Grace and Grit

I began this month on Wall Street and I’m ending it in Ojai and Santa Barbara. At the start of June, I quit my job in New York City. My feelings were less directly tied to my job than to my general life direction. My resume and routine were dragging me forward and I was following because of inertia. If I had been completely happy and healthy, I might have pushed through it, but with some lingering hand problems and a general exhaustion, my body was telling me exactly how it felt about my life and environment. Around the time I quit, my brother and sister-in-law invited me out to Santa Barbara to do some housesitting and to take an energy healing seminar, which seemed like the perfect way to clear my head and try something completely new.

My first weekend in Santa Barbara, we drove down to Ojai for the seminar on energy healing. For those unfamiliar with it, energy healing is similar to Reiki: using visualization and intention, the healer acts as a conduit for energy, with the goal of balancing out energy in the body of the recipient, which then affects him/her physically. I took away the following main points from the seminar:

1. Energy healing is not complicated or difficult to learn- anyone can do it.
2. In some parts of Europe, including England, energy healing is widely used alongside more conventional treatments in hospitals and hospices.
3. Even “novices” can pick up on extremely subtle changes in energy. For example, two separate individuals noted that the energy flow in my body seemed to be far more imbalanced in my right hip and right shoulder than in my right hand itself, consistent with an observation from my acupuncturist. As they let the energy ”flow” in, I felt both immediate effects- a set of muscular contractions and movements in my right hip- and improvement the next day.
4. Imagination and self image appear to be related to energy movement as well. Our group was given a simple exercise to move a ball of light around the front, back, right, and left of our bodies. Oddly, I noticed that every time I moved the ball to the right of my body, it appeared to get dimmer. I ask the instructor if there was a reason that visualization was more difficult in some directions (without specifying which one) and he only said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. I see that your aura is a bit dimmer on the right side, but that’s not a big issue.”

The energy healing seminar involved a psychological shift for me. The extreme simplicity of it initially turned me off. My mind wanted it to be more difficult because I equated struggle and complexity with anything worthwhile. Instead, some of the greatest assets for energy work are sensitivity, receptivity, and the ability to get out of the way. The work is not passive though- the healer needs to be entirely focused throughout. Though I loved the seminar and saw clearly the effects, a huge part of me resisted the simplicity of it.

While taking the seminar, I was reading the book “Grace and Grit” by Ken Wilber, a well-known psychologist. In many ways, it perfectly set the tone for the internal changes I was noticing and issues I was working through. The book documents Ken’s wife Treya’s experience with breast cancer, through both her own journal entries and Ken’s commentary. It’s an incredible book for many reasons, one of them being that it describes an extreme version of a struggle I was working through and that many modern women (and some men) experience: seeing value in who you are versus what you accomplish, uncertainty of when to accept life as it is and when to try to change it (the serenity prayer), and how to create meaning when your body or a part of your identity changes.

In her journal entries, Treya discovers she has aggressive stage 2 cancer on her honeymoon and mourns the life and marriage she imagined for herself that will never exist. Though she dies within 5 years of the initial diagnosis, Treya uses cancer as a catalyst to explore a new approach to life and work:

“I now value…the work that doesn’t have a title or a hierarchy of professional advancement. Amorphous work. Work that has to do with creating a mood or a setting or an atmosphere, whether in a meeting or in a family or in a community, where other kinds of more visible work flourish… This combines with the new direction I feel feminism taking, away from imitating men or proving we can do what they can do, toward valuing, defining, bringing forth, making visible the special kinds of work that women do. The invisible work.”

In her final journal entry within a week of her death, Tria writes the following: “It takes grace, yes- and grit!” It summed up perfectly the balance she finally achieved as her life’s work, which culminated in her death.

What this book highlighted for me- among many other things- was the value of grace. While I spent the first half of my life pushing through and trying to develop grit, I feel the balance shifting towards an appreciation of grace and more “feminine” values. As one woman from my seminar told me, “I hate being called ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ all the time…It seems like the most annoying, general compliment…but it’s funny, that’s what’s most important to me in my daughter- that she be a kind person.” I could empathize- I was often called sweet as a child and always wanted to punch the person saying it. But one of my goals now is to see the value in those qualities- sweetness, kindness, receptivity- that I spent the first half of my life pushing back or resisting, and forming a new relationship with them.