Being Receptive: Five Ways to Open and Heal Your Heart
Are you so used to taking care of others—putting their needs first, making them comfortable, ignoring yourself in the process—that you don’t even notice when someone offers to support you?
Do you have a strong drive to make others—family, co-workers, friends—feel better (the "helper syndrome")?
Do compliments pass you by—you hear the words but just don’t feel them or take them in?
Are you so busy you forget to slow down and enjoy a hug someone gives you?
With all of us feeling secretly isolated and not cared for most of the time, it’s a tragedy when we can’t experience the appreciation given to us!
Instead, wouldn’t it be wonderful to feed and nurture your receptivity so you can fully take in and receive all the blessings that come your way?
How Receptivity Can Shift Your Experience
Receptivity is like a permeable membrane in your energy field, allowing appreciation, love, caring, joy, spontaneity—some of which might be unfamiliar or new—into your awareness.Receptivity opens you to possibilities not yet explored, and different ways of perceiving your experience.
The more open and receptive you are, the more people will love and appreciate you!
Being receptive expresses your willingness to experience, engage, and be open.
Being receptive helps you look for commonalities—what you might share with others—and complementarities.
Being receptive helps you step aside from judgment and your experience of separation.
Without receptivity, you probably do not trust enough to listen and hear.
Without receptivity, you spiral within what you already know: your mind cycles its old stories and tells you what you think; you repeat your beliefs endlessly in your conversations; and you refuse to believe what does not correspond with your ideas. Your perception of the world remains static and rigid. Nothing can move.
Lack of receptivity creates a barrier, a kind of wall around you. Often you unconsciously hope this wall will keep things as they are, prevent disruption, and protect you from having to change.
Such rigidity of beliefs has personal physical, psychological, spiritual, and health consequences. It can result in disease, fear, suffering, despair, and uncontrollable rage. It can and does prevent healing.
We see also that rigid belief systems are the source of increasing national, cultural, and species dysfunction—whether in the form of climate change denial or cultural-religious wars over what is the right way to live.
Nothing will change until you perceive a different road, and take it. The first step is to be receptive to different possibilities. Then your willingness to try something new, hear something different, and experience a shift will open pathways.
For your personal health and our species’ survival, it makes sense to cultivate receptivity.
A Story
In one of the first journeys I ever took, over 30 years ago, we were instructed to receive a gift from spirit. I was given an Eagle, a bird I’d resonated with since I was a young child. Yet when I came out of the journey I said, “I was given an eagle. No, maybe it was a hawk.” The teachers called me out. They pointed out, and I realized, that I was acting as if I didn’t deserve an eagle. Big lesson in receptivity!
Being Receptive: Five Ways to Use Your Intent
I was shocked and sad when I observed and began to acknowledge how often I deflected appreciation and praise. My stories and interpretations of reality were clouding and dampening my receptivity. It’s taken a constant shifting-of-perception to retrain myself.
Here are five suggestions that have worked well for both me and my clients. They will help you develop your receptivity and openness.
Set your intent to be present. When someone hugs you, let yourself slow down, feel it, return it. When someone compliments you, take it in. Focus on saying “thank you” rather than deflecting with “Oh, it’s an old dress” or changing the subject.
Pay attention to your language, the responses you give. They may help you identify your barriers of resistance—belief, lack of trust, habits of response, disconnection.
For example, when someone says do you are pretty/smart/clever/a good mom/a valuable employee, do you deflect? This may indicate you don’t believe it! Chapter 15 of Weave the Heart of the Universe Into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy offers a lot of guidance on identifying and shifting your barriers of resistance.Develop the qualities of listening and witnessing.
Try being curious instead of reactive. When someone expresses an opinion that’s anathema to you, breathe deeply, and ask a question, trying to learn what’s behind that opinion. I did this intentionally at a dinner party with a Trump supporter, staying curious and calm throughout, and noticed that he felt heard rather than defended.
Trust your insights and the gifts spirit gives you. When a little voice tells you you’ve done a good job, listen! When you sense energetic chaos around you, let yourself leave. When spirit gives you and eagle, take it with gratitude!
In sum, the more receptive and clear you become internally, the stronger a conduit you can be for balance, cosmic healing energy, and bringing your light to the world!
Meg riffs on receptivity and the three other pillars of perception in her new book. She loves empowering people with tools for change, and is always happy to talk. Give her a call.
Meg Beeler—Author, Shamanic Guide, and Spiritual Mentor—helps clients heal soul and spirit, find luminous presence, and move energy to remove blockages through mentoring, training, healing, and ceremony. She is a lifelong explorer of shamanic, animist, and meditative consciousness who practices Earth-centered, nature-based, ancient wisdom ways, and studied Andean mysticism extensively with the Q’ero in Peru. Meg is the creator of Energy Alchemy™ & founder of Earth Caretakers Wisdom School. Author of Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy, she is a contributing author and photographer to Where the World Begins: Sonoma Mountain Story and Image. Meg lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. megbeeler.com