Thoughts in Practice: Grace

On January 1, I saw a bald eagle flying overhead and four hours later, a shooting star. It's easy to feel grace in nature. Every once in a while when I'm in a session, everything comes together perfectly, it seems, and I find myself sitting with an Other, my client, in a moment of grace. It happened on the first day that I worked this year. A client was talking about gratitude—gratitude that he was alive, having survived a particularly difficult cancer and course of chemotherapy, gratitude that he had the resources to "stick it out," gratitude for the gift of This Great Life. I had a fleeting awareness of a shared moment of grace, and in that second I had the realization that every moment in this work can be a moment of grace, though not always recognized.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grace is "gratitude" (as in grace before meals); it is also "favor" (that ephemeral moment when one experiences the divine).

The grace that I witness from session to session as I am privy to my clients' struggles, the perseverance that keeps those I encounter working and growing and changing, humbles me and is the wonderful byproduct of this work that I engage in, psychotherapy. And my clients and I achieve it together: mutual grace, as we sit together gracefully.