From Wrath to Fortitude, Invoking Grace

Are you feeling angry? Outraged? Wrathful? Perhaps you are experiencing personal or social injustice? Would you like to transform your life and find the higher altitudes from which to engage? Move from wrath to fortitude?

You’ve probably experienced the energy drain that comes from staying attached to our wounds, insistence on unforgiveness, and fears. Caroline Myss invites us to see this from the perspective of an “energy budget”. Negative patterns take energy to maintain and at some point it will leave you “less and less power with which to manage the demands of your daily life: your health, your creativity, your relationships, and the subtle movements of the natural laws.”¹

Another great book to check out is Power vs Force by David R Hawkins.

Your negative history creates psychic weight, and the more psychic “weight” you carry around with you, the longer you have to “wait” for anything to heal, or for anything to change in your life.

Caroline Myss, Defy Gravity

For some people, the crossroads comes during a crisis. Maybe the dark night of the soul, a term coined by John of the Cross.

The dark night of the soul calls to us to purge our inner demons, our dark passions. We want to dismantle what Caroline Myss calls the “destructive authority each particular passion has in our life…the underlying dark inner currents that direct our actions and behaviours.”² This invitation to cross into timelessness requires courage and honesty to look at the reasons and ways we use our power to feel safe and secure, even and especially at the expense of other people.

Negotiating this terrain takes more than our mental skills and even will. In Defy Gravity, Caroline Myss writes about the power of grace.

Now grace, that’s a little more challenging to describe. So what is grace?

Grace is a mystical force, with many expressions. Its definition defies the limitations of intellectualization and representation of language. We must experience grace to truly understand. Perhaps you have already felt this tranquility, quiet knowing, and field of connection. We may know it in its diluted form, as “our finest personality characteristics”, from kindness to wisdom.

Caroline Myss writes that understanding the seven chakras can help us more easily connect with the graces. Just as the seven passions are not punishment, the seven graces are not rewards. There is no concept of deserving here.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Heart Chakra

Associated with the heart and thymus gland, the heart chakra holds the ability “to make decisions beyond the bounds of our Karma.” ³ For Jung, with each chakra presenting a worldview, the fourth chakra is the beginning of individuation and where we tame our passions and learn empathy.⁴ Often we present it as the bridge between the lower and upper chakras, between more primal and more refined consciousness. Caroline Myss writes in Invisible Acts of Power that the heart chakra is the physical centre of both our physical and spiritual beings. The key to a healthy heart, for Richard Gerber, author of Vibrational Medicine, is love of self.

Signs of deficiencies in the heart chakra include a lack of self-love and empathy, apathy, and inability to forgive. Jealousy and tribalism can point to excessive energy here.

Cyndi Dale, in Complete Book of Chakras, shares that “the typical block is congested energy, or a buildup of stuck energy. This extra energy can be composed of physical microbes or inflammation, repressed or stuck feelings, dysfunctional beliefs, and other people’s energies.”⁵ These knots can impede natural energy flow. She also offers numerous suggestions of chakra medicine. Many of the exercises works on building our different types of intuition.

Fourth Passion : Wrath

Wrath goes beyond anger, in its destructiveness and vengeance. Caroline Myss writes in Defy Gravity that wrath’s language is self-righteousness, which sees only you in the right. As it builds, and contaminate the heart, a person seeks to punish and even destroy anyone who s/he sees as unloving. This of course is a perspective, whether a person is loving us enough, or in the way we like to be loved. When wrath fuels a person, s/he also uses it to control or hurt other people.

Fourth Grace : Fortitude

Courage, at the energy level of 200 in David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, is where we first see power. Those with an energy level below Courage see the world through a lens of hopelessness, fear, and frustration. Riddled with anxiety and anger, these people drain more energy from society than contribute and live with and through force.

Force always moves against something, whereas power doesn’t move against anything at all. Power gives life and energy – force takes these away. We notice that power is associated with compassion and makes us feel positively about ourselves. Force is associated with judgment and makes use feel poorly about us.

David Hawkins, Power vs Force

Fortitude is the grace that supports those “who have awakened, for example, to the challenges of their highest spiritual potential.”⁶ To see past the illusion, to be filled with light, to discover our calling or vocation. The more we are conscious of what we are doing with our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, the more we tap into our potential. The question Caroline Myss asks is – “how much truth can you absorb on this journey of illusion while still living within the illusion.”⁷

The need to search for our highest potential is a destined battle between our ego and soul that is encoded in our spiritual DnA. We cannot help but wonder if there is “more” for us “out there” somewhere.

Caroline Myss, Defy Gravity

From Wrath to Fortitude

What do we need this fortitude for? To follow our inner intuitive guidance.

In a world that places a premium on logic and reasoning, intuition is dismissed, ridiculed, and suppressed. Yet, to meet and rise above our passions, we must rely on more than our five bodily senses and on our spiritual senses. Fortitude helps us keep steady in times of chaos so that we do not succumb to our fears so that we do not live from wrath. It is to remain steady in our understanding of the existence of mystical laws, that are “outside the equation of time, space, and matter, and outside social and religious convention”, as Caroline Myss reminds us.

Love is our nature. Yet, from age-old systems and constructs that control through fear, most people respond more vigorously still to this energy. Because we believe in the three dreams of security, permanence, and unconditional love, we seek to ensure our safety, certainty, and security in the ways that have been passed down. We buy into using anger and wrath.

To step out of this illusion we can invoke the grace of fortitude. We call on our intuition and compassion so to move through our engagements with ourselves, other people, and the world at large with love, meaning, and purpose. Together we can move from wrath to fortitude, living a grace-filled life.

Sources

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