Kate's Nuggets

Cultivating Grace Through Action
Episode 32

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Hello, today I want to talk about grace, and that means I have to start by exploring what grace is.

Grace is a word that has meanings in religious traditions and in art, and in terms of describing someone's character, you would say that someone lost gracefully, that someone skated or danced gracefully. We say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." In that phrase, God's grace is a kindness, a generosity, and compassion.

Grace notes in music are extra flourishes that make a phrase more beautiful, highlight the phrase, and take a little attention for themselves, but don't interrupt the piece. What are the overall themes between these ideas of grace? There's a sense of effortlessness in terms of how it looks, and ease. There's an elegance. There's certainly a generosity. There's a sense of calm. It's certainly dignified, but probably most of all it is graceful because of the sense of ease.

There's that easy elegance of a fully outstretched arm or a little musical flourish.

Grace is not a thing that exists by itself. If you are being graceful, you are in action. If someone else is demonstrating grace, they are in action. Grace doesn't exist by itself.

This is actually really good news. This means that if we want more grace in our lives, we don't have to stop doing what we are doing. We have busy lives, most of us, and if we are busy, the last thing we want to do is add, "Make grace, be grace," to our to-do list. On the other hand, grace doesn't need a lot of action.

Gracefulness can be in a small gesture, in laying of a table for a cup of tea. Grace can happen in small movements. So, whether you are busy or not, you can find grace. You can be grace. You can have the effortlessness and elegance and dignity of being graceful.

Now the other thing I want to say about grace is that grace, as I'm talking about it today, is a quality of the heart. It's that calm and generous and dignified caring beauty of the heart. You can be graceful and also not be terribly physically coordinated.

Grace in the body of work known as InterPlay has a slightly different twist that I also want to bring to the conversation. InterPlay believes that everything that we experience, we experience through our bodies. Our minds, we experience through our bodies. Our minds are mediated by our nervous system, our interrelationship with the world, and our emotional responses and the actions that we take. They're all physical.

In InterPlay, physicality is basic. It's fundamental. Everything starts with our body. So, interplay has an embodied understanding of grace. The InterPlay understanding of the physicality of grace is that grace is the physical experience of the opposite of stress.

Think about it for a moment. If you have an experience and it goes with ease and comfort for you and somebody else has a similar experience and it doesn't go with ease or comfort for them, and you are in a position where you say "There, but for the grace of God, go I," your physical experience is relief in comparison to the stress that they who you have witnessed have experienced.

This opposite of stressed feeling in our bodies, English doesn't have a great word for, not one that's universally accepted, that's universally comfortable. And so, for today, I'm going to use the InterPlay word, grace.

Now, just because you can't articulate it, because there's not a great word, doesn't mean that you don't know the physical experience that I'm talking about. Another one of the InterPlay teachings that is very, very important to me is that just because you can't articulate an experience doesn't mean you can't have it.

In fact, in InterPlay, they phrase it in the positive. You can have your experience even if you can't articulate it.

To get in touch with what that feeling is, that physicality of grace, for a moment, think about how you are in your body when you are stressed. What's going on in your body when you get stressed that tells you, "Oh yeah, this is what happens to my body when I'm stressed. I'm stressed now?" You've probably got some tightness in places. You've probably got something happening with your breathing. There may be some pain in places if you clench your jaw consistently or maybe you raise your shoulders. Don't spend too much time hanging out in that physicality of stress. Most of us spend a lot of time in that space.

Now think about what your body feels like when it's the opposite of stressed. There may be some calm, there may be a sense of free movement, there may be a sense of openness, or there may be a sense of flow or engagement.

There may be a sense of peace or calm. What do you notice when you check in with your body and ask, "What does my body experience when it's the opposite of stressed?" What is your experience of that? Now, the neat thing about being in the experience of the physicality of grace is it keeps us in touch with our creativity and our kindness and our clarity and our compassion. And it's a very powerful thing to be able to do for ourselves, to take ourselves into a state of grace.

In order to be able to consciously take ourselves into a state of grace, we have to learn what has that impact on our bodies. So, think for a moment, and you might want a little later to write down a list, of the things that when you do them, you feel the physicality of grace in your body.

It can be really tempting to put down the things that are fun when you first start making a list. And if you notice yourself going for the things that are fun and exciting, I want you to check in with yourself and just notice what do you feel when you feel the opposite of stressed? Because there's an energy and a drive that can happen in the state of grace, but it's not fueled by the same level of adrenaline as the things that are exciting are.

You want to be able to have a choice, so you want to be able to create grace or excitement. They're two different experiences. The thing about grace is that spending time in a state of grace is really, really great for our body. Our body rests and recovers and heals and is open to all of the things that are good for our heart in terms of our actual cardiovascular system, heart.

And the state of grace helps reduce inflammation in our bodies. And so all of the modern diseases that are impacted by inflammation are eased by getting into a state of grace.

Once you have identified for yourself the things that help you have a state of grace in your body, you experience the physicality of grace, then you have the ability to choose to do more of that in your life. I have never met a person whose life wasn't improved by adding a little bit more of the experience of the physicality of grace in it.

I may be proved wrong someday, but so far, it's universal. Sometimes the difference between something taking me into the physicality of grace and not is my intention when I do it, and sometimes it's the details of how I do it. These days I've been walking a lot and I can walk in a way that brings me the physicality of grace.

When I'm doing that, I am noticing my feet as they touch the ground, I'm noticing the sensations of my feet moving on the ground, I'm noticing the texture and temperature of the air on my face and hands. I'm hearing the sounds in my environment and I am really present in the experience of walking or I'm listening to a novel that I really like. Wow, I am walking.

On the other hand, if I'm listening to a book I'm trying to understand or learn from while I'm walking, I get worked up in my head and it doesn't bring my body grace at all. I'm more likely to experience the physicality of grace when I walk at sunrise or at sunset than in any other time of day because when I'm walking at sunrise or sunset and I notice the changing light, I settle into awe and wonder and delight in the universe.

I often find this happens when I am walking in woods or by water in a way that it doesn't happen when I'm walking in my suburb.

The details matter. Learn what details matter for you and then learn to become a grace operative for yourself.

A grace operative is someone who walks in the world looking for opportunities to increase somebody's sense of grace. When you become a grace operative for yourself, you are taking your wisdom about what creates the physicality of grace experience for you, and you are choosing to do the things and put yourself in the places that make that more likely. And for many of us, we get a kind of delight out of bringing that sense of grace to others. I invite you also to consider what it would be like to be a grace operative for the other people in your world.

Now, being a grace operative requires a bunch of things. It's kind of related to doing random acts of kindness. Being a grace operative requires noticing what seems to be going on when the person you're a grace operative for experiences the physicality of grace. What are their triggers for that experience? What did they respond to with grace in their mind? And then how can you introduce more of that in their life as a gift to them?

Remember, grace looks effortless, is elegant, generous, calm. So being a grace operative for someone is to be generous, gifting them with things you hope will provide them with grace in a way where they don't see your working, where it looks effortless, where you stay calm and dignified and not attached to whether it actually brings them grace or not. Having done your best to identify what would and to, in a way that looks effortless, that creates no obligation on their part, put it in front of them in hopes that it brings them a moment in which they experience the physicality of grace.

What would the world be like if more of us walked through the world thinking of ourselves as grace operatives?

End Theme and Credits:
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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.