In the same week I’ve heard four clients say the same thing:
“I’m not sure how to receive.”
This wasn’t just support or care from others. The hardest part was receiving acknowledgement or thanks from themselves.
“It feels so uncomfortable. It feels selfish.”
Like attracts like. I’ve been here before.
Among my many addictions, work was one of them.
Work was predictable. In the sense that I knew waking up every morning where I needed to be, the stops I’d had planned, everything I’d written down to not forget for each site, what to bring, who to see, things I had to bring up and get resolved. I woke up each morning with dread and purpose. Just get through it, then…
Then what?
At the time, each day was punctuated by dogs, work, gym, eat, dogs, weed, eat, TV, more weed, sleep. When I got to the weekend I could do the substances that hit harder, the ones that would put me out for a day or two so that the hangover itself became a relief from the thoughts of the week.
So it was, the cycle of dread, force, relief. Dread, force, relief. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The guilt of the weekend would be assuaged by work. Maybe it was the only thing that felt honest because it was the only time I had to be sober.
Whatever I was feeling could be put aside during work. No time for it was the general attitude. The gym felt like the place to go afterwards to “get rid of” them.
This set up worked for many years. The more I felt like something was off, the more I told myself I just needed to work harder. The harder I worked, the more chaos I needed on the weekend to balance out the intense structure I upheld during the week.
Giving and showing up was where I’d placed my value. I could see when it was working in the looks on other people’s faces. When I got my cheques. It felt like a measure of success I could count on.
I didn’t know how to do that for myself other than the things that gave me temporary pleasure. Substances were the most effective way at the time. The aftereffects seemed like part and parcel of the package. Maybe it seemed like a fair price because I didn’t know I had other options.
The first few times I went to yoga I was like, this sucks. It was slow. It was boring.
In other words - it wasn’t distracting enough. I wasn’t gasping for air. I wasn’t pushing through intensity. It was making me…oh god…FEEL.
I rejected it.
But I tried it again about a year later when I challenged myself to 100 days of no alcohol. In a scramble to fill the hours I’d usually be drinking, I tried aerial yoga with a friend. It was challenging and novel enough that I didn’t have time to think. I couldn’t remember when I’d last hung upside down.
From there I slowly added more mat yoga classes to my week. Going after the faster ones at first. After some months, I worked my way up to the slowest ones.
Learning to be slow was so counterintuitive to every obsessive neuron in my brain. Do more, prove more, achieve more, perform more, fix more. But my body wasn’t finding relief in more, anymore. I’d chosen something else. And despite what I’d previously thought, I was actually starting to like this.
In learning to be slow, in learning to be still, I learned to receive.
We work so hard that output becomes the only solution. Feelings become another outward problem to be solved, rather than an inward affair to be tended to.
Tending to something requires tenderness. And I’m not saying this happens overnight. It took about five years of practicing for me to even recognize the concept of being gentle with myself. And years after that for the concept to be integrated as a way to live.
The trouble with receiving is the same trouble with acceptance. We cannot accept what we set out to fix. The more intent we are on doing, the more tangled we get in the trap.
Receiving from ourselves can be the hardest task yet. It’s surrounded by the fear that we’d lose our edge to be competitive. That without the voice inside chastising us for not enough, we’d never amount to anything.
Maybe the most important thing I received from myself was the space I allowed between the voice that says I can’t to the voice asking me if I’d be willing.
Would I be willing to pause before saying yes? Would I be willing to stop before burning out? Would I be willing to do the next hard thing - even if that means disappointing people, for the sake of not disappointing myself? To show parts of myself, so that others don’t feel so alone? To keep going, experiencing fully moment to moment, rather than break my own heart with expectation?
The freedom in would I be willing is that there is no definitive result. There is no success or failure. It is both giving and receiving to ourselves the most important gift of all - time to be - and within that, possibility.
