Receiving is an Active Process
learning to feel safe in worthiness
It is not enough to know that we want more, in our relationships, in our careers, in our home lives, in our communities. It is not enough to know that we deserve better from ourselves, from others, and from the universe.
Knowing is not enough. Knowing means we’re clarifying what we want, but there is a deeply emotional (dare I say spiritual) component to actually getting what we want that I see a lot fewer memes or pithy posts about.
That component is the act of receiving. Yes, the act, because my beautiful gems, quite frankly we suck at receiving. There is a kind of unconscious passivity assigned to the act of receiving, much like the binary I see in New Age movements where the feminine = passivity/receptivity, and the masculine = acting/giving. Barf.
And I’m not saying there’s nothing to that dichotomy, just that it isn’t that simple and it’s just us smashing our oversimplified and Puritanical Western ideals of gender onto ancient concepts of reciprocity and balance. The Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy is not about opposites, it’s about complements, and the harmony of all things and their qualities being in all things and their qualities.
A quick way to see what I mean in real time is this: reflect on what happens for you when you receive a compliment.
(Or any other kind of non-transactional kindness, and figuring out if it’s transactional can be stickier, but let’s put that aside for this exercise.)
Do you…
laugh nervously and deny your deserving of it?
become uncomfortable and minimize it?
immediately defer to the other person and compliment them instead?
anxiously wonder if it’s a trick?
push it far, far away, lest you be seduced into arrogance and selfishness?
The way that we receive a kindness is a key to recognizing how we do or do not allow goodness into our own lives.
As New Agers, we can talk all day about manifesting and “The Secret” (barf), and we can victim-blame and spiritually shame ourselves til the cows come home when our prayers seem to go unanswered. We tend to not talk about how to be ready to receive all that goodness we’re so sure we should be receiving.
If we can’t receive a compliment, how can we expect to receive the fruits of our wildest dreams and efforts?
Receiving is an active process. It requires us to deeply examine how worthy we believe ourselves to be of those wild dreams, because if a deeper part of us believes we can’t/shouldn’t/couldn’t have it, then we will find a way to leap right over it like a cat with a cucumber.
Receiving is a test of the nervous system emergency broadcast system. How safe do we feel allowing in the love, adoration, and generosity of others?
Attachment trauma will tell us that in order to receive anything, even a crumb of goodness, we need to work hard to earn it. Or maybe that we’ll be in someone’s debt. Or maybe it would require digging through carefully constructed layers of cognitive soil to the parts of us that are sure we only deserve bad stuff, because deserving good stuff would mean we’re good, and if we believe that we’re inherently good…well that might fuck up the very delicate ecosystem we’ve created out of self-loathing.
All of these internal resistances make receiving a complex, active process that truly requires us to square up with any belief that we don’t deserve what we truly want, or that we can’t have it because it doesn’t exist (if you exist and your desire exists, then having it can exist), or that getting it would require something of us that we are not willing/wanting to give.
Noticing and exploring all of that inner content is the first step.
The second step: unlearning those false stories and deciding what new ones you want to write for yourself.
Third, we get started on loving ourselves. No more self-deprecating “jokes,” no more self-pity, no more running from grief, no more internalizing of all the ugly shit that isn’t about us.
Unsubscribe from the daily newsletter of your Inner Critic.
And just like we have to click that unsubscribe link 28 times before we’re taken off the email list, unsubscribing from the Inner Critic’s ideas requires repetition to be effective.
To receive graciously when someone offers you something, whether it’s a compliment or the million dollars we all wish someone would hand us, we can pause. We can inhale. We can make space for the possibility that someone appreciates us so much as we are that they are giving us something. We can let it in, let it land on our hearts like a small singing bird. And we can say, “Thank you so much. That means a lot to me.”
It is safe to believe that we are good.
It is safe to believe that we are worthy of what we want out of this one wild and precious life.
Thanks for being here! Please share this post if you think it would resonate with someone you know. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what this post brings up for you, or how you’ve been learning to receive.