feel that way.

Tip: When you are feeling bad about something that happened, ask yourself: what meaning am I giving this? Rewind the movie back to right before you started feeling bad, and ask yourself, what am I saying in my head about this situation? Can you change that narrative? What could you say that will allow you to move forward the way you want to?