Receiving Means Giving

Receiving Means Giving

A wise woman told me once that is it important to give if you want to receive. I was fresh on my spiritual path and I had internalized this concept in a very surface-level way. So I thought: ‘Hmmm ok, I want certain things for my life and it will be pretty easy to give things away.’ A very normal and transactional perspective of any twenty-something. 

It was only in my thirties that I really started understanding the concept of giving and receiving. Sometimes we’re unbalanced in one or the other. I couldn’t understand why I was giving so much, living with such an ‘open heart’ but I wasn’t quite receiving yet. I longed to break the salary bracket I was stuck in, I wanted to experience more satisfaction in my relationships, and I wanted a better life experience in general. I gave and gave and gave, sometimes until I was completely empty. 

In my thirties, I realized that the practice of giving was only half of the journey. I would need to travel the other leg of the journey too, and that was the right of receiving. I use ‘practice’ because there is a certain amount of intentionality implied and ‘right’ because there is a certain amount of self-acknowledgment implied. I had realized that my heart was only open to the outside but to myself, it had been shut. I did not know how to receive it, it was a foreign concept to me.

It meant I needed to go a lot deeper with myself, to get real with myself about how much I thought was okay for me to receive. I took a closer look at the opportunities that were given to me by friends, so that I could receive from them and realized I wasn’t really giving them an opportunity to really give to me – I was doing a lot of the giving: of my time, of my energy, of the shiny gifts. I started noticing my behaviour with giving and receiving. 

I started slowly entertaining the idea of receiving, being gifted, and being taken care of. It was the most difficult thing to do. It brought up thoughts of being burdensome to my friends and family. It made me feel shameful, it made me immediately feel like I would be indebted to someone else. I could feel the discomfort in my body as I allowed my mind to imagine this possibility. I realized that I had been avoiding receiving it because it made me feel uncomfortable. Therein lay my work and I started removing all the distorted thinking that got me to believe it was not okay to receive too.

When we allow one without the other, we are closed off. The experience isn’t complete if we don’t experience the other side. If we realise that we are all connected and moving through this experience as one massive wave, we must also realise that when we give to others, we give to ourselves. You know how good it makes you feel to give to someone and see how it impacts them. This is what I mean. In giving to that person, you also get something from the experience. In the same way, when we receive from others, we receive from ourselves. When someone gives you a gift, you would have to be receptive to receiving that gift. There must be some sort of permission you give yourself on some level, in order to receive it. What permission or allowance are you allowing yourself to receive? It’s your giving to yourself. 

 

Once we allow ourselves to give and to receive, we come full circle with ourselves.

 

Questions To Reflect On: 

  • Are you open to fully giving from your heart?
  • Are you giving with pure intent? Or are you expecting to get something back? 
  • Are you allowing yourself to receive from other people and yourself? 
  • What feelings are you wanting to avoid by constantly giving to others?
  • What feelings are you wanting to avoid by constantly receiving from others?

In love and gratitude,

A woman's hands holding a flower, symbolizing the act of giving and receiving
quote from the post
A woman in a meditative pose, reflecting on the balance between giving and receiving.

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What to do when life gets in the way?

What to do when life gets in the way?

You know this one all too well: 

you plan to the most minute detail, to account for everything in your life until it throws you a curveball! Life’s sense of humour, when we take our lives too seriously, can really test what we’re made of. 

What do we usually do in situations like these? 

We go into a frenzy, we stress about how things will work out, we internalise the situation, and feel shame or guilt for being human. This is our default process, our unconscious and very mammalian stress response kicking into gear.

How do we respond differently to these outside circumstances that are so loud and demanding of our immediate attention?

  • We go in the opposite direction. 
  • We stand our ground firmly and how we do that is by steadying our nervous system.
  • We plant ourselves firmly in our bodies by consciously becoming aware of our breath. We allow our breath to deepen as it takes us deeper into our bodies.
  • We may play some soothing music.
  • We may feel like crying, laughing or screaming (this is the release response – letting go of all that tension that is welling up inside the body). You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity to let all that worry and stress out of your body, even if it takes you to a feeling of complete powerlessness. That is just the call for you to surrender. 

Usually when we have some kind of release, we allow ourselves to become emptier and more receptive to the information and guidance that is waiting for us. It comes in the form of inspiration to go in a new direction or to take a different action step. We may find that what has just gone wrong wants us to apply a completely new solution. All new information of the highest quality is waiting for your receptivity to be open and trusted before it can be recognised by our centers for cognition.

Most of the time, we want to know what this detour has happened, because we don’t have all the information available to us at the time. Have you ever looked back at the circumstances of your past and realised that certain things needed to happen, no matter how painful or inconvenient at the time? Looking back you can see why you were meant to stay in a place you were longing to get out of (maybe you met someone really amazing as a result or found a job that is exactly right for you in that place). We can never see the whole picture, we can only see the square that we have our feet on at the time. The thing about life is that it is constantly unfolding and we won’t ever ‘know’ for sure how things will pan out. Our work lies in trusting the path of our unfolding and also letting go of any preconceptions about our futures that are based on past fears.

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. – John Lennon

Individual practicing deep breathing meditation for stress relief
Quote on What to do when life gets in the way?
Hands releasing light symbolizing the emotional release and letting go of stress

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Old Emotions, New Situations

Old Emotions, New Situations

Our thoughts, emotions, and bodies are all connected. Western medicine and healing modalities traditionally dealt with these as separate parts – almost like a mechanic would service a car. We are slowly beginning to realise that contrary to this perspective on human beings, there is an interconnectedness between all parts these parts, they are in fact a reflection of each other and work together.

I was at my laptop and found a bill that was sent to me without a breakdown of the total amount. My immediate thought was ‘’I always get screwed over’’ and then my heart started racing away. I stepped away from my laptop to go make some tea because I saw that where I was was in an outdated version of thinking that the new me had worked very hard on purging. The old belief was ‘’I always get screwed over.’’ I understood that the belief formed an emotion within my body and that emotion prompted my body to release a chemical response that caused my heart to start racing. 

Just having the knowledge of the process helped me this time, but it wasn’t enough to still the thoughts that gripped me so tightly, trying to force me to accept them as true. I stood there, stirring the pot as I slow-brewed my tea. I identified (from past experiences) that I had to get my awareness back into my body and soften the blow to my nervous system. As I stirred the pot I started doing my deep diaphragm breathing making sure that my inhales were as long as my exhales. I focused on bringing more oxygen into my body. By the time my tea was brewed, I was feeling a lot more expansive and fully in control of my ship!

I walked over to my laptop and responded to the email and then decided to ring the sender in a calm manner to find out what the problem was. To my surprise, it was a problem with my email, and the breakdown of the statement was easily viewed from another email address. After feeling a tad foolish and remembering that this was an old identity paying out, I was able to see the situation as a beautiful reminder that ‘’I am always supported in my world’’ (my new belief to replace the distorted one).

The moral of the story – Old identities try to express themselves through new situations and if we are aware of the fact that they have no relevance to us now, we can quickly step into who we are now and what we are wanting to affirm for our lives. It takes some time to practice a new identity and it takes some time for the old versions to run themselves out of their system but every time we affirm by putting our attention on what our preference is at any moment, we begin to shift over to our new versions (and new neural pathways).

Much love!

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Needs VS Neediness

Needs VS Neediness

It’s taken me a long time to share what I have discovered about relationships (2 years in fact) – I wanted to ensure I had integrated PROPERLY all that I had learned.

We look to partner, mostly, because we’re looking to fulfill something within ourselves. There’s a kind of neediness that pervades our romantic relationships (whether you’re anxiously attached or not).

We chase after love and affection from our distant partners, we try to be ‘good’ for them in every way possible and when they don’t return our displays of affection and love we feel terrible. It is cyclical and can chip away at our self-worth.

What’s really going on, typically, has very little to do with our partners – it has more to do with ourselves and that feeling of incompleteness we may feel that drives the entire thing.

When we start to first address that feeling and tend to our own feelings of emptiness, we can start seeing through the hormone-driven illusory nature of it all and our true needs become apparent. The relationship itself then takes its rightful place (this may mean that the relationship is not the right one for you) and some real conversation will need to take place.

How do we even recognize when we are chasing something?

  • It will be a strong compulsion towards winning someone else’s love or affection.
  • You feel drained when you’re with the other person, yet you stay.
  • There is little to no reciprocation of your energy and spirit of giving.
  • Most of your time is consumed by a preoccupation with the other person and the connection itself.
  • Your boundaries are not firm with the other person.
  • You can not be yourself in the relationship (you have to become someone else to win over their love and affection).

We ALWAYS complete ourselves first and only then can we make space for what is truly a fit for us.

In love and gratitude,

Need more guidance?

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What Else is Possible?

What Else is Possible?

Everything around us is information:  from the feelings we experience to the type of food that we consume – it all holds information. What we do is assign a meaning to all of it. For example: eating a cheeseburger from the fast-food place around the corner could mean bonding time with kids to some parents, it could mean a sense of comfort for others, and then for others, it could have no meaning associated with it at all. I have spoken about this in a previous love letter to you.

Sometimes we get tired of the same experiences. Sometimes we want to create new experiences but our sense of perception may be closed off to the world of infinite possibilities because we’re locked into one very specific paradigm. What can help us broaden our own perspective about ourselves and the world is asking questions (without answering them immediately but rather for the answer to arrive on our doorstep through what the outside presents to us).

I’ve been using a very specific question to experiment with this and the question is ‘what else is possible?’ It comes from my studies in Access Bars Consciousness. I wasn’t quite aware of how powerful this little tool was at the time. It’s now that I realize how it opens up your mind to be able to perceive more than what your brain’s wiring allows you to perceive. 

I ask myself this question whenever I would like to experience something different in my life but tend to be hit with the same experience as I always have been. I found that I am able to see other options more clearly. If for example I want to go out to dinner and I am about to take the route to the same restaurant I always have, I ask the question ‘what else is possible?’ It gives me time to pause and consciously think about what I’m feeling: am I wanting the same choices that are available on the menu? Am I wanting to go there out of habit? Am I resistant to going to other places because I know that this place is reliable in terms of service and quality? 

Do you see? It sets the ball in motion for self-inquiry and analysis. It allows us to self-reflect and make a choice from free will as opposed to choices that have been created as automated programmed ways of being and routine. This way we allow ourselves to embrace change and new experiences and we ‘Break the Habit of Being Ourselves’ (as Dr Joe Dispenza’s book title of the same name suggests). It’s a wonderful question to guide you along your day and to make a daily practice out of.

We can empty ourselves completely to allow ourselves to experience our highest potential.

In love and gratitude,

Need more guidance?

If you want to work with me 1:1 CLICK HERE to  enroll for my coaching program where I tailor a process specifically for YOUR transformation.

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