The More I step into my Grace, the More Grace I naturally Give to Others

The more you get to know yourself, the more you get clear on what your true values are. This is a true gift because your values light the way towards living a life that is in alignment. Your values help you make the hard decisions, and have the hard conversations. And most importantly maybe, they ground the heavy emotions that inevitably come with movement and change.

So many of us are so enmeshed with our emotional experiences that we lose ourselves in our emotions. We experience grief and we start questioning our decisions. We experience sadness and wonder if we should make that next move. We experience guilt and get confused about our boundaries. We miss someone and start bargaining our needs. And all of this is, well, normal to do. But when we allow our emotional experiences to overcome our true selves, we find ourselves making choices to avoid emotion. And those choices can’t really honor the most important parts of us.

What would it be like if you shifted your goal from “to be happy” to “to heal”? Not the kind of healing that feels like a never-ending search to be better than we are. But the healing that happens in moments when our partner turns to us and stays present when we know it’s hard for them. The kind of healing when we learn to self-soothe before we set that boundary. The kind that creates moments of delicious closeness, connection, and intimacy. The kind that creates safety to deeply reflect on ourselves that allows us to let the joy in, and have the hard conversations.

I don’t believe in striving for happy marriages or happy lives or happy kids. I believe in embracing it all, the hard, the healing, the joy, the pain, the human. Alongside someone willing to do the same.

Next time emotion shows up in your journey, remind yourself emotions are meant to be experienced, they aren’t meant to swallow you whole. Your values are there to keep you intact.

When we struggle with grace, we often associate it with ignoring or allowing unwanted behavior. But I would argue grace is quite different, as it’s very present and intentional. Often the moments we give are times when we are reacting when we are triggered when we lose touch with humans and only focus on behavior.

We can give grace and still have hard conversations. We can have grace alongside boundaries. Grace isn’t excusing, it’s understanding. It isn’t silencing our voice, it’s softening it. It isn’t ignoring the behavior, it’s recognizing we are all humans.

We all want to feel chosen, loved, seen, and cared for. All of it. And at the heart of this, is a need for deep self-belonging. You see, choosing ourselves when we need it the most, puts us back in touch with our worth. The worth we have lost in the pursuit of something or someone. The worth we have misplaced on another, or an accomplishment.

But let’s distinguish for a moment the difference between longing for something and desperation for it. We can desire love, partnership, success, anything really that we want. But when we think those things will fulfill us, we become desperate for them. Within that desperation, we detach from important and vital parts of us in seeking them.

Often we aren’t actually seeking that achievement or that person, we are seeking fulfillment, worthiness, and contentment, and misplacing it on that achievement or that person. Anytime we start to self-abandon to attempt to get someone to choose us, it’s a calling back to ourselves. And when we start to slowly choose ourselves again, we get back in touch with our worth, which is the foundation for integration.