A Deeper Look at What it Means to be Receptive

Having recently done the post about Receptivity and how many women (including myself) are terrible at accepting things, this is a topic now on my radar. As if by serendipity, a situation occurred a few days ago which really made the extent of this receptivity potential exceedingly obvious. My housemate ended up losing her set of work keys. She was understandably terribly upset about it. Seeing her distress, the contractor plumbers who work for her company said to bill them for the cost of the replacement - a more than $200 cost. She accepted.

I have to admit, I was blown away for multiple reasons. Firstly, the generosity of the offer had my jaw drop. That in itself was amazing. Secondly, these are older men who really like my housemate for the simple reason that she treats them with respect, and listens fully to what they have to say. There’s nothing else to this offer than “we like you, and don’t want to see you get in trouble at work over this incident.” That’s it. But what really and truly had me agog was that she actually accepted.

Her story got me to thinking about my post on ‘receptivity is quintessentially feminine’ in a new way, to a greater depth. I tried to imagine myself in her position, asking "would I have been able to accept?" The answer is, unfortunately, no. I could not have accepted. Not 'would not', but 'could not' have accepted. Trying to imagine it, the gift offered was literally too large to have squeezed through the small chink in my armour. A compliment? Sure, that's easy. It's tiny, for the most part. But larger? No way. That would have physically hurt, and I came to the sudden realization that in the process of rejecting their sincere offer that I would have demonstrated to those guys to never again attempt to help me in any personally meaningful way. That was an entirely new revelation to me.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since then, wondering how many gifts have been offered to me over the years that I literally didn’t even see?  I want to be able to recognize all the things that my husband WANTS to do for me but right now I am blind to. I am now fairly sure that I regularly reject his offerings simply because I can't see them, and this hurt me to think that I am inadvertantly rejecting him in any way. For illustration, I see myself standing behind a giant wall. In this wall is a tiny little hole. Only things which can fit through that hole are recognizable as gifts. Anything larger is either flat ignored because it’s not even reasonable to imagine, or it’s recognized and rejected for being too large, too generous. Accepting it would mean that I’d have to enlarge the hole, a process which is both painful and leaves me open to being wounded.

This image lead me back to an older idea, revamped a bit. There is another thing that I think is quintessentially feminine, and it is often unrecognized or unspoken. That thing is a willingness to be vulnerable. It’s what makes a woman ‘soft’ in appearance. I’m still working on articulating this better, on how to work with it, but it feels like I’m on a right path there. Being open to receiving gifts means simultaneously open to being abused, hurt , used. It takes a powerful woman, a  truly self-confident woman, a Lioness, to recognize this, to know this, and still choose to remain open to all the positives despite the potential negatives.  A child is open because she hasn’t learned yet of the dangers. A woman chooses to remain open because she understands her own strength. Few women do know and trust in their own inner strength, and so fewer and fewer experienced women are willing to make themselves vulnerable anymore. In doing so, they are rejecting everything, even the best that men have to offer.

I’m still working out how to go about opening myself in this way, to being able to recognize and receive graciously yet without expectation. But then, that’s the whole point of this blog – learning how to be that Lioness. The first step was seeing what I've seen. Now to take the opportunties which abound to find ways to learn how to trust my own strength.

- Lioness (in training)