Letting It In

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about stepping down from my work as Senior Faculty at CTI.

After the article went out, a friend and colleague politely nudged me toward posting it on social media, which I’d considered but up to that point hadn’t done.

I did it, and…

Wow.

Just plain wow.

I wasn’t prepared for the response and, truth be told, was caught flat-footed in the face of what I can only describe as a deluge of love…

Which, fittingly enough, crested on Danielle and my 30th wedding anniversary.

Timing is a thing, ain’t it?

I thought, up until that moment, that I was pretty good at walking my talk in the receiving department.

“Pretty good”, I discovered, is a relative term free of any remotely useful comparative data points.

“How you doin’?”

“Pretty good…”

Compared to what…?

No ISO measurement codes on pretty good. No pre-made universal hook upon which to hang the pretty good hat. No available reference numbers on the Rockwell scale…

And believe me, my mettle was (still is) being tested.

I’m telling you all this, dear reader, because not only have I taught this very stuff for a long time, but because a key component of teaching was, is, and always will be demonstrating (in real time) what’s being taught.

For years I’ve stood, vulnerable and open-hearted, in front of hundreds of rooms receiving, in a pretty good way, what I thought was just about everything one could receive.

I was mistaken.

The day I posted the announcement of my resignation I found myself profoundly moved by the outpouring of love and appreciation. So moved that, quietly weeping and sniffling my way through lunch as Danielle worked at a table on the other side of the kitchen, I logged off, took a deep breath, (I caught myself barely breathing) and decided to come back later to go through the comments more consciously.

I’m still making my way through. Slowly.

Arguably, I have (I thought) a modicum of self-awareness and do well (I thought) at receiving.

Now I’m learning how much I wasn’t aware of and how much more receiving capacity I have and have yet to develop.

Particularly when it comes to celebration and love.

I lost count years ago of the number of times I’ve helped clients work to open themselves to receiving. We’re talking everything from compliments (think “Nice tie”) to sincere expressions of love and affection. (“Why, Enzo, do you suppose your wife wants to spend more one-to-one time with you?”)

There’s this strange “law of nature” in my line of work. Goes something like this: Your clients will bring you the very thing you yourself most need to work on…

Until you get it…

And then they’ll bring you the next thing.

I’m sipping from a very large glass of humility, making it a point to go slow and savor these many moving messages, to let their essence make its way into my blood and bones, to have the full experience of letting it in. All of it.

One thing I’m wildly clear about is that I have no interest in what my egoic mind wants to make of this stuff. (It wants, by the way, to convince me it’s all nonsense and I’m nothing at all or, on the other end of the continuum, that it’s proof I’m some sort of superior being. It has only two speeds: insignificance or grandiosity.)

This is a beginning, and one I’m likely to be harvesting lessons from for a while.

Knowing how often the whole receiving thing comes up, the last bits I’ll leave you with are simple questions:

How are you (really) at receiving?

What would expanding your capacity to receive (without conditions) do for you?

Let me know what you discover.