Daring to Receive

This concept has been on my mind the last several days.

Receiving.

When I think of this word right off the bat, it’s someone giving me some concrete object as a gift – a bottle of perfume, an article of clothing, a DVD. An actual tactile thing.

Poking a little more, receiving could be an experience or service – giving me a massage, giving me a smile, a handshake, a friendly glance.

Pull it out a little further and I begin to get into receiving the ephemeral and esoteric –receiving abundance, receiving help, receiving love and support.

And I feel that, for my part at least, I’m not so good at receiving that last group of gifts. Receiving love, receiving support and help, receiving abundance from the universe.

The modern western culture in which I live focuses most on active life – doing, buying, getting, achieving, reaching, striving, competing. Maybe receiving makes people think of passivity, of doing nothing, and doing nothing is frowned upon in this culture of being a go-getter.

*shrug*

I think that receiving insinuates a certain level of vulnerability, and I think that’s why I and most people I know aren’t great at it – we fear being vulnerable, because this culture and time period in which we live equates vulnerability with weakness, with the opening ourselves up to be hurt.

I was thinking about this pretty hard today after an interaction with someone who is unspeakably dear to my heart. I gave this person a sincere but fairly casual compliment and, like many of us, this person kind of tried to shrug it off, to deflect it.

I told this person to just take the damned compliment and LET ME LOVE YOU.

It hit me that this is something I do as well, and the issue is not “I’m not good with compliments.” The issue is deeper – the issue here is that we’re not good at receiving love. At just standing there and letting someone give us love, without us doing anything in return, or anything to “earn” it, or “deserve” it.

It seems like our world is based on mutual-gain transactions: in each interpersonal experience, someone gives and gets something from the other.

But what about just getting? And I don’t mean in a selfish, self-absorbed way. What about just … taking in what we need to feel nourished, to feel GOOD, to feel like we are precious and like we belong? Like someone cares about us? Like we care about ourselves?

That gets into the bumpy issue of loving ourselves, and that subject could fill an entire blog for decades by itself. We feel we aren’t worthy, or that in order to get something, we have to give something in return.

So I won’t go into self worth or self love. Or even being able to ask for what you need, although it’s all related.

When we refuse to drop our defenses and just … receive, are we not stealing from them an opportunity to love us? Aren’t we robbing them of a chance to give us a part of themselves, a part that matters more than anything else they could offer?

It occurs to me how hurtful that is. To refuse to allow someone to give the good things they have inside of them – God, that’s ugly.

We have no right to deprive someone from doing a good deed, from putting love into this world that so desperately needs it. We have no right to take that from them, or to take the love they’re offering away from ourselves.

Thinking of it that way, thinking that it’s basically theft when I refuse to receive love from another – that really changes things for me.

If I refuse to receive, I steal love from myself and I steal from another the opportunity to give me the love they have for me.

Talk about no-win situations.

Letting them love me … giving them the opportunity show me the feelings they have for me, just like I want to show them the feelings I have for them…. It is a subtle shift in my perception that absolutely changes everything.