Embodied Grace: Trusting the Intelligence of Presence
“A Lived Approach of Healing and Transformation”
Author – Paul Robear ©2025
As we step into a new year, I find myself drawn into a season of reflection. Not as an exercise in self-improvement, but as an honest look into how I am living. What am I embracing? Where am I present, and where do I pull away? How am I continuing to open myself to healing and transformation?
Again and again, I return to the same threshold: trust.
Trust in our ability to meet life as it unfolds. Trust that even in uncertainty, something within us knows how to stay present, how to love, how to remain open.
I am reminded that this kind of trust is not passive. It is lived. It is embodied. I have come to think of it as embodied grace.
Embodied grace invites us into a way of being where we trust the flow of life itself: the gifts that arrive unexpectedly, the people who shape and challenge us, and the choices we make that quietly define the life we are living. Grace, in this sense, is an inner knowing, deeply spiritual in nature, that can be felt in the body and expressed through relationship.
By grace, I also mean a felt sense of alignment, a quiet recognition that we are guided from within. When embodied, this grace shapes the way we listen, the way we respond, and the way we hold both ourselves and others in moments of tension or uncertainty.
To live embodied grace means trusting ourselves to be fully present, with access to what we need in each moment for peace, healing, and transformation.
I find there is a profound humility in this kind of trust. It asks us to release the illusion that I must manage everything in order to be safe. It invites me instead to listen to the intelligence of the body, the wisdom of the heart, and the quiet guidance of Spirit moving through me.
As human beings, we are wired to evolve. Growth and change are not optional; they are part of our design. Yet how we participate in that evolution is always a choice. We choose the depth of our commitment. We choose whether we meet life contracted or open, defended or receptive.
When we look to the wisdom of the ancestors, we see that ritual, ceremony, and a personal journey of reflection have long served as pathways into the transcendent, places where deep trust is cultivated and remembered.
At the Cuyamungue Institute, our work is grounded in direct experience that supports trust in this orientation. My wife and co-teacher Laura Lee puts it this way: “Trust the process. Trust the body’s response to the ritual to support this state of being, it’s built in. Trust the spirits to deliver the healing, the journey, the grace — it’s a gift. Let us trust our own inner wisdom, in dialogue with unseen voices.” Through ritual body postures, embodied experiences, and guided trance states, the invitation is always the same: to slow down enough to listen, to allow the body to speak, and to trust that wisdom does not need to be forced or figured out, but remembered.
These practices are about restoring relationship with the body, with Spirit, and with the deeper intelligence that knows how healing unfolds when the conditions for presence are created. In this way, embodied grace becomes something we practice, not just something we reflect upon.
As I step into this new year, I notice how often my own experience calls me back to this simple truth. Not to do more, but to listen more deeply. Not to control the outcome, but to stay present with what is here. My reflections are less about where I am going and more about how I am meeting each moment along the way.
I am learning again that trust is not a single decision, but a daily practice. A quiet recommitment to stand in love for myself, to meet others with compassion, and to hold life’s uncertainty without closing my heart. When I do, grace ceases to be an idea. It becomes embodied. And in that embodiment, healing and transformation arise naturally, in their own time.
"When grace ceases to be an idea and becomes embodied, healing and transformation arise naturally, in their own time."
The name “CUYA” carries with it both history and vision. Rooted in our origins as the Cuyamungue Institute, it now also serves as an acronym — C.U.Y.A. — a guiding symbol that unites our mission:
C — Consciousness: The field of shared awareness that arises in Collective Presence, where the “We” awakens beyond the “I” – moving from the “Me to the We.”
U — Unity: Our alignment with the Cycles of Nature and the rhythms of the cosmos, reminding us that we are woven into a greater fabric of reality. This sense of unity reminds us that our awareness is the shared consciousness that connects all living beings.
Y — Your Awakening: The inner journey of Embodiment and Wisdom, where through direct experience the body remembers. At the CUYA Institute, this awakening is nurtured through Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, where the body itself becomes the doorway to wisdom, presence, and transformation.
A — Ancestral Wisdom: Roots. Our connection to Sacred Lineage, honoring those who walked before us and rooting us in belonging and continuity. Our founder, anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman looked to some of the oldest, most authentic ancestral records we have — the world’s collection of early and indigenous art — and decoded selected artifacts as embodied “ritual instructions.”
Together, the Four Pathways of C.U.Y.A. — Consciousness, Unity, Your Awakening, and Ancestral Wisdom — form a single tapestry of practice. They remind us that awakening is not an abstract idea but something we live: through the body in Your Awakening, through nature’s cycles in Unity, through community in shared Consciousness, and through the guidance of Ancestral Wisdom.
- …. CONTINUE