For a long time, I thought I had difficulty receiving. I could give easily. I could help, organize, take responsibility, solve problems, anticipate what someone needed and make things happen. Receiving was more complicated. I knew this about myself long before Cambodia, and like many things we know about ourselves, it had become almost a finished sentence: I am much better at giving than receiving. The typical story of the false “empath.” I have become suspicious of that story at one point that I called myself "empath". Sometimes what looks like extraordinary empathy is actually an unconscious contract. I give, understand, accommodate, anticipate your needs, make myself useful, and somewhere underneath all of that is an expectation I may not even admit to myself: now you will love me, choose me, appreciate me, treat me gently, or give me a secure place in your life. The giving may be completely sincere, but it is not completely free.

In Jungian terms, this is where the persona and the shadow become interesting. The persona may identify with the generous one, the understanding one, the person who needs little and gives much. Meanwhile, the ordinary human need to be loved, chosen, valued, desired, cared for, or even given something in return does not disappear simply because it does not fit the identity. It goes into the shadow. And from there it can quietly negotiate on our behalf. Then I am not simply giving to you. I am giving while unconsciously trying to influence what comes back. It was a form of manipulation. True empath can feel everything and continue holding the space for your processes without influencing anything. 

The hidden sentence becomes: If I give enough, maybe I can control how you receive me. That was much closer to what I began seeing in myself. I wasn't simply bad at receiving. Sometimes I was using giving as a safer, more controlled way of receiving. If I could create value for another person, anticipate what they needed, be generous enough, useful enough, understanding enough, accepting enough then maybe I would not have to stand there with empty hands and simply discover what they wanted to give me.

Then, shortly before everything began to unfold in Cambodia, I saw something more uncomfortable. I was not simply bad at receiving. I was actually quite willing to receive, provided I could choose what came, who it came from, how it arrived, what it meant, and what I would be expected to do with it afterward.  Apparently, I had terms and conditions. Cambodia made those terms visible almost immediately. 

I wanted support, but I wanted to approve the support and the person supporting me. I wanted guidance, but I wanted to understand it. I wanted Mystery, but I wanted some idea of where it was taking me. I wanted to surrender, but preferably without becoming helpless. I wanted to be changed, but apparently I had some opinions about which parts of me were available for renovation. This is where my understanding of receiving began to change. 

We usually talk about receiving as an action. Someone gives me something, and I accept it. A compliment, help, money, love, attention, advice, pleasure, an opportunity. I don't refuse it, therefore I received it. But maybe that is only the most superficial level.

I can accept something without allowing it to affect the structure through which I understand myself and the world. I can take what confirms me and discard what disturbs me. I can receive someone's love while refusing the form in which they are capable of loving. I can listen to advice while translating it immediately into what I already believe. I can travel to another culture and keep evaluating everything through the standards of my own. I can have an extraordinary experience and explain it so quickly that it never has a chance to challenge the worldview I brought into it. And that is not bad! it's typical! human way! It is all about if you can see these games you are playing inside yourself with this world? As if negotiating constantly. 

Something entered my life. But did I receive it? In Cambodia, I had already watched myself reject a motorcycle driver before allowing him to become one of the most tender experiences of the trip. Nothing about him had changed. What changed was my willingness to receive what was actually there instead of comparing it with what I would have chosen. That difference matters to me now because I can see how often we think the world has failed to give us what we need when the real problem is more complicated. Something may be arriving, but not through the door we have designated for it. We want love from THIS person! Recognition from THAT person. An apology in THESE words. Support in THIS form. A teacher who looks like THIS. A partner who behaves like THAT. A spiritual experience that feels unmistakably spiritual. We are willing to receive, but the package must match the order.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with preference. Standards matter.  Compatibility matters and boundaries matter. Sometimes the package really is wrong, and wisdom is precisely the ability to say no. But preference and receptivity are different capacities. 

The question Cambodia began asking me was not whether I should accept everything. It was whether I could recognize something valuable when it arrived in a form I had not chosen. Kru gave me another version of the same lesson. I asked him how I could know my karma so I could work through it faster. I wanted knowledge. He gave me something far less useful to the part of me that likes control: live what is already happening. I could have received his answer as another interesting spiritual concept. I could have written it down, admired its simplicity and added it to everything else I know about karma. But then life kept giving me opportunities to discover whether I had actually received it. 

The motorcycle. My injured knee. The waterfall. The night my body shook and sweated while my mind produced frightening explanations. Bayon. The things I could not explain. The guards who appeared and disappeared. The rain. The bird at Angkor Wat. The woman-shaman who arrived while we were praying. The children who became my teachers. The man at the lotus farm who decorated me with flowers until I looked like some absurdly happy Cambodian bride. 

Again and again, something arrived before I had decided what I thought about it. And slowly I began to understand that receiving may require something more radical than openness. Receiving requires allowing what enters my life to change the structure that receives it.

Otherwise I may only be assimilating. Assimilation is safer. I take something new and translate it into something I already know. I fit it into my existing categories. I preserve the architecture and find a room for the new object. Real receiving sometimes changes the architecture.

This is obvious when we think about the body. Eating is not the act of putting food into the mouth. What enters us is broken down, transformed and incorporated. Some of it becomes energy. Some becomes tissue. Some is rejected. The body distinguishes, absorbs and eliminates. But after digestion, what was outside is no longer entirely outside. Some part of it has literally become us.

Psychologically, I think receiving can work in a similar way. It does not require swallowing everything. That would not be receptivity. That would be an absence of discernment. But when something is genuinely received, it enters into relationship with what is already there. Sometimes I absorb it. Sometimes I reject it. Sometimes it reveals that an old structure can no longer hold what I now know. Sometimes two things I believed could not coexist have to find a way to live inside the same person. 

This is why receiving can be frightening. Giving allows me to remain relatively intact. I can give you my knowledge, my time, my love, my work, my body, my money, my attention. I may become tired or depleted, but I am still largely the author of the movement. Something travels from me toward you. 

Receiving reverses the direction. Now something I did not create crosses my boundary. And I cannot completely control what it will disturb once it gets inside. Maybe this is why some of us who are very generous are not necessarily very receptive. Generosity and receptivity are not opposites on the same scale. I can give enormously while remaining highly defended against influence. In fact, giving can sometimes be one of the safest positions available. I know who I am when I am useful. I know my role when I am helping. I know my value when I am contributing.

Receiving is less organized. It may put me in debt. It may make me dependent for a moment. It may expose desire. It may reveal that I need something. That I am hurt... that I am vulnerable... It may force me to encounter the giver rather than remain occupied with myself as the giver.

And sometimes the most difficult thing it does is contradict my existing identity. Cambodia did this repeatedly. I had ideas about what kind of men I was attracted to. My body complicated them. I had ideas about cleanliness. My body spent a week wet, sweaty, muddy and alive. I had ideas about spirituality. Some of my most meaningful moments were ridiculous, sensual, physically uncomfortable or impossible to explain. I had ideas about being a Master of Sacred Dance. Then I sat on a floor while Cambodian children corrected my hands. I had ideas about dignity and sexuality. Then my shalaven appeared in full daylight and, instead of destroying the respectable woman, somehow made her more complete. I had ideas about strength. Then I discovered how much strength can be required to let somebody else carry you.

None of these experiences replaced the woman I had been. They made her harder to define. And maybe that is one reason genuine receiving can feel threatening to identity. Every identity creates a perimeter around what belongs inside the word me. The more precisely I define myself, the easier it becomes to identify what does not belong. But life does not always respect that perimeter. Sometimes it hands me something and says, in effect: Now make room.

This is where I began to see a connection between receiving and control that I had missed before. Control asks: how can I let this in without allowing it to reorganize me?  Receiving asks a different question: what becomes possible if I don't already know who I will be after this enters?

That does not mean allowing other people to define me. It does not mean abandoning judgment, boundaries or sovereignty. Being changed by an experience is not the same as surrendering authority over my life.

It means allowing reality to have consequences. There was one moment in Cambodia when this became almost literal. At the waterfall, I was immersed in water while my injured knee was bleeding. The water entered my mouth, my hair, my clothes, every part of my body. My blood entered the waterfall. Later I kept returning to the simplicity of that image.

The water entered me. My blood entered the water. There was no clean division between giver and receiver anymore. There was exchange. That is very different from the spiritual language I sometimes hear about “receiving from the Universe,” as though life were an endless delivery service and our task were to become sufficiently open to collect the packages. Relationship is not like that. Relationship changes both sides. A place enters me through what I see, smell, eat, fear, love and remember. I enter the place through my footsteps, my attention, my money, my body, my questions, my blood, my presence. Another human being affects me, and my existence affects them. A teacher transmits something to a student and is not entirely untouched by teaching. A child teaches an adult. A stranger carries me through a jungle. I bring home a bracelet for my daughters. The movement continues. Receiving, then, is not passivity. It is active participation! And this is what I was beginning to learn when I arrived in Cambodia thinking I had come there to work with the space. lol The space started to work with me. I had come with practices, intentions, Sacred Dance, questions, a Mystery to enter. I thought about what we would activate, what we would experience, what we would bring.... Then Cambodia kept giving. A motorcycle driver.... A hermit... A waterfall... Sacred water from a guard's bucket... Rain, a bird, a blessing, a school that opened for us on a national holiday, a ninety-seven-year-old woman, children who put my fingers into the correct positions, lotus flowers, food, strangers' hands....

I could easily turn that list into a romantic story about a country giving me exactly what I needed. I don't know that it did. Cambodia is not a character in my personal mythology, and millions of people live their ordinary complicated lives there independent of what the country came to mean to me.

What I know is that I arrived with a strong orientation toward doing. And I repeatedly found myself being acted upon. That was new. I used to think receiving meant opening my hands. Now I think it may be closer to opening the structure. Not to everything! Not indiscriminately! Not without judgment! well, not without checking with your strategy and authority first! But enough that something I did not design can enter my life without being immediately reduced to what I already know. Enough that another person can give me something in their language rather than mine. Enough that an experience can remain unfamiliar while it works on me. Enough that I can discover, afterward, that the woman who received it is no longer organized in exactly the same way as the woman who arrived.

Maybe that is the risk hidden inside receiving. And maybe it is also the gift. If nothing that enters me is allowed to change me, I may be accepting many things. but I am not sure I am receiving them.