The Elusive Art of Receiving

Why you can't work harder at becoming more receptive

Receiving.

It is probably one of the most frequently mentioned qualities of the feminine.

And it has always annoyed me a little.

Because what does that actually mean?

• How do you receive?

• How do you become more receptive?

• How do you even know if you are receiving?

And “working on it” isn't even the right language, because receiving, by definition, is in a completely different ballpark than working.

And yet, if receiving is one of the fundamental qualities of the feminine, how far are we going to get if we don't actually know how to access it?

We women have become very, very good at doing.

We work hard. We make things happen. We anticipate. We take care of people. We solve problems. We give. We organize. We push through.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But it doesn't mean we are receiving.

We can be enormously successful at making things happen and have very little experience of allowing things to come toward us.

• Love.

• Affection.

• Attention.

• Support.

• Pleasure.

• Appreciation.

• Opportunities.

• Money.

• Care.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Because you can't decide your way into receiving.

You can't discipline yourself into receiving.

You can't push yourself into receiving.

And you certainly can't work really, really hard at becoming a woman who doesn't have to work so hard.

So what do we do?

This is what I have been diving deeply into.

Because talking about receiving isn't going to do it. Conceptualizing it isn't going to do it. Deciding to receive isn't going to do it.

If you have been following me for a while, you know that I don't believe anything about us can effectively be addressed in isolation.

Everything we are exists within a historical context.

We are the product of our own past, yes.

But we are also the product of the people who came before us.

Imagine your great-great-grandmother.

She may have had to get her children through a war.

The men in her life may have disappeared or been killed, leaving everything on her shoulders.

She may have lived through famine and had to make sure her children ate.

She may have survived violence or rape.

Depending on a man may have been dangerous.

Her survival—and the survival of her children—may have depended on her ability to anticipate, control, work, endure, push through, and make things happen.

Receiving wasn't necessarily a luxury available to her.

She had to DO.

And then imagine that the women who came after her inherited some of those patterns.

And the women after them. Until eventually, here you are. Living in 2026.

• Wanting a completely different experience of being a woman.

• Wanting love.

• Wanting support.

• Wanting a man who steps forward.

• Wanting to relax.

• Wanting to be able to receive.

And yet there can be unconscious patterns running underneath all of that that are organized around something completely different.

This is where the science of epigenetics becomes so interesting. We now know that experiences in one generation can influence subsequent generations.

So when you find yourself over-giving, overdoing, over-functioning, unable to relax, unable to let someone help you, or somehow always being the one who makes everything happen, the question becomes much more interesting than:

• “What is wrong with me?”

  Or:

• “Why can't I get this right?”

  Or:

• “Why am I not disciplined enough?”

Because discipline, focus, pushing harder, making it happen—that takes us straight back into the very energy we are trying to get out of.

You cannot push your way into receiving.

So what if instead we could explore the unconscious patterns that are actually interfering with your ability to receive?

Not just talk about them.

Not just understand them.

Actually work with them at the level where they are operating.

This is one of the areas I am exploring through the deeper work I do with MAT: the unconscious and generational patterns that can influence our capacity to receive.

Because if the pattern is unconscious, insight alone isn't necessarily going to change it.

And if it didn't begin with you, blaming yourself certainly isn't going to change it.

What becomes possible when receiving no longer feels so difficult?

What happens when there is actually room for love, affection, support, pleasure, opportunity—and the masculine—to come toward you?

Because the nature of the feminine is not to chase down everything she wants and wrestle it into submission.

The feminine receives.

And I am becoming increasingly interested in what becomes possible when we stop merely talking about that—and begin exploring what has been standing in the way.