When Did You Last Feel It Was a Joy to Be Alive?
When did you last have that feeling that it was a joy to be alive?
Has this become a luxury as you busy your way through life—making a living, building a career, caring for children or elders, or simply taking care of yourself? Perhaps you feel burnt out or depressed. Maybe you managed to carve out time for a holiday, meet friends, tend an allotment, or do something creative, only to find that the effort required to make it happen left you feeling short-changed.
Busyness gets in the way.
Busyness is necessary for most of us to survive these days, and our bodies are built to tolerate it. But when it becomes a way of life, it leads to burnout, takes its toll on health, and interferes with our capacity to receive. We need stillness and presence to take in what is offered and experience the enlivening effects of receptivity.
Dictionaries define receptivity as a capacity of the mind—open-mindedness or a willingness to accept new ideas. But it is the receptivity of the body that is needed for the sensation of aliveness.
Bodily Receptivity Is Needed for Aliveness
This kind of receptivity is recognised in Eastern spiritual traditions as a core feature of the sacred feminine—a way of being that offers stillness as a counterpoint to action, experience to ideas, and feeling to thinking. The sacred feminine prioritises the wisdom of the body and the sacredness of the Earth. It balances the projective, action-oriented sacred masculine, which prioritises the mind and the heavens.
Humans of all genders need these capacities to flourish, yet we have created a culture in which masculine attributes are applauded while feminine qualities are often dismissed. As a result, we live in our heads rather than our bodies and lose the capacity for receptivity.
We need more embodiment to receive in this way.
I have recently participated in another of Philip Shepherd’s Radical Wholeness embodiment workshops, where receptivity is one of the core abilities explored. Every time I attend, I receive an experience or insight that leaves me feeling more sensitive, impressionable, and alive. Each time, I realise how much I want more of this ability—an ability I had lost contact with and did not even know I was missing.
What Gets in the Way of Receptivity?
Recovering receptivity is a gradual process because many of us find it difficult to receive. Instead, we organise our lives around acquiring what we need through money, status, or power.
We fail to notice that every breath is a gift from the natural world upon which we are utterly dependent. We eat several times a day without considering the soil, sun, rain, growers, harvesters, packagers, transporters, and cooks who brought that food to our table.
We may overlook the presence of someone who is centred, grounded, and available, even though such people can measurably affect our mood. We crave information and miss the gift of wisdom when it is offered.
At a more everyday level, many of us struggle to receive gifts, believing there must be strings attached. Some of us cannot even receive a compliment without immediately undermining it.
Experiences in Infancy Matter
There was a time in our lives when we could only receive and were completely dependent on others. This was during the first 1,001 critical days of life—from conception to around two years of age—and, to a lesser extent, throughout childhood and adolescence.
Among the many things we received was the emotional atmosphere of our homes: calm, warmth, spaciousness, and love—or anxiety, guilt, shame, rage, and depression.
Most babies experience both positive and negative emotional environments, but the balance between them may determine how easy it becomes to receive throughout life. Severe negativity or prolonged exposure to it can lead children to dissociate from their bodies. Even when love is present, it may be conditional rather than open-hearted and generous.
Some children have access to nature, freedom to roam, and opportunities to receive the gifts of the natural world. Others grow up in relentless busyness.
Positive Early Experiences Enable Receptivity
If you were among the fortunate minority whose early experiences were largely positive, chances are you remained relatively open to receiving throughout life.
If your early experiences were negative or ambivalent, you may have learned the value of shutting down receptivity as a form of protection.
Even those with wonderful childhoods may later suppress receptivity to cope with the overstimulation of modern life. In many ways, the experiences that helped us survive have also enabled us to adapt to—and perpetuate—the busy, overstimulating world we have created.
Yet many of us now recognise that this is not the life we truly want to live.
We Can Recover Receptivity in Adulthood
Positive psychology has shown that simple practices can make a significant difference.
Examples include:
- Counting your blessings each day
- Savouring positive experiences
- Noticing when you reject gifts or compliments
- Questioning the need to do so
- Making time for yourself
- Practising not being busy
These practices all begin in the mind. You decide to do them, schedule them, and remember them. But the effects are experienced in the body.
Gratitude, equanimity, and joy are bodily experiences. They require embodiment to be fully felt. Buddhist teachings offer valuable methods for cultivating these qualities and opening the heart. Yet deeper receptivity requires fuller embodiment—paying attention from within (the skill of interoception) and bringing the belly to life.
Taking Things One Step at a Time
Living primarily in our heads means we often fail to notice dis-ease in the body. Problems can develop without our awareness.
As a result, the first experience of embodiment may be discomfort, dysfunction, or pain.
How we respond matters.
A helpful response might be:
“I’m sorry I didn’t notice you were hurting. What can I do to help?”
This marks the beginning of an embodiment journey.
Less helpful responses might include:
“I don’t like this,”
or
“I need someone to make this go away.”
These reactions often arise from anxiety and may require practice to transform into more supportive attitudes.
Encountering Emotional as Well as Physical Dis-Ease
Embodiment can also bring difficult emotions to the surface—feelings that were not permitted in childhood or that we have deemed unacceptable.
There is a profound difference between:
- Feeling emotions consciously, and
- Acting them out unconsciously
The first is healthy. The second can be problematic.
When emotions are not allowed, they remain held in the body, contributing to dis-ease and eventually disease. Embodiment may release them.
During the second day of a recent workshop focused on receptivity, I became aware of intense rage. Beneath it was a deeply infantile need to be seen and understood—something difficult to fulfil in a group of sixteen participants.
Eventually, I realised that it was I who needed to receive my rage, rather than expecting Philip Shepherd or the group to do it for me.
I sat out the remainder of the session because the angry baby part of me simply needed her rage to be witnessed and received with presence, insight, and compassion. This is what embodied parents naturally do for babies. They know that being present with a child’s distress helps soothe and integrate the experience.
If we did not receive this kind of holding in childhood, we may need to learn to offer it to ourselves as adults.
Experiencing Receptivity Without Being Overwhelmed
Developing receptivity requires vulnerability.
When we shut down receptivity, we do so because we were vulnerable. When we reopen, that vulnerability returns.
We cannot know in advance what we will encounter when we begin inhabiting our bodies more fully, nor can we be certain we will be able to cope with it. For this reason, it can be immensely helpful to have a trusted companion, fellow traveller, or therapist—someone capable of holding us when we wobble.
With enough of the right kind of support:
- We learn to regulate our nervous systems.
- We learn to ground ourselves.
- We learn to experience difficult emotions and physical pain without becoming overwhelmed.
Over time, old wounds can heal, unhealthy patterns can integrate, and we become able to receive the richness of life more fully.
Fulfilling Relationships
As receptivity deepens, we become more capable of experiencing other people’s unconscious emotions and difficult behaviours without being overwhelmed ourselves. We learn to stay connected. We respond rather than react. Relationships become less fraught and more fulfilling.
Addressing Our Collective Future
When enough of us develop these capacities collectively, we may be able to do something that is difficult for any individual alone. We may learn to receive, soothe, and integrate the madness driving the destruction of the planet and the harm being inflicted upon other beings. Although the journey toward receptivity inevitably includes difficult moments and periods of distress, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It is profoundly rewarding, deeply meaningful, and holds the potential not only to transform our own lives but also to benefit the lives of others.
The journey to receptivity is ultimately a journey back into the body, back into relationship, and back into aliveness
