Two spiritual reasons it’s hard to receive money and help

Just a week ago I totaled our car. Driving in the snow, trying to make a turn at the bottom of a hill, I slid right into a bridge guard rail. In fact, it was the bridge over the creek here on the private road at our ecovillage, so I’m handling not just the car but getting the bridge repaired as well.

Thank goodness I wasn’t injured or even sore as it was a low-speed accident, for all the damage caused, yet I’ve felt a fair amount of remorse about it. It’s work for us, buying a car when we weren’t planning on it, and the community taking up time to get the bridge repaired.

I caused all kinds of work for our family and for my community. My first feeling was that I needed to take care of it all… and I didn’t. There were things that needed doing that I didn’t think of, and others did them, like putting cones and yellow caution tape on the bridge. Thankfully, I’m not wracked with guilt as I would have been 20 years ago, and I apologized for not seeing that need, thanked people, and moved on.

That was real help.

Financial help can also be difficult to let in. It may be someone willing to pay for a meal for you.

Or it may be asking a client to pay the price that is in your heart, not a much lower price that maybe is easier for you to ask for.

Why is it challenging to let in help? And make no mistake, asking for your heart’s price is a part of letting in help. There are two main reasons, linked deeply to our spiritual natures.

The first reason: The desire to contribute

I’ve written about how people often struggle to let their life partners support them.

We have a deep desire, a need, to contribute. The human heart is created to serve, and when we can’t contribute our gifts, we don’t feel fulfilled.

Unfortunately, in our individualistic culture, this can be conflated with needing to do everything ourselves, and not allowing any help in. What gets overlooked is that by letting help in, we’re allowing others to fulfill their own need to contribute.

We need to give, and we need to receive, both, to be full human beings.

The second reason: Receiving means being vulnerable

This is where it gets a little trickier. To take anything in, we must open up, and that is inherently vulnerable.

I became aware of this, again, at a very intimate level during firefighter training for our volunteer department. Even the normal, everyday unconscious act of breathing becomes something to question when you are surrounded by toxic smoke, when taking in air from the outside can hurt or kill you.

We’ve all been hurt in this culture, and many of us have learned to defend ourselves with walls, with masks. This has, to a point, kept us safe, and it has also blocked large portions of generosity from our experience.

I’m not wishing to minimize how much pain we’ve received, or the work involve in opening up. And in doing the healing work of the heart, it becomes possible to open up to the generosity that is available, but may not be visible from behind our walls.

I’m not talking about making yourself dangerously vulnerable- we all need and deserve protection. Learning to discern between what we actually need versus all the extra armor we may put on can make a huge difference in what we can access.

For instance, protecting ourselves from the possibility of hearing “No,” or other response from a potential client, means we never have the possibility of hearing, “Sure, that price sounds fine to me.”

The invitation

I invite you to allow others to contribute to your well-being. I invite you to consider the next step deeper in vulnerability. I invite your heart into opening wider to the world around us.

Your business can receive so much, and the doors just need to be open to let the flood in.

With huge love and gratitude,
Mark Silver, M.Div.