Meditation: The Thrill of Receiving Your Own Nourishment

Written by Kyle Schauenberg

For many, it feels natural to offer your attention outward and to be generous with your energy.  You express yourself externally, take care of others externally, tick through your to-do list externally, love your family externally…

Less automatic or comfortable are the acts of receiving and absorbing.  It can feel like a major shift to absorb the moments of your own life, rather than only act them out. For example, imagine that moment when you see a friend and automatically hug them. How much of your energy feels like you’re hugging and how much of your experience feels like absorbing the hug in return?

Of course, only offering out and never remembering to receive is an imbalanced way of being in the world.  And nature prefers balance. 

Meditation teaches the skill of receiving. When you meditate, you are literally practicing the art of absorbing: absorbing your own attention, absorbing your own perceptions, absorbing your own love.  And in this way, you are coming into a more balanced relationship with life. You are creating familiarity with this skill and muscle memory around it, making it more automatic and easy to receive the energetic gifts of your life when you’re not meditating.

Remember, anytime you meditate, you will flow through a rhythm. Sometimes you’ll notice how you are offering yourself attention and sometimes you’ll be feeling into the way that you are receiving that same attention. This is the natural current of all meditations.

Beyond sitting and meditating, you can actually practice the visceral art of receiving in the form of small booster meditations all day, without even having to find time for it. As you go through your regular daily events, there are opportunities to receive life’s offerings with a gentle shift of perspective and intention. This sensation of receiving can feel like a sigh of relief or an unexpected gift.

Here are some examples:

- Drinking a glass of water: receive the hydration of the water into your body

- Taking a shower: receive the gift of the water’s cleanliness / be showered upon

- Eating: feel yourself absorb the flavor, vitamins and nutrients of your food like gifts from nature

- Being entertained: receive the joy of people's talents

- In relationship: absorb the love of a touch

- At work or in friendship: take a moment to breathe into compliments from others / let yourself really hear them

- Observing the world around you: Soak in the beauty of nature

Even 30 seconds of absorbing life’s gifts is a beautiful and powerful meditation. Trust your intuition and be alert to the abundance of opportunity to receive all around you all day long.

Photo by Seth Doyle