There’s always beauty wherever we choose to access and awaken it. We cannot choose life’s glitches that hit us without notice, but we can choose the filter we don to access beauty.
That’s not to say we can totally avoid life knocks that leave us cranky and miserable at times. Yet our choice to filter out misery eternally exists within the depths of grace’s energy, life, light and loving-kindness.
Few deny that we flourish and thrive with a grace mindset’s healing powers. And many admit that grace filters add healing freedom, as we cobble together new possibilities. No question, a grace mindset also turns mental and emotional dials away from sad or cranky.
Too few experience grace filters alive in lived practices
As a child, a habitually cranky uncle visited us once or twice a year. Uncle Stu would never have made any malodorous beauty list – even in the best of times. In fact he ranked rather high among the who’s who list of stinkpots on most visits.
Take the week Stu left Camembert cheese in his unkempt beard and then saw everything through a moldy cheese crankpot fog all week.
The aging Camembert went unnoticed except for the stench, as my uncle smelled a bit like unwashed gym socks one minute and curdled milk on a hot day, the next. Even worse he ranted and raved about the stench filters he projected into every place he walked.
Unless we access filters of grace, major disappointments, or chronic sorrows, can limit our ability to feel joy or hold onto hope. Grace offers a filter to see beyond momentary loss, and catch life-changing glimpses of eternal delight. If we ignore God given grace filters and deny feeling of loss or sorrow, a stress chemical, cortisol slams our brains into danger zones, causing prolonged intervals of grief. To help us face grief’s initial force, cortisol acts as a short-term elixir. It enables us to survive emotional trauma and prevents us from falling into depression or other emotional dilemmas when we’re most vulnerable.
The key is to inch forward with grace
Initially, cortisol can help us survive extreme loss, pain, loneliness, or despair. Some may even experience raw anger like my uncle does, while others feel hopeless, as cortisol-driven tears, for instance help us to simply stand against the backlash of sorrow’s first strikes. You may suggest that crying offers us a cleansing process that’s essential to also activate a grace mindset or hold hope in our other hand. You are correct! Grace reminds us that hope and inner kindness is fueled by serotonin chemicals.
Serotonin fueled expectations offer hope. When we practice joy we open our minds to see exciting new possibilities beyond artesian-depth loss. We can sometimes see grief through a filter of grace that adds sweetness to transform our view from hopeless to hopeful.
Grace filters re-frame loss and highlight beauty
For instance, I could not bear to climb steps in my home after my longtime friend lost her life there. The steps triggered unbearable heartache and sorrow initially. Only when I re-framed these same steps to view them less as tragedy but as Robyn‘s stairway to eternity in heaven where she enjoys perfect love, could I walk on the steps and sense her characteristic smile. Sorrow faded. There’s no set time-line to leave tears behind or embrace more hopeful filters, however.
Even our admission that cortisol chemicals hold us down is a step in the direction of grace. And good news is that sorrow need not leave us in a sink hole for long. No question, after any significant loss, we’ll likely revert back and forth between hope and despair for a time. One day we’ll feel tossed back and forth into choppy cortisol seas that attempt to sink us. The next day we may spot a serotonin oasis where hope lifts us to reach beyond our fierce storm. The back and forth reality that allows for differences, also shows why five lock- step-stages in the traditional grief model do not describe adequately the turbulent grief process for a grace mindset approach to healing from grief.
Grace mindset filters help us heal from loss
Grace mindset approaches to grief allow us to feel the depths of our pain while at the same time nudging us toward reflection that balances pain today with healing that could follow tomorrow. Despair yields to comfort when we can spot hope ahead. Feelings of pain through loss are as natural as touching a hot surface in error. We either feel them, or deny and force feelings down, where their embers consume our amygdala and pop up painfully as soon as we walk into similar situations. Grace inspires us to look at even our most challenging situations with courage rather than through a stench such as Camembert cheese scents hidden in Stu’s bushy beard.
That’s because our brain’s amygdala (or seat of emotions) stores our every response to pain. To grieve, for instance, is to bring those emotions to the surface and allow ourselves to feel them for as long as we need. Simply stated, grace mindset filters offer us a balance between sad feelings and adventurous expectations that help us embrace kindness as reality on the other side of loss.
Over time, our newly formed memories will replace broken-hearted rags of grief, and healthy emotional responses will suddenly clothe us again for unexpected melodies in our grace guided journey forward. Have you experienced this? Or are you stuck behind the stench of less caring choices?
It’s no secret that crying stores sad responses that add more tears, sorrow or crankiness to any similar challenges in our amygdala. With our grace filter in place, we cry over loss for a time only, while expecting joy to follow in the morning. No magic formula here but we can expect more from life than the downers my uncle toss into a day. The gaps between crying, cranking or chasing joyful adventures will differ for each of us.
Yet when hope and curious expectation stores responses for our future reality more than tears store feelings of loss, the brain’s plasticity – or its ability to change itself, leaps to help us build kinder and more caring directions.
Plasticity (our brain’s ability to change itself) reboots our focus for a grace-filled reality – based on every action we take that is embedded in that reality. So, for instance, my recent loss of Dr. Robyn McMaster a lifetime friend and awesome fellow-leader at the Mita International Brain Based Center, holds memories of love in life-changing adventures that will one-day bat last again, in spite of sadness and loss that filled my soul at the moment of her passing.
A grace mindset bereavement process finds safe channels to let out deep emotions, while hooking fun, fresh adventures onto hope and wonder about a new reality that side-steps depression. How so?
When we’re ready to step forward again
When our time is right, and we’re ready to move forward, we often enjoy creative adventures that include innovative activities from our multiple intelligences, as illustrated in chapter one. Let’s say we decide to survey our intelligences below and then use a new one today. OK, we’re already stepping away from misery to a mindset we deserve! Our amazing brains and grace filters will do the rest.
The note read:
“I am so sorry that we lost contact son, because I missed you every day we were apart. I am also sorry that my eye patch caused you shame with your friends. After cancer as a baby when your eye was removed I gave you mine to spare you the shame of wearing an ugly patch to hide the socket.
My gift that vital day came with the same love that God’s enormous grace came to help me cope with the sadness from not sharing my latter years with you. I’m so proud of you son, and so thankful that grace restored me to survive life with one eye and strengthened you to enter and discover the wonders of a whole new world with two.
All my love, Mom”
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