For a long time, I used to be calculating with how and when I would give or share my love, energy, and attention. “What about my needs?” would inevitably creep in to my otherwise genuinely generous state of mind, degrading and demoting a caring presence into a transaction. “This is a one-way relationship…me to them. It’s all about them!” is another frequent scarcity-based belief, a condition, a program I’ve learned is not my own. I borrowed it at some point, and it has poisoned my process, my beingness, my authenticity in critical moments.
What’s true is there is no upper limit to love. There is no end to the giving potential, as it flows from the infinite, past the barriers of condition and qualification, beyond the illusory fences of quantity. The physicality and emotionality of our actions may weary even the most trained and effective of human bodies, but the replenishing rivers are ever-present and unconditionally restorative. It’s a perfect system that requires only of us a knowing surrender to accept it as real, open, and free of terms and restrictions; the dams and blockages are always self-imposed. Whatever hurt we ascribe to keeping ourselves in a limited capacity only serves to suppress what is natural, boundless and beyond egoic scope.
Of course, there are those who will happily take. It’s the other side of the same coin. When we perpetuate a belief in lack, want and need, suppress our capacities, and expend energy on maintaining the old, small story, we foster dependence; we shrink our reality bubble to maintain known knowns. We can trust in what has always been, resisting and repelling what awaits just beyond the next thought and liberated desire.
Certainly, there are those who will try to take advantage, yet we’ve all tested a variation of someone’s generosity, and have at one time or another been tempted to abuse their gifts, with or without any remorse or gratitude.
I’ve learned that keeping score only wounds and scars my heart. It clouds and obscures the greater mission. It revisits pains my parents and others may have lived, and passed down to me. It recycles unusable, predictable themes that flow directly against my better sensitivities and values. It reminds me that my experience is unique to me, and projecting my unverifiable perceptions onto another harms us both. It reminds me that the journey of discovery, of the endless necessity for self-inquiry and self-compassion, and the truth of the moment is almost always known well afterward.
It reminds me to communicate better my needs. Reaction and reflexes are not generally based on fact.
Solvitur ambulando