Accept, Serve, & Flow

I sat down to write about the self-nurturing essential of receiving -- love, energy, compliments, ideas, gifts, the Divine – and I didn't want to write.

I kept putting it off, doing anything but writing... and then it hit me when I was out walking... I haven't been receiving so how I can I write about it! I've been cutting myself off from the flow, I've fallen into that old pattern of shining out without taking in.

My buddy, coach and co-facilitator of Surfing the Edge of the Known Molly Gordon puts it this way, "I've been in the self-sacrificing serving mode before but I hadn't before glimpsed a way of serving that feeds my soul and a way of feeding my soul that serves. It's not that I sacrifice myself for the whole, but that I heal myself for the whole."

When I focus on serving without receiving, I end up deep crispy fried without even noticing. I eat sugar (my personal nemesis), get a cramp in my neck, and resent anything that requires me to exert effort. I move slower and slower, starting to resemble the chocolate brown banana slugs creeping through my garden. There can be other reasons why this fossilizing happens but the first recourse almost always seem to be to open myself up to receive – Spirit, love, feedback, nature, gratitude, energy, creativity.

As Raymond Carver wrote when he was dying:
"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."

Time and time again I see how almost terribly difficult or impossible it is for people to receive. Many of us live in stories about receiving: that we will become beholden; it makes us too dependent and vunerable; it is too intimate; Who are we to ask or receive? Always a lender, never a borrow be; If we receive we will feed our ego and become monsters; Modern women don't ask for help, it isn't being a good feminist; It is cleaner and easier to just go it alone, look what happens when you get enmeshed with people!

How we open to receiving?

1) Acknowledge that you are an animal (so easy to forget!) and animals must live in community to survive. Any fantasy of going it alone is just that, a destructive fantasy. We need community to survive and certainly to thrive which means give and take, love and shine, share and negotiate.

2) Acknowledge too that contraction and expansion is the rhythm of life – inhale, exhale, tides wash in, tides wash out, nature blossoms and nature sheds. So it goes with you: you open and receive and then you contract. And what is the problem?

3) The only problem is if you fight the contraction! Love when you contract – that is the only way out! Love when you cut yourself off from love, energy, Spirit, compliments, community. Love the beliefs and assessments that tell you to. Observe them, note them, and love them. This is the surest path to opening! Imagine how you would love a puppy who was butting her head up against a wall trying to get out of a corner. You can see the way out and lovingly you pick them up and show them. Lovingly observe yourself butting your head – and then you will see the way out.

4) Write down your assessments about why you can't receive in the moment of shutting yourself off. You must write them down! Keeping them in your head won't allow you the distance you need to observe. What do you tell yourself about why you can't let something or someone in? Do this everyday for two weeks and you will be amazed.

5) Involve your body. Slow down -- receiving can't be hurried. Deepen your breathing, lower your shoulders, lift your heart toward the sky. Do this during a hug and feel the difference.

6) Employ this magic words from spiritual wise woman and intuitive Brenda Villa (Email brendavilla@fuse.net for info on her readings and tell her I sent you), "I accept." Brenda taught me this a few years back. Take your first sip of tea in the morning and say, "I accept." Stand in a ray of sunlight and declare, "I accept." Notice the love in your dog's eyes and whisper, "I accept." A friend pays you a compliment and you elegantly reply, "I accept." You find a perfect parking place and you nod and say, "I accept." Thanks, Brenda!

7) To quote the Comfort Queen from page 198 in Comfort Secrets for Busy Women, "Consider this: What if God is speaking to you, caring for you, through the arms of your friends and neighbors? What if by refusing to receive you are blocking Divine Love, the Divine Hello?...

8) We are all connected. Science keeps handing us more hard data to prove that we are each a wave on an endless sea, part of the whole, rising and then falling back into the whole. Why do we insist on painfully separating ourselves when the ocean just wants to carry us forward, hold us up, accept us as part of all that is, and then drop us gently on the sand to start again?

What can I allow myself to receive this week? Today? Right now? What am I willing to accept?