Receiving Hours: How I Am Training Myself to Welcome Life as It Comes
In-Between Times Experiment #14
I woke up this morning at 4:45 am with a vicious leg cramp in my left leg.
This tracks.
Metaphysically, our left sides are thought to be our receiving sides, representing the feminine energy of our lives. Our right sides represent our giving sides and the masculine energy of our lives.
Last week I had some Reiki done. When it was over, my practitioner said, “Your receiving side is really pissed off.”
I guess that’s why the post that came to me last week was about how I longed to practice receiving. It seems pretty clear that the Universe is trying to tell me something.
It’s not that I don’t do enough things for myself. I do plenty. I get exercise and a good amount of rest. I buy myself bags I don’t need (currently obsessed with this one). I get help taking care of my kids. I’m no Mother Teresa, for sure.
Yet, I can see the imbalance of my general approach to life in my posture—hunched forward, almost strained. It’s in my breathing, or non-breathing as it were, as I regularly find myself holding my breath. I can see my resistance to receiving in my thoughts, which race constantly forward into everything I should be doing next.
I’m out of balance, feeling too much this for most of my day:
And not enough this:
I’ve began to wonder:
What would happen if I turned the dial down on making things happen, and turned the dial up on receiving life as it comes?
I knew this should be my next experiment, but how to put this into practical terms? As I asked readers last week, How does one practice receiving more? It’s an abstract concept.
I’m definitely still figuring it out, but here’s the thing I’ll start with: daily Receiving Hours. No, not stuffy Victorian sitting rooms and fancy calling cards (though that sounds fun, too). But, rather, this month, I’ll randomly designate hours of my day to be Receiving Hours, where I will practice receiving my daily routine instead of doing my daily routine.
As an example, this morning’s coffee looked like something this:
Saw coffee. Wow, look, there’s coffee, yay. Opened the cupboard. Wonderful. Clean mugs for me. Poured coffee in mug and inhaled, receiving its rich, bitter scent. Opened fridge. Excellent, there’s half and half. Stirred it in. Such a gorgeous color.
Instead of “getting coffee” this morning, I tried “receiving coffee”—using one part appreciation and one part close observation. I tried leaning back to open up more to the experience instead of rushing forward to complete it.
It felt awkward and unnatural to start my morning this way. But I could feel something cracking open slightly as I did. That grim protective shell that constantly mutters, “We have to do everything for ourselves! We have to make it all happen!!” quieted down a bit.
And I heard a faint, encouraging whisper arising to take its place, “Maybe it’s possible to live as if we believe that Life is unfolding for us.”
I suppose adopting a deliberate “receiving mode” is a version of gratitude practices.
I like this notion of receiving good things, even when they seem small. Interesting to ponder the left side of the body as the receiving side. I’ve also been taught that the left side is about the past, and the right side is about the future…fun to explore!