Prefer to listen? I’ve recorded an audio version here:
Each of us holds things in life that we simply cannot imagine losing. A marriage. Our professional identity. A physical or mental ability. Our reputation. A sense of a specific future as we imagine it.
These are often aspects of our experience that are so closely tied to us, we don’t think of them as attachments. We think of them as reality – as who we are.
Which means that to imagine them being threatened or lost brings on an almost certain and overwhelming sense that we wouldn’t survive it.
It’s no secret, though, that humans face these losses all of the time. We witness people we care about facing devastating losses of relationships, people, careers, health, and we say things like, “I just couldn’t imagine…” We say it until we can indeed imagine it, until we’re on our own knees.
I’m talking about those experiences where the ground falls out from under us. The ones where it feels like the universe has come in and shaken our life like a snowglobe. The ones that feel, in our imaginations and in their unfoldings, insurmountable. Ram Dass, the late psychologist-turned-spiritual teacher, had a term for experiences like these. He called it fierce grace.
Now, we usually think of grace as something sweet and comforting – an offering of compassionate understanding or gentle reassurance. But there is another kind of grace, the fierce kind, and it arrives not as gentleness, but as disruption.
Ram Dass shared that he came to the term after having a stroke. He was lying in the hospital, being told how terrible the situation was by his loved ones and being told he would never function the same by his doctors, when he looked at a picture he’d pinned on his wall of his guru. He wanted to be angry at the situation, devastated by what he was losing, but he noticed a place deep inside that wondered if there could be any good that might come from it. It surprised even himself.
Over time, he started to pick up threads of that good, but that didn’t happen right away. He describes always having been intensely independent and active – flying planes, playing sports, writing books, and trying to depend on no one – and in an instant things shifted dramatically. As I think we all tend to do when things suddenly and relentlessly fall apart, he initially grasped for his old ways of being. But fierce grace wouldn’t let the pieces fall back into place that easily.
Instead, he had no choice but to slow down and to depend on other people. And in doing so, these tightly held notions of himself, these identities, started to fall away. He had been the author, the athlete, the traveler, the individualist, and now… he wasn’t. And at first that felt terrifying.
If you haven’t been through an experience like this, it may be hard to imagine just how disorienting this feels. It’s panic-inducing and heartwrenching all at once.
It’s easy in the midst of these kinds of experiences to fall into an abiding depression. Many of us do. And to be clear, finding ourselves there doesn’t mean anything at all about us. The depression might be thought of as a kind of deep grief. We are grieving the layers of self that we had often spent a lifetime constructing.
But that’s exactly the work of fierce grace. I think of fierce grace as a sort of alchemical process. It’s a type of grace most of us would never consciously choose, but that does its work by stripping us of identities that we had been clinging to in order to feel whole and worthy. It strips us of the very idea that we need these identities in order to be whole and worthy.
Because, my friend, we don’t. We don’t.
We think we need all sorts of things to be at peace or to have purpose. But the truth is, peace and purpose were never meant to be contingent on a singular role or relationship or ability. They were never meant to be vulnerable to the changing tides of reality.
But here’s the thing: I could write you a hundred beautiful essays telling you that, and you wouldn’t really believe me. There would be parts of you that couldn’t actually accept that the professional identity you have spent years building isn’t who you are or that losing the most important person in your life could actually end up revealing deeper truths about yourself. And I wouldn’t blame you one little bit.
That’s where fierce grace comes in. There are certain lessons we can only learn in the experiencing of them.
If I can personify her for a moment, Fierce Grace, in all of her love and wisdom, says to us, “Oh, darling. I know you’ve been living in this gorgeous little delusion about who you are, but I can’t let you stay there any longer. I’m going to show you something.”
And the something often feels brutal at first, but it gives way to a reality that is indeed so loving and gracious in its truthfulness. It lets us finally start to release the clinging that told us:
I cannot exist without this.
I am only this.
If this disappears, I disappear.
My worth depends upon keeping this intact.
Because I have learned that some of the identities we are most terrified of losing are the very ones we need to discover we can live without. And being free of those falsehoods is a peace unlike any other I’ve found
I realize the risk in me saying all of this. There’s a fine line one might tread between fierce grace and some kind of self-gaslighting or even self-shaming for not seeing the “good” in the tragedy. I want us on the right side of that line, which requires understanding this next very important point.
Fierce grace never asks us to put aside our grief. It doesn’t ask us to be grateful or optimistic about the tragic things happening to us. It asks only that we leave a tiny bit of space to consider that we might be more than what we have always known ourselves to be. It asks us to make room for a self beyond what has been.
It asks us to recognize that grace may come in many forms.
Questions for Reflection
- What have you lost that you once believed you could not live without? Who did you discover yourself to be on the other side?
- Looking back, has there been an experience you can now recognize as a kind of fierce grace, even if you never would have called it that at the time?
- What are you clinging to because some part of you believes, If this disappears, I disappear?
