“The only possible match for someone who doesn’t know how to receive is someone who doesn’t know how to give.”
– Amanda Owen
RECEPTIVITY
Our capacity to receive–be it love, money, friendship, compliments or presents–stems from our ability to acknowledge our own worth. So often we carry within us a deep sense of being undeserving, and whether that feeling is conscious or unconscious, it makes us repel the very affection and abundance we so desperately seek. The world around us reflects our inner vision; if we have a poor self-image, we’ll be blind to gifts from others since we have grown visual receptors only for rejection, mistreatment and unkindness, never seeing the love.
Sometimes a good first step is to begin sharing our gifts and attributes with ourselves through the use of positive affirmations and meditation. We must do this work for ourselves before becoming involved with partners, otherwise they simply become a convoluted means to our same, habitual end of misprizing ourselves: We’d use their constant validation and praise to feel momentarily good about ourselves, but this dynamic would not foster receptivity as much as codependence.
To practice receptivity, we can also practice actively appreciating the good in others, celebrating them and offering support and encouragement. We can make a point of meeting another’s gaze and allowing ourselves to receive that connection. We can hear others out, even if we suspect their ideas are off-kilter. In these practices, receptivity brings openness–taking in new points of view, suggestions, strategies and possibilities–and allowing them to alter and affect us deeply. We can become highly receptive to change and growth. We can encounter a mystery and open our hearts to the grand uncertainty of life on this planet. In the end, receptivity is intense aliveness in which we deny no one and nothing, and thus receive everyone and everything.
– Alexandra Katehakis and Tom Bliss, The Center for Healthy Sex, Daily Meditations, September 2, 2015