The amount of love and acceptance you can receive from others is proportionate to the amount you love and accept yourself. If you aren’t feeling it from the outside world, look at your inside world first.
– Lyndsay K. R. Toensing
In Tis the Season for Receiving Part 1, we started the discussion about our openness to receiving. I shared examples from my journey where I have blocked and shut down my own receptivity. I also shared how your Reticular Activating System (RAS) in your magnificent brain will show you more of what you want to see regardless if that is based on truth and reality or not.
Most of us want to live a fulfilling life, full of love, joy, and happiness. But then our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors sabotage our efforts to creating this life. We block our ability to receive all that life has to offer us and wants to give us.
I gave you some reflective writing prompts last week to start exploring how you are blocking your own receptivity. If you haven’t done that exercise yet, please go do that now.
What did you learn from that exercise? Are you happy with how open you are to receiving from others and the universe?
If you want to make some changes to how you are open to or blocking your receptivity, here are 6 tips to get started:
- Awareness – We’ve already started this step with the writing prompts in the last post. Bring awareness to where you are or aren’t open to receiving and identify the belief tied to it. Stay open, honest, curious, and leave judgement at the door. As my coach, Alyssa Nobriga says, if you judge it, you’re stuck with it!
- Get to know it – Once you’ve identified a belief that keeps you closed from receiving, get to know it. We’re not analyzing it to understand root cause. Give it a voice and ask what it needs? What does it want you to know? How can you best support this part of yourself?
- Show love and acceptance – After you’ve taken the time to understand what this belief needs, give yourself some love and acceptance. Not by not judging or trying to fix anything. But by thanking this part of yourself for letting you know what it needs. Then share how you will support this part of yourself. Maybe it just needs to know that you will check in or that you will do something nice for yourself every week just because.
- Act – If you’ve followed me at all, you know that I believe this is one of the most important steps in your inner work. Whatever you decide you will do to support this part of yourself, take action to do so. Put time on your calendar to check in with yourself, schedule that class, massage, friend time, etc. Follow-through on what you said you would do to support this part of yourself.
- Gratitude – Showing gratitude for all the parts of yourself and all the beauty in your life is a great way to open the floodgates to receiving. From thanking the belief for showing you what you need to feel more whole, to thanking someone for their flexibility instead of apologizing for rescheduling, thanking the food on your plate before you eat, or writing a list of things you are grateful for at the end of the day. Gratitude is a celebration of all the abundance and beauty you have in your life.
- Repeat – The inner work journey is a continuous spiral. You will come around time and time again to many of the same wounds and lessons to look at and heal them from a different perspective. It is absolutely normal and beautiful. Keep doing the work and unraveling the spiral to break your receptivity dam wide open.
Wishing your and yours a beautiful holiday season and a happy New Year! May you all be open to receiving all the magic this life has in store for you!
Stay curious, friends!
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