What Happens When We Resist Receiving?

They say we teach the thing we are meant to learn  No where has this been more true for me than learning to receive.  During a call with some colleagues this week to discuss networking, I could feel resistance welling up but couldn’t pinpoint the reason why. And then, it came to me in a sudden flash that I resist networking because it requires being able to open yourself up to receiving.

I am intimately familiar with resistance. It is the mind’s way of asserting control in the face of fear.  At this stage in life, I can identify it nearly instantly and when I do, I know I need to hit “pause” and explore what’s behind the fear. 

When we are in resistance, it’s like driving a car that is stuck in the wrong gear. We intuitively know that there is an easier way to get from point A to B, but we often feel thwarted from accessing the extra power with ease. 

Resistance to receiving has been my heart’s way of protecting itself in the face of disappointment.  But resistance is a lot like kryptonite.  It repels all the good things in life from coming to us with ease and flow. 

When I’m working with my clients’ charts,  I look to their moon to assess their capacity to receive. The moon represents our emotional security.  In my own birth chart my moon is debilitated by a lot of challenging aspects from other planets.  It makes sense then that I’ve learned to “armor up” as Brene Brown would say to protect myself from hurt and disappointment. 

This habitual “armoring up” is also why I so strongly identify with the avatar of a warrior and a fighter.  I became a lawyer became because it gave me permission to stay in my then emotional comfort zone of remaining emotionally invulnerable.  I also know this is why I transitioned out the law, not because I had lost respect for the profession, but because there was another part of myself waiting to express itself.

When we adapt or modify our behavior and our identity to fit our perceptions we attract more of those experiences into our life. This explains why I attracted my former husband into my life, something I’ve been reflecting upon a lot since he passed away in August.   When we met, I was 20,  not at all clear on who I was or what I wanted from life (is any 20 year old?) and very much operating in the world from the belief that you had to “fight” for what you wanted (can you feel the “kryptonite”?)

We got married right before I graduated from law school.    We both had wounds that needed healing. The problem is they were hidden from ourselves and each other. In some marriages those wounds get healed. That was not the case in ours. 

As a result of that relationship I developed a way of being in the world that has been very hard to let go of.  At first, I found myself picking up the slack because my husband was unable to. And then over time it became a matter of necessity as our family grew and we both worked full time..  As life added more responsibilities to our plate, my husband coped by escaping. I coped by doing what I knew well, which was to become a warrior attend to whoever and whatever needed attending to and learn to get by with receiving less and less, until at some point you forget what it’s like to receive.

Fast forward over a decade, and I’m now remarried to a very different man. He taught me to learn to receive again, for which I am grateful.  I’ve also done a lot of work to learn to trust and to balance out the warrior energy and to open myself to receiving in my personal relationships. The epiphany during the call “aha” was a reminder that there was more work to be done and a balance that needed to be restored between giving and receiving in my professional role as well.