The Uber driver offers me complimentary water and candy.
I choose a mini Hershey’s nugget wrapped in gleaming silver. She teaches Spanish online and at a French school. She apologizes for the Spanish music playing in the car, voicing an assumption that I’m probably not enjoying it, but I quickly profess my genuine love for Spanish and express my desire to speak it.
“God bless you, Meredith,” she bestows a goodbye and I leave the car with my treasured chocolate and beautiful blessing tucked close to my heart.
…
My coworker bakes me homemade sourdough bread. The loaf deserves to be on the cover of a cookbook. Paul Hollywood would be impressed. I cradle the delectable gift that’s fresh and still warm from the oven.
“All organic ingredients,” she says, showing that she knows me oh-so-well. Our shifts together flow in easy conversations about nutrition, sustainable living, prenatal yoga. There’s a natural pace of give and take, of sharing and listening, and we’re both attentive and allowing. I take note of this balanced dynamic to help fortify equanimity and respectful sovereignty in my relationships, and she’s taken note of all the times I’ve loudly admired her tales of baking feats and has presented me with my own loaf.
I cut thick slices and store them into my carryon for my flight. Later I will gratefully eat them in the quiet dark of a place that has been my home for lifetimes.
…
He helps me move through airport security.
Slowly marching through the maze of check-points and electronic scans, I notice and smile at the cute and charming couple in front of me. They affectionately tease one another and hold hands, and there’s a fluidity to their traveling partnership, a stability that breathes.
At the end of the conveyor belt we wait to collect our scattered and shed belongings.
There’s the typical scramble. I hop with one shoe on and rummage to find the other squashed underneath a laptop case. Soon, I empty out my bins of backpack, jean jacket, sandals, and the man in front, the husband in the charming duo, simply and graciously just picks them up and puts them away for me.
And I’m stunned with thanks. The tidying away of those bins was a small and swift gesture, instantaneous and fleeting. I could have done that completely on my own and I didn’t ask for assistance, but because I am traveling solo and proudly am accustomed to looking out for myself, I accepted this spontaneous act of kindness. It was a tiny gesture with significant impact. I didn’t feel alone after that.
…
“It’s time to remember that it’s divine to receive,” Maryam Hasnaa’s words manifest in these moments to me.
The Uber driver inquiring about my hydration as I slide into the car, the coworker asking about my week, the airport couple turning around and taking time from the mad hustle to reach out a helping hand and include my bins with theirs: All are all opportunities to receive.
And it’s divine to receive.
My healing, my coming back to wholeness and equanimity, includes creating space for receptivity, because I over-give.
I over-give. I over-function. I over-do.
I say YES when I want to say NO, and then, burdened-down by obligation ignore my intuitive pleas to pivot and push myself to drudge on. And showing up in that energy of contempt does not serve anyone.
I experience sticky lurches of guilt when I do set a boundary. I forget that my preferences matter. I become inflamed with silent resentment when people step over my boundary-line, and then I remember, well, I haven’t told them and been honest and transparent about my needs because of fear of judgment, which leads to feeling a lack of lovability.
This patterned tendency stems from a nervous system that tends to fall into “fawning” and people-pleasing to achieve security and safety, and runs under a false-narrative that I must “do” things for people so they will love me.
I am lovable because I exist and breathe. I am worthiness incarnate, as Danielle LaPorte would advocate. My preferences do matter, because they are wonderfully unique and life-giving resources for me.
Receiving myself – in all my shadows, gritty edges, lightness and joy – in loving-awareness reinforces new pathways that simply ask for me to be, to move as I need to move, and not seek and overly reach.
Relax into embodied being.
Then, giving comes from a nourished and sustainable energy-well. And receiving shimmers in sweetness.
And to receive, as Maryam Hasnaa teaches, “without need.”
“Receive without need. Give without need.”
Receiving and giving without need radically frees, and this is a new concept I’m integrating and embodying.
Envision and FEEL the abundant aliveness of your own life-force energy. Perhaps let the movement of the breath move your back to your sense of center, into the song of your heart, into gravitational hug of Momma Earth, anchoring down and through the middle points of the soles of your feet. Or place palms over the heart-center, and return to receive the gift of your own affectionate attentiveness, your own gift of complete acceptance.
Receive. There are emotions, sensations, intuitive whispers surfacing to be heard. Instinctual and truth-pulsing information that rivers forward to speak about you to YOU, the perfectly whole and complete being you are here and now.
Cradle. Attend to. Let go and let be. Breathe.
Soften any grasping so there can be the grace of receptivity.
And from here, giving will not deplete. It will happen spontaneously and in aligned-action. You’re resourced. You’re at home.
So here’s an invitation to be open to the small and significant acts of generosity that appear in our lives, in our day-to-day happenings, in our routines and schedules.
And when those gestures of kindness occur, may palms open.
May the breath flow easily.
May your heart and entire being be nourished in the resplendence of receptivity.