Conscious Giving and Receiving

“It’s the season of giving!”–Right? Perhaps–though maybe conscious giving and receiving require new skills. Specifically, the ability to ask yourself “what is the truth about what I want to give or don’t want to give, what I want to do or don’t want to do?” Perhaps this season, that is also so rife with overeating, overdrinking, and overdoing, could be much more pleasurable for you.

In this next series of posts, I’ll be exploring conscious giving and receiving. My experience is that most of us have glitches around one, the other, or both of these aspects of interacting as a human in this world.

GIVING

Last weekend, the Intensive Learning Community and I explored this issue. We began by listing beliefs we carry about giving.  And–the immediate belief?

“”tis better to give than to receive.” 

This one was universal, we all piped up with it right away. Then we began to wonder–who even said this? An idea that we all carried with us? Someone said it was in the Bible, which right away became arguable. (Our community member who happens to be a minister was the one who said this was a misinterpretation.) IPhones came out, we debated the point, and realized that a belief that we universally thought was sacrosanct wasn’t even traceable to someone we’d decided was inspiring for us.

Take a moment and list some of your own beliefs around giving and wonder–from where did you learn these? Do you, yourself, even believe them?