Relax and Receive
What if it was your downtime, your lounging-in-bed-too-long time, your walkabout time, and your blow-Friday-off time that made possible your greatest achievements? Would they still make you guilty?
TUT-Notes from the Universe (www.TUT.com)
Never have we been so intently busy with so much to show for it: stress-filled sleepless nights, 60 hour work weeks, health problems and mountains of debt. Who said we were underachievers?
The tragic irony is that the harder we strain and the more we stress, the further away we push the things we are working so hard to achieve.
Stress and strain as the pathway to riches is a concept that has been sold to us by employers who want us to work longer hours. They can’t say, “Hey, I want more money so why don’t you work harder?” They don’t think we are quite that gullible. So instead, they dangle the carrot in front of us, “Work hard and maybe someday you’ll be rich—like me!”
So we fret over unfinished projects and tasks, chase antacids with coffee and count the days until retirement when we fantasize that (what, exactly?) will happen.
We look for someone to blame and the usual scapegoats line up in our imaginary firing line: parents who didn’t raise us right; teachers who were demeaning instead of encouraging; bosses who clearly didn’t know the level of talent they were dealing with; and co-workers who undermined us for their own ambition.
It was never supposed to be this hard. Most stress is a by-product of where we place our focus and what we tell ourselves during the process.
Always remember—your brain doesn’t know the difference between pretend and reality. When you say, “This is really hard,” it is equal in power to, “This is really easy.” The first triggers your brain to release stress hormones; the other triggers the “feel good” hormones. Both declarations are true to the degree that you believe them to be so.
It is time to remember how to relax and receive. We are born knowing how to do this—we spend the better part of the first years of our life sleeping, amusing ourselves and letting others take care of us. Sometime between then and now we began to believe the ridiculously popular notion that things outside of ourselves would make us happy and the only way to obtain them is through struggle and effort. Do you see babies struggling?
I have friends in varying economic situations—some are unemployed and looking for work, others are living paycheck-to-paycheck, some are comfortable and others are rich. I can tell you unequivocally that their level of satisfaction with their lives is not caused by their circumstances. I can also say with equal conviction that the circumstances they find themselves in have everything to do with their ability to receive.
The Law of Attraction says that you attract more of what you focus on. The reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because each group expects to receive what they’ve always received. When someone who is wealthy starts to judge his bank account as “not enough,” the downward spiral begins. And the moment someone poor starts to dream about better circumstances, the upward spiral is put into motion.
How are you at receiving? Do you allow others to do for you or are you always the one doing for others? When you receive a gift, do you feel grateful or unworthy? If someone picks up the tab at lunch, do you feel obligated to do something of equal value for him or her? Can you allow yourself to be happy even when circumstances aren’t perfect or are you delaying it until things line up?
The reason I wrote, “relax and receive” is because this is different from the grabby and defiant “I deserve this” mode of receiving. When you relax and receive, you are aligned with the natural order just as you were when you were a child. The difference now is that you can appreciate it so much more because it’s a leap forward from the difficult approach you’ve been using.
