What do love and marriage have in common?
In early 2018, after unearthing some deep insights about my long term relationship with myself, I decided to get married...to god.
Unlike most marriages, mine was rather spontaneous and unconventional. We eloped rather suddenly on a yoga mat in the back yard of the house I was living in at the time, in Las Vegas, while I was doing my morning practices in the sun.
I have a friend who once told me that Las Vegas is the most spiritual city in the US. So many people go there for the sex and the gambling and the drugs...and statistically — likely because of these circumstances — it's a common place to find god.
Although my union had nothing to do with sex, drugs, or gambling, it was incredibly profound just the same.
I was making a choice in that moment to live as the embodiment of love for the rest of my life.
Like most momentous life choices I've made over the years, I had no idea what exactly this would entail when I made the decision. I mean, I thought I knew, but I actually had no idea. At the moment, it was a ripe intuitive seedling, a formal declaration out into the universe, and a sort of "wait and see" for the rest.
Stepping into this kind of union is far from linear, and although my marriage only involved myself and The Great Mystery, I quickly learned just how demanding this path would be for me. Living in love is unrelenting.
As it turns out, the challenging aspects of my spiritual union and commitment to live as the embodiment of love had a major thing in common with most conventional marriages:
R E C E I V I N G.
Yes, you read that right: receiving is the cornerstone of marriage, love, and spiritual union within ourselves.
What does that even mean?
Well, practically speaking, in relationship between two people, it means learning to be receptive to your partner at a deeply nuanced level. It means learning how to receive their gestures of love without allowing their actions to get snagged and stuck on your judgments and preferences.
It means learning to receive love in all things and all gestures, without attaching value to any of it, at a cellular level.
It means choosing to be open and receptive, on all levels of abstraction, no matter what is happening in your environment or with the people around you, all the time.
Have you ever tried that?
This singular self-imposed sadhana has kept me REALLY inwardly busy for the past few years, and so you can imagine that when I launched The HeartCore Collective at the beginning of February, it was the showcased theme for our inaugural month. Over the past two weeks we've been stripping away the layers of our relationship to receptivity, leading up to our live call on February 22nd.
If you've been on the fence about joining The HeartCore Collective, and this theme feels important to you in your work with yourself, or with your partner, there's still time to join and dig in before the content disappears and before our monthly call (everything shared in there is only available for 30 days, to motivate participants to stay in the game and not get complacent with their heart-core workouts. So by the end of March the content on receiving will no longer be available).
Like most things in life, mastery is never one-dimensional. Mastering receptivity will absolutely serve you in more than just the areas of love and marriage in your life.
But did you know that something exists which will serve you in both love, marriage, AND receiving?
(woah, yes I did just get that meta)
Listening to my dear friend Alexandra Stockwell's new podcast, The Marriage Podcast, which launches today.
Many of you know Alexandra as my beloved coach and mentor of four years. She taught me a level of mastery in coaching through receptivity, vulnerability, and surrender, and showed me the power of intimacy and depth of conscious relationship dynamic, in ways which are unparalleled by any other coach out there. Referred to as The Intimacy Doctor, and a potent relationship expert with a hot, sensual, and turned on 25 year marriage to her husband Rodd, she is a beautiful model for what embodying love, union, and receptivity looks like in action.
And we need all the models we can get, especially in this arena! I don’t know about you, but when I think about couples who model what I respect and admire about intimacy and relationship, I genuinely can only think of three couples: Barack and Michelle Obama, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, and Alexandra and Rodd Stockwell. That's it.
So you can imagine how excited I am that someone who I love deeply and respect broadly, is bringing her genius into the world in this way. In a valiant gesture of receptivity, it would delight me beyond all measure if you were to beam some of your own gorgeous, receptive love on her podcast today, by receiving the love she's poured into it through subscribing, downloading her first few episodes, and leaving The Marriage Podcast a review.
One of the aspects of receptivity that I taught this month in The HeartCore Collective is the circularity of love, which means that one of the best ways to get better at receiving is to be generous. :)
Give it a try and let me know how it goes! And perhaps I'll see you our next THC call on February 22nd.
Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash