The teachings of Ram Dass – the teacher born Richard Alpert – had a great influence on me. He suffered a stroke late in his life that left him paralyzed on one side and dependent on others for the simplest things. And at first he raged against it. Here was a man who had spent decades teaching serenity and surrender, and he was furious — at his body, at his helplessness, at the sheer indignity of it.
And then, slowly, something turned. He began to see the stroke not as an interruption of his path but as part of it – a fierce teacher delivering a lesson he could have learned in no other way. He came to call it Fierce Grace. Grace, because it was a gift. Fierce, because it had arrived in a form no one would ever have chosen.
Think about that phrase, because it describes something true about the whole of a life, and not merely about a stroke. We live, I am convinced, in a benevolent universe – but we badly misunderstand what benevolent means. We imagine it means a universe that hands us what we want: the promotion, the clean bill of health, the smooth passage. It means nothing of the kind. A benevolent universe fashions for you exactly what you need in order to grow – and a great deal of what you need in order to grow is precisely what you would never, of your own will, have asked for.
The lost position that felt like a catastrophe and turned out to be the doorway to your real work. The relationship that ended, and broke your heart, and made you over the years into someone far wiser than the person who first fell in love. The illness that stopped you at last and forced you to look at a life you had been far too busy to examine. At the time, each of these felt like the universe turning against you. Looking back, you can see that it was doing the very opposite. You simply could not see it then, because the value of the gift was hidden inside the pain of receiving it, and was revealed only much later.
This is why I ask you to trust, especially through the dark stretches. There is a saying in Hindi: when the night is at its blackest, the dawn is not far off. When you are in the middle of one of these fierce graces – and you will be, more than once – you cannot yet see what it is for. Sometimes you must simply hunker down and endure, holding fast to the possibility that this thing you did not want is the very thing you most needed.
The Lesson. A benevolent universe does not give you what you want. It gives you what you need in order to grow – and that often arrives disguised as misfortune. The gift is real, but its worth is hidden inside the difficulty and revealed only later. Trust the fierce graces. What feels like the universe set against you is very often the universe at work on you.
Peace!
