Receiving Help

C.E.B. Bernard drawing

The last in my series on transformation falls into a unique category called receiving help. J.G. Bennett delineated this as the fourth source. How do we actually receive? What is defined as help?

We have to put ourselves in the pathway of help; whether that is help from above, help from colleagues and friends, help by striving to evolve into elevated consciousness.

We cannot receive help if we don’t think we deserve it.

Putting ourselves in the pathway requires knowing how to ask and how to receive. We may only sit and pray when we are desperate, when life has backed us into a corner, or when conscious shocks come our way. We must sit up and notice our part in it all, and we must know that it is not us alone who make it all happen.

We often ask according to our terms and our agenda. We pray for things that we believe should be.

Asking for help implies that we have faith and trust in something beyond ourselves, and our own cleverness. We put our trust in something wholly undetermined and out of our control. When we ask, it comes in the form of “Thy Will Be Done,” not My Will Be Done.

This is “trust in the Universe” as it is said.

We ask in complete faith and openness that higher forces act upon any given situation. When we are unable to do this, we live in fear and move from fear. We panic about how we have not done this and that. We worry that there will not be enough. We feel guilty for having more than others. People call it scarcity mode, and I call it lack of trust that all is as it should be.

There are clear and benevolent forces that work in conjunction with all that is. We must learn we are worthy of such help.

If we are identified with our helplessness, our victimhood, our worthlessness or cling to unhealthy co-dependence, we won’t let help in, even if it is right in front of us. We become blind to that help. We continue the pattern of “self-flagellation” by returning to unhealthy relationships, not addressing our actual issues, living with procrastination; fearing that we will not be capable of taking care of ourselves or be taken care of by life itself. We live in fear of the unknown future and cling to small and limiting safety mechanisms. We are out of the flow of life itself, scrambling not to drown while not realizing there is a way to float.  

We have to be teachable, willing to struggle, ready to sacrifice our “comfort zone,” and prepare to receive. This is risky business.

This beautiful combination means we cannot stay in the myopic view of our small little worlds.

We do each part of the formula, learn, struggle, sacrifice because receiving help requires active work on ourselves. It also requires an act of surrender. This does not mean laying down in passivity.

It is actively letting go of one’s agenda in order to serve a much bigger agenda, looking at life through the eyes of service in all its forms. We too are part of “life” and so to actively surrender to help is to trust that it is there in the first place. We actively work to see our part in the problem, but we also concede to what we have no power over.

This means learning to put our egoism aside…

Enter:  struggle and sacrifice.

I see these four elements as a spiral to elevated consciousness.

We can learn only through experience and that often comes from experimenting with the right effort. When we find ourselves mired in the mud of “the battle of the I’s,” (unwanted inner conflict and lack of discipline), we have to learn to recognize it through the right effort. We then bring ourselves to the point of sacrificing our attachment or “identification”. Truly doing this requires us to accept and trust that something outside of our own power will fill the newly found void.

We spiral through these elements, bringing ourselves to the possibility of living life consciously, manifesting through choice.

We then are able to serve humanity in a new way, because we see we are part of the whole, serving something greater than our own small little story. This, in turn, creates more possibility of receiving and participating in the conscious flow of Love.

This brings to mind the four degrees of prayer delineated by Teresa of Avila. She likens our practice to watering a garden. A beginner is confronted with a garden of unfruitful soil and weeds and must prepare the soil. Then there is the question of watering and how much labor that will cost. Those watering methods are using a well and buckets, then graduating to a windlass that keeps the soil more consistently hydrated (less watering required) and then finally, heavy rain which comes with ease and grace and no labor at all.

Stepping into the conscious flow of Love is receiving on a constant basis. It emanates out into our world, and holographically comes back to us one hundred-fold. At this point, we have learned and acquired the necessary station to receive this grace.

Have you weeded your garden so it is ready?

How are you still carrying buckets from the well?

In what ways do you lack trust?

How does life reflect that for you?

You can read about the other three sources in my previous articles:

Bennett’s Four Sources of Transformation

Right Effort and The Power of Struggle

Sacrifice

I look forward to hearing from you this week.

Love,

Molly