The End of Continuity
If you invite him, Krishna will come. / Get ready. / He will ruin everything. / Especially our sleep. – Mirabai
I have a tattoo on my right outer calf that reads Fierce Grace. It’s a large piece, black and gray, with beautiful hand-drawn script surrounded by organic filigree and leaves. “Fierce Grace” is the title of a 2001 documentary about the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. The phrase refers to the moments when grace — a blessing that transforms us, or divinity — is delivered through ferocious events, delivered with a steel hammer, not through turns of good fortune or small miracles. Ram Dass had a stroke in 1997, which hindered his ability to speak and move, and required massive lifestyle changes. For someone who was a former Harvard professor (known as Dr. Richard Alpert, then) and spent his life eloquently speaking and leading others to be here now, it must have been an excruciating adjustment to become unable to find the right words and pause lengthily while searching, searching.
At thirty, I got this tattoo while I was a student in a nine-month meditation and spiritual-leadership intensive in NYC. Ram Dass (which means servant of God) speaks in the film about toggling back and forth between stroke and grace, stroke and grace. He says the major spiritual exercise is to bring the two together. My meditation teacher used the two-word term as well and instructed, “Fierce Grace isn’t just lousy life. Fierce Grace is the moments when our awakening becomes fierce.” Applying this idea to a life of obstacles and hardships was liberating. If, according to Ram Dass, our lives are grist for the mill, every failure becomes a lesson, life becomes school, and opportunity shows up in all kinds of awe-inducing forms.
A woman in my spiritual cohort chuckled and said, “Ooh, be careful what you tattoo on yourself…you’re asking for it!” I wasn’t thinking of my piece as an augury or precognition of the future. I was channeling trust to salve the past, reveling in the initial bliss of awakening, and committing to a path of practice. Many more, permanent, spiritual marks would follow in a short period of time.
Joseph Campbell, religious- and comparative-myth professor, remarked after seeing a fully tattooed Marquesan body, it “was hardly a natural body anymore; it was a mythological epiphany, and the consciousness inhabiting it could hardly have wished to behave otherwise than in a manner comporting with the physical form.” I think sometimes that’s the hope, the impetus of a tattoo — that the external reflects the internal, or an even higher state than that, and reminds us what we espouse or strive to be.
Two months into the intensive, I was ready for a sublime New Year’s Eve and enthused for 2013. A group of us practiced yoga and meditated our way out of the tired old year at a studio in Brooklyn. Afterwards, high on energy and hope, three of us wandered the dark quiet streets of Prospect Heights after 11 p.m. We heard gospel music wafting down brick steps, onto the sidewalk. It was mesmerizing. We stopped walking and looked at each other. Hesitant and sheepish, we climbed the steps and pulled the heavy door open. A few congregants of the Church of the Nazarene ushered us in, waving their hands and exclaiming, Come on in, come on in! We inched our way into a blue-gray pew and swayed and cried with this group of kind strangers.
We stayed for the preacher’s sermon. He said the theme for the new year was Rise Above and exclaimed, “We worry about the future but God is already in tomorrow…We say to God, ‘Get me out of this.’ We should ask, ‘What can I get out of this?’” He talked about turning struggles into stepping stones, and we left dizzy with joy. His words resonated with ideas we just discussed and they felt magical, serendipitous. I could hardly believe our good fortune.
Around this time, I’d created a vision board with four areas of life in four quadrants — relationships, contribution, material wealth, personal evolution — and in the middle, a powerful center that the rest of the vision should expand from. I covered a large poster with words and cut-out photos and all the best of intentions. For the sacred center, I painted a metallic gold circle. Inside it, I boldly scripted in black my chosen word: Grace. All four areas would fall apart so thoroughly by the end of the nine-month training, it would be staggering — almost humorous, really. I then would break the board in half and break it in half again and throw it in the trash. And this would just be the beginning of the breaking.
Ram Dass mentions that he didn’t appreciate his physical form enough before the stroke. Maybe he was so focused on the ethereal that he took the vehicle for granted. Less than a year after getting the tattoo and after all these hoped-for areas fractured, I would fall and shatter my heel — my first major injury — which would result in overwhelming upheavals and a cascade of painful revelations. My injury would not be comparable to a serious stroke, but it would certainly be Fierce Grace in action. Even though I appreciated movement and my body quite a bit before the fall, I’d learn afterward how much I did take things like walking without crutches or getting my own coffee for granted — which you can never fully grasp until they’re taken away.
Things like a stroke are so captivating to the consciousness, Ram Dass states. Suffering comes when you try to hang on to continuity, like things I can’t do. But when you do spiritual work, you have weird multi-awareness. You have moments when you feel dejected, angry, and disappointed. You think you can’t trust God. You also believe things happen for us and not to us. You remind yourself your plan is not your plan. You pray to get out of your own way. Stroke…Grace, Stroke…Grace. Being able to embrace paradoxes is one of the oft-used wrenches in the spiritual toolbox. You simultaneously do the hard work, and realize you have little control. Everything can change in a heartbeat, and does, constantly.
When Ram Dass got stroked, he didn’t have any spiritual thoughts. He only remembered looking at pipes on the ceiling. With a smile he says, In my own death, I didn’t orient towards spirit — that shows me I have some work to do. That’s the test. I flunked the test. These insights come on the other side of surrender, after being open enough to listen, and trusting that linear time will provide clarity as our retrospective wisdom coheres. For as articulate and radiant as Ram Dass was pre-stroke, he’s even more powerful to listen to post-stroke. His pauses sound like he’s getting a download, like each word is considered, like his eye of perception is clearer not cloudier.
Saint Jnaneshwar taught, “Steadfastness is the courage through which one would not close the eye of perception — even if the heavens were to fall.” Fierce Grace isn’t just something that’s bestowed on us — we have to face it with fierceness. After my fall, I learned more deeply how to be steadfast. I’d do one-legged burpees or get on the floor with my casted foot and do yoga that could be done on my knees. I left NYC for the west coast shortly after my return to shoes, when my rebuilding efforts felt fruitless. In a taxi on the way to the airport, I watched the trees speed by in a blur against the pink and orange sunrise. I was moving on to the next stage, the next place, with a strong limp, two suitcases, $400 to my name, and no available credit.
In the nine months since the accident, I had lost some physical capabilities; I had lost the dream job I was gunning for; I had lost my apartment. Maybe hardest of all, I had lost my meditation teacher and the spiritual friend-group with whom I’d ushered in 2013. Actually, I chose to walk away from them after seeing a pervasive lack of integrity. I was distraught and left wondering how it all went so awry, but also determined to meet my situation with faithful fierceness. I knew that if this was grace, it would educate me — and if this was a test, I’d try to be up for the challenge.
With no job waiting for me, I boarded the plane to California because I trusted my inner compass. Spirituality requires listening and surrender, but also requires some muscle, some grit, and some boundaries; it requires doubling down when things get rough, and using the tools even when you’ve lost the toolbox.
The joy of initial awakening isn’t false, exactly, but one would be delusional to expect bliss to be a constant state or to expect others to be constantly in that state — a bubble of perpetual positivity leads to undesirable ungrounded-ness. “Yoga is skill in action,” asserts the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture. These skills don’t refer to physical postures or capabilities, but to bringing acquired strength and grace into our daily lives, into battle. Whatever we do on the mat, on the meditation cushion, or in the church isn’t where the work ends — it’s where it begins.
After things started crumbling and only a few days before I shattered my heel, I posted one of my favorite quotes by spiritual teacher Adyashanti all over my social media: “Make no mistake about it. Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”
Maybe the woman in my cohort was right: I was asking for it. Asking for truth, not comfort. Asking to be a vehicle for grace, not to be content in my own ego. Over and over again.
Ram Dass never fully recovered from his stroke although he lived for another twenty-two years. In the film, he artfully states the difference between being cured and being healed. Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God. I look at my tattoo and do not wish for things to be the way they were when I got it. We can never embody a phrase or notion more fully than in our behavior, but maybe a tattoo is one small ritualistic step in an ongoing movement towards God. As Joseph Campbell notes, “Ritual is mythology made alive, and its effect is to convert men into angels.” In my ever-expanding awareness of fierceness and grace, the mark doesn’t feel outgrown as much as increasingly potent, like a robust tree layered with rings and reaching upwards.
