Ep #55: Learning How to Receive

“Gratitude is the ultimate state of receivership,” Dr. Joe Dispenza. If you’ve been listening to my work for a while, you know I am passionate about helping you create the life you want, the results that you want, the art that you want, the money, the relationships, create your vision.

And a fundamental part of creating though is knowing how to receive. I want for you to be able to receive the fullness of your life, the fullness of your gifts, so that the world can receive the fullness of what you have to offer.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you, not only my listeners in the US, but this is a special Thanksgiving episode for all of you. And I don’t think you have to be American to really celebrate and acknowledge what, to me, the spirit of this holiday is about.

We are looking forward to Thanksgiving in Iowa this year.  It’s going to be a special one. My grandparents, fortunately, are still able to live at home and they live on the acreage where my mom and her 10 siblings grew up. It was a big family. We have so many good memories of being surrounded with cousins and family and they live outside of Dyersville, Iowa. So if you’ve ever seen the movie Field of Dreams, that’s their area.

And it has always just been a very special place for me. Oak Hill is the name of their home. And it’s, yes, a house, and it’s on a hilly acreage with a lot of oak trees. And it’s germane to this episode because I have done – and I want to suggest that you re-listen to the episode called Whole Body Gratitude because these two episodes together are what I wanted to offer you as my thanksgiving celebratory gift today.

And today’s episode is going to be very heavy on the practice because, bring it back around to my grandparents, the experience, for me, the memory of the experience of times there, of being surrounded by family, playing with my cousins, we’d explore the woods and the creek and the pasture and their limestone bluffs with caves in them that we’d be out there for hours, and then we’d come inside and there would always be something warm and good to eat and a crackling fire and we’d sleep piled three or four to a bed sometimes.

It’s experiences like that that, to me, help usher in and open my heart to gratitude again. Gratitude can feel many different ways, and again, if you re-listen to the episode on Whole Body Gratitude, I want to remind you that gratitude, just done as a cerebral activity, isn’t it? But gratitude as this embodiment of a certain energy is that presence, is that mindfulness, is that being alive, fully alive in the moment now that I think we’re all so desperately searching for.

You know, I have a lot of very high achieving clients. I have clients who are very successful. I have clients with multiple degrees. I have clients with companies. I have clients who are accomplished artists and have been recognized for their work. I have clients who have millions of dollars in the bank. I have clients who are raising beautiful families.

And one thing I hear as a block over and over for people is that they just don’t feel better. And they can be very achievement oriented and very good at achieving and very good at doing what they’re supposed to do, but they don’t fully receive their life. That’s another way of saying not able to access a feeling of gratitude.

And I do think that gratitude is a skill and a practice and I also think gratitude is very much related to our creative capacity, to our capacity for creating and contributing to the world, and then also gratitude is very much related to our capacity to receive. I cannot overpromise on the benefits of gratitude, really understanding what gratitude is and having a gratitude practice and embodying it will expand your capacity, not only for what you’re able to create, but what you’re able to receive.

And what I see way too often is that we really have an underdeveloped capacity to receive, an undeveloped gratitude skill. And it’s a perfect topic for Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving, you know, leaving aside its relationship to some of the darker aspects of some of the beginnings of, you know, the American society, there’s also this celebration of harvest that’s embedded in the American tradition and in traditions around the world where ritual has been known to be a very critical necessary aspect for humans.

And this ritual of harvest, which is celebrating abundance and having reaped what you sow, and look at the feasting that happens around harvest. It’s not like a light little snack. It’s like being fully nourished. There’s a feast for the eyes, a feast for the senses, just the sight and the smells and the touch. And we, as a society, are malnourished in spirit too often because we haven’t really focused on what it takes to celebrate a harvest.

And what we don’t acknowledge and celebrate and fully receive, we don’t integrate. And back it up a little bit more, what we don’t acknowledge and celebrate, which you could also call gratitude, we don’t fully receive. And therefore, we can’t be nourished by it.

And so when I see deficits and lack showing up in people’s lives, gratitude and their capacity for gratitude is someplace I always look. And almost always, it’s the case that they’re very dismissive of what they’ve created and of what they have in their life. And this is not to judge anyone and this is not to shame anyone. This is just to be very pragmatic and point out, if you have a deficit in your life, if you feel kind of malnourished in spirit or your bank account is malnourished or your relationships are or you are surrounded by abundance and beauty, but you just feel no change, flat, like you can’t take it in, look to where you may be missing a ritual and a practice of acknowledging, celebrating, fully receiving, harvesting, and feasting.

Because, I’ve mentioned before, you see all the platitudes about gratitude and you can go through the grocery store checkout aisle and on the cover of every magazine see something about a gratitude practice, and we’re kind of like, yeah, yeah that’s a good idea, and we think we can just think it and know that it’s a good idea and do it in passing without really requiring much more of ourselves.

And when we do that, it’s like if you were to look at this harvest table, this Thanksgiving table laden with all of this beautiful amazing food and you were just to look at it and be like, I get it, it’s a feast there, but you don’t actually take it in and you don’t actually enjoy it and you don’t actually celebrate it and share it with others and you don’t actually feel like this upwelling of an urge to give thanks for what the earth has created and given to you when you are just doing the cursory perfunctory gratitude of, yep, make my list, that’s good, but you feel no differently, you know you’re not doing it right.

And when you’re in a hurry to get onto the next thing, you also know you’re not doing it right. You’re not savoring. You’re not feasting. And you’re depriving yourself of reaping what you’ve sown and of really allowing yourself to absorb the nutrients of all of the lessons of the work that you’ve put in and letting your spirit and your mind, your body and your emotions, be fully satisfied and delighted deeply by what you’ve done.

So again, I like to remind my clients, if you are discounting what you’ve created so far, if you are discounting your own worth, if you are discounting your efforts so far, and especially the ones where you were courageous and that showed up as failure. And if you’re discounting the lessons you learned from that, you will see your life discounted in other ways.

Other people will discount you. You will feel you’re discounted by others. You will underestimate yourself. You will see a discount on your bank account. And so I share all of these things because I don’t want to undersell the idea of how important it is that you have this gratitude practice and that you work for it, that you work to feast on it, that you work to feast on your life and to expand your capacity to create and then also to receive.

Also, in this episode, I wanted to make sure to revisit something I know I’ve talked about a number of times before, but maybe I have just a little bit a slightly different way of saying it this time that will hopefully continue to get the point across.

And that’s on this topic of abundance and prosperity consciousness because so much of the coaching work that I do on myself personally, and then with my clients, are places where we are still experiencing scarcity and lack. And we are so conditioned to think that the way to create something is first to be in this place of want, like wanting it, needing it, and we all know necessity is the mother of invention and so on and so forth.

But that’s useful until it’s not useful. And what I want to point out is that creating something, as Albert Einstein said, “The level of thinking that has the problem is not the same level of thinking or consciousness that creates the solution.” And it’s very much the same when it comes to lack and abundance.

To me, gratitude is the same frequency of energy as abundance. So when someone starts from the place of, well I want something, I need something, I don’t have it yet, and this is a problem, I know you can’t get to abundance from there because abundance, gratitude, that state of receivership doesn’t know lack. It doesn’t even have discussions about enoughness.

But when I have people who are not at their goal yet, no matter what it can be, they can be very resistant when I am selling them on a gratitude practice because they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I will be grateful when I get there, but that’s backwards. That is absolutely backwards. The way to create abundance is to expand your capacity for abundance now.

The way you expand your capacity for abundance now is by expanding your capacity for gratitude now, is by flexing your gratitude muscle, is by being the most grateful person you have ever met, and this takes so much more intention, attention, focus, and time than we have been told, that the magazine articles will sell you on. It takes a lot of focus.

You need to rewire your brain in order to become someone who has this extraordinary capacity to receive and to be abundant because from abundance, you’re not creating from scarcity. You’re creating from imagination. You’re creating from wonder.  You’re creating from what can I get away with, you’re creating from what am I capable of, what can I astonish myself with? You’re creating from generosity.

And I wanted to say, again, that this is a skill and you have to practice it because if you cannot be grateful for what has been in your life to this point, if you cannot expand your capacity to really receive it and feel changed, feel present with your life and fully alive and grateful for having received it or for what you’ve created or for who you are, you’re not going to be able to receive those even bigger things that you dream of because your capacity to create them will be limited. And even if you do create them, it will be through the force of achievement and there will be a quick dopamine hit and you won’t feel changed.

Cultivating gratitude will change you, will transform your life. You will become a more powerfully creative person. You will become a person that is so much more abundant and prosperous in every possible way, on every possible level.

I’m always emphasizing this to my clients, especially as they’re starting a new endeavor or a new era in their life and they’ve been successful before is to celebrate and harvest, acknowledge, fully receive and integrate every single thing along the way because you can’t postpone it for when you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars for your art. If you’ve never sold a piece before, you need to celebrate every single $100 sale.

You need to celebrate your first $1000 sale. You need to be so grateful for that person that loved your art so much, you need to feel that movement in your heart that you created something that someone else values and brings meaning to their life, so there was an energetic exchange. You need to really get that in your heart and your soul and your body on an organic level because without that, you can’t skip on to the next thing.

You’re going to be discounting and undermining your ability to create more powerfully and create more abundance in the future, and you’re going to be stunting your ability to fully receive the experience and be fully alive and in touch with that moment.

So, an example, and this is ongoing work, so I might sound like I’m ranting, and I am, but that’s only, again, because I really care about you becoming as powerfully creative as you can be and also receiving the results you know you’re capable of creating and receiving. And I am always doing this work on myself too and it always ushers in a breakthrough.

And I want to share with you some very recent work I was doing, even just this morning, this kind of meta-breakthrough work. Because something was bothering me this weekend and I felt a little off and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on because I had an incredible year, I have a lot to be grateful for and there’s so many things that I’m proud of, and I am not only on track with my goals and my dreams, I am way ahead of schedule and have built so much momentum.

So I was like, what is going on with you, Leah? So I got up even earlier than the dark 0’30 when I usually love to get up at and did some of my own self-coaching. So what that looks like again, I do the thought download, I dump them out on paper. I catalogue all the thoughts, including the negative thoughts.

I know some of you don’t like doing this because you think, if you don’t put it on paper, then those negative thoughts aren’t already in your head and you feel some shame about that. But if you understood they were just thoughts, you wouldn’t feel shame.

There’s no moral judgment in putting them down on paper. This is just like cleaning house. Human brains have thoughts, many of them are negative. What you don’t want to do is just pretend it’s not there because then they go underground and continue to run your life in invisible ways and you call it fate, to paraphrase Carl Jung.

So, again, what I did, I emptied out a lot of the thoughts and, lo and behold, what was there was I am not getting enough traction, was one of my thoughts, and I want to breakthrough. If I had just done this in my head, I wouldn’t get there because on the surface, I was like, I’ve had a great year. And I really have.

And I can look back and I can find the evidence for it, but I still couldn’t quite get away from this nagging feeling that something was off. So that’s where emptying out all the thoughts is and not censoring your download is really important because I can really be sincere about the fact that I’m proud of what I have created this year and I can look at all the evidence that I’ve created to support that, and still, then there are also these thoughts up there. I’m not getting enough traction and I want a breakthrough.

So I went through the process of doing a thought model, and I’ve shared that with you in some master class kind of episodes in previous episodes. So in my thought like, I put, I’m not getting any- traction. And that was a thought I had about both my money goal and then also about my goal for writing my novel.

And so the feeling I have was frustrated, and the action then, when I’m feeling that way, I’m thinking that thought causes me to feel that way, and then what do I do? What I do is I make stabbing attempts at my coaching. I do scattershot kind of coaching. I kind of close my eyes and go for it. I don’t think it through. I speed up, I don’t slow down. I am not present during the rest of my life.

And this is what cued me in that something was going on because I had this great weekend at home with my family and I was having to will myself to stay present and just enjoy it a lot of the time, which is not usually how I am. I am preoccupied is another thing I put in my action line. I’m rushing.  I’m thinking about how I am not doing a good job.

And so when I think I’m not getting any traction and I feel frustrated and I act and show up in this way, the result that I create is that I don’t get traction. Those aren’t the kinds of actions, behaviors, ways of being that really move me forward in deep and meaningful ways.

The second download that I did a model on was that I want a breakthrough. And that seems like a great thing, right? Like, I love breakthroughs. I love getting breakthroughs for my clients, but I’ve done this enough to know, the moment that I put that down, I want a breakthrough, I was like, oh yeah, that’s not so pretty. That’s not coming from the best place. That’s coming from a scarcity place.

So then I did the rest of the model. When I think I want a breakthrough, I feel desperate.  That’s not abundant. That’s not creatively powerful. That’s not trusting.

So when I’m feeling desperate, what do I do? I fill out my action line. Again, I make stabbing attempts at coaching, kind of, again, close my eyes and go for it, throw things against the wall. I feel like my coaching is unfocused. It’s scattershot. Again, it’s rushed. I’m too much onto the next thing without taking a hard clear look and having laser focused coaching going on for myself. And my action feels all over the place, is all over the place, again, scattershot.

And when I act that way, which is a result of feeling desperate and that feelings desperate was caused by, I want to breakthrough, I could have said too I need a breakthrough, it would have been accurate, then what that creates in my result line is that I don’t have a breakthrough and I still want one, I still feel like I am in need of one, in want of one.

So all of that language, when I lay it out like that, it’s abundantly clear how scarce that is because you don’t want from abundance.  Think about how those two words are just diametrically opposed; want and abundance. And so what I realized was, oh abundance is grateful. Abundance is grateful and wanting a breakthrough, needing a breakthrough keeps me apart from abundance, wanting, needing a breakthrough means I am somehow separate right now from my gratitude.

And that was enough for me to shift back into truly feeling grateful and not just thinking of all the reasons I should be grateful right now and should be proud of myself and know I’m right on track, but I had to go and do the work and kind of dig up this obstacle thought that was in the way. And once I looked at that and I could see from start to finish how inaccurate that is and how coming from a place of want is only ever going to create more want and more separation from what it is, the place that I really want to be and the state of being in which I want to be is grateful.

Because why do I want to create the things I want to create is the feeling, what I think I’m going to feel when I’m there. And that always is a practice that’s open to me right now. What I want to feel when I’m there so often is grateful, present to my life right now. I want to look up and see that this moment is magical.

I want to look down and think, oh god, my feet, I’m standing on the ground. I woke up this morning, thank you. I don’t need to wait to achieve something else. My capacity to create and receive comes from being in this moment, being as grateful as I can, and that expands my capacity to allow myself to be more and more powerfully creative and to allow myself to receive greater and greater abundance and I want my gratitude to be as good of a match for the abundance that flows into my life as it can be because one of my core desired feelings is to be fully alive.

So the really ironic thing with that coaching then was me realizing, gratitude doesn’t want a breakthrough. I don’t want a breakthrough. All of a sudden, that was the breakthrough. And coming from that place too, all of a sudden, I felt places where I had been resistant, I felt myself relax again into trust.

And so to address again my, I’m not getting any traction statement, to me, trust creates traction. Gratitude creates traction. So while it was ironic when I realized I’m not in want or need of a breakthrough, that actually was very much a breakthrough moment for me this morning. It was that realization, that revelation that then made me realize, I am not separate from everything I want. That is all available to me in the moment if I really allow myself to be in this moment and take the time to live my life and acknowledge my life and celebrate my life, all of it, even the things that would be, quote en quote, not to positive, but to receive it all.

So this brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to take this information and really make it transformational for your life. Move the needle. So lean in here, really work with me and coach with me.

So here is a little secret about my gratitude practice; I do it a lot. And again, I’ll bring it down right to the nitty-gritty of today because I’m recording this for you on a Monday and I usually don’t do podcasts on a Monday.  Mondays are my miracle magic Mondays. And I usually take this day to be kind of fully by myself. But I was really excited to share this particular work with you and to get this podcast ready to go for you for Thanksgiving.

So what happened after this morning, after I did the thought work and the rest of my morning routine, and then my kids get up, Monday mornings my husband has a workout class he likes to go to. So I get the kids ready for school and take them to school, and plenty of chances to practice gratitude along the way there for all of it, the, quote en quote, good, bad, and the ugly, and send them off to school on the right foot, no matter what, because that’s a thought I get to choose.

And then from there, I went to the gym. And so here is just a very practical way that I do gratitude is I focus on it. And so this morning, at the gym, I had my AirPods in, but I wasn’t listening to anything.  I just keep them in there because it’s a little bit of a buffer to the noise and for some reason it’s kind of like a Pavlovian conditioning. I focus better with something in my ears.

So I was on the treadmill and then I went around and did my workout routine, but my other intention at that same time was, Leah, for this entire hour, 90 minutes, however long we’re here, the entire focus central to your brain, put it right on that third eye spot between your brows and then get it in your body, is gratitude.

Because where does our mind go? We want to be distracted by something that’s on the screen on the treadmill, by the people walking around, or by a podcast. I love podcasts, so that’s not to say that I never listen to podcasts. But I also do this routine of doing an intentional gratitude practice like this, a gratitude workout while I’m working out, while I am strengthening one set of systems and muscles in my body, I’m also working on this ultimate state of receivership, gratitude.

Because where else too does our mind go when left to its own devices, it goes to things that we should have done differently or better or that we haven’t done, or it goes to things that we need to do, things that we’re excited about, or often things that are on our list and how we’re going to do them and get them done.

But in that moment, for 90 minutes, I wanted to really focus on harvesting, fully receiving, embodying, and feeling a change in my heart and in my body and in my mind by focusing on things that I’m grateful for. So I focused on some interactions with my children that morning, some of which were very easy to be grateful for.

Like, my daughter usually comes and finds me when she gets up and she’s still got sleepy eyes and bed head and her little nightgown on and she crawls up in my lap. And I just hold her for a few minutes or longer, you know. There’s that. And then there’s also, like, one son was out of sorts and picking on the other this morning, and so being grateful that, first of all, that I have two sons and experience boys doing this, and then also grateful for the experience of being able to be their mother through this process and to learn about them and for us to be together and so on.

I also focused on, again, going back to not just naming things that have happened through the year, but I would think about maybe there was, for instance, one particular coaching incident that I’m really happy with how that coaching went, that it could have been called a difficult situation and I didn’t ever label it as that and I felt honored to hold this space and a powerful and safe space for someone as they were going through difficult intense transformation.

So to let myself rest with that and to really absorb the lessons from that and really allow myself to see what I did well there and also allow myself to feel immense gratitude for this person who let me share this experience with them. And then that led me to feeling grateful that I get to do this work in general of sharing very important experiences in people’s lives and helping them with this deep and transformative work, to not only think about that as, that’s a pretty idea in my head, but to really be present with it in my heart.

And this is very much experientially, physically, energetically driven. And it’s also individually driven. So, many people ask me, well how do I do this? And in my one to one coaching and in The Art School, I do go more into depth with what you can do with the body practices, to not only think differently, but to feel differently and then to hold that sustained feeling so that it starts to change you from the inside out and to take much more control over being the person that’s in charge of initiating that change and sustaining that feeling.

So again, my whole point for the 90 minutes of the workout was to work out by moving my body, but was also to be generating and spiraling and creating momentum for an even greater sense of gratitude so that that is my predominant energy for the rest of the day. And then I thought, woo, now I’m in this great place, I’m going to go home and make a podcast about it on Monday and share that with you.

So my coaching for you today, whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the US and whether you are anywhere in the world and you just want to begin to have this ritual of harvesting everything in your life for the goodness and the nourishment that it offers you, if you want to begin to really deepen your practice of gratitude so that you expand your capacity for creating and receiving, think about the amount of time and the energy and the focus that you bring to it currently. And how can you really dial that up?

So maybe today or in the next few days, you take this podcast and the whole body gratitude podcast for walks and you just listen to it long enough that you start to feel like you get into the zone and you kind of understand what I’m saying, and then you turn it off and you just find ways to teach yourself from the inside out how to expand your capacity for gratitude so you’re a greater conduit for what it means to be fully alive so that more of that full experience of being a human is available to you so that you become the most powerful creator and the most abundant grateful receiver that you can be.

Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Art School Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, the best thing you can do to pay it forward is to go to iTunes and leave a review. I’m so grateful that you take the time out of your day and that this podcast is a part of your life, and I am especially grateful for those extra few minutes that it takes you to hop online and leave a review.

That tells me that this work is resonating with you, and it helps me share the work and share it with a greater audience and spread and amplify the impact. And if you want to amplify the impact of this work in your own life, I highly recommend looking into either joining The Art School, a group coaching program, or applying to work with my privately one on one because if you have ever been in a place, and staying there for more than a day is too long, where you feel that you’re not getting traction, you feel like you’re in want of a breakthrough, you feel separate from your dreams, you feel like you’re struggling, don’t buy a bill of goods that it’s just meant to be that way and it’s just always going to be that way.

I can help you get out of the weeds and get back on track and start creating your dream with power and intention and purpose and results. Your way of being, your mindset, your emotional mastery, all of that is what’s contributing to the results that you’re currently getting. When you’re in it, it can be so hard to see it. But having a coach who is standing on the outside that can see where you’re getting in your own way can save you not only years but hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some people baulk at the investment that coaching is, but I want you to consider the cost of what you’re leaving on the table.  Is your novel not written? Is it not published? Are you sacrificing making multiple six figures or seven figures?

Those are very real costs of not investing in yourself and not investing in the one thing that is going to create the life of your dreams, and that is your mind, your way of being. I absolutely believe that if you have a dream, you have it for a reason and you’re meant to claim it and to create it. So the sooner you can not delay in giving yourself everything you need in order to do that, the sooner you’re going to become the person who that’s just your new normal. It’s no longer the dream that you’re wanting. It’s the abundance. It’s the landscape of your reality from which you live.

Lately I’ve been working on this new program, a new concept that I’m going to be unrolling in 2020 that I’m already going to begin working with my private clients on now, and it’s going to be very much the centerpiece of the transformational retreat at the Miraval Spa and Resort in Arizona that’s happening at the end of January.

And that’s this concept of creating a wind horse. I’ll be talking about this more in upcoming episodes, so be sure to tune in. But I believe, and I will always have coaching as a part of my life because I know coaching works to create the kind of momentum, to create the wind horse that allows you to ride to your destiny and not feel like you’re always trying to run to catch up to it and forever separate from it.

So if you would love to learn more about what creating a wind horse that you ride to your destiny is all about, if you’d love to learn more about what working with me is all about, you can email me with discover consult in the subject line at leah@leahcb.com.  I do currently have a waitlist and my first next available spots open up in January and those will go quickly, as will the spots for the retreat.

We are already filling that up. So if you’re interested in those, you can also email me at the same address with retreat in the subject line and my assistant or I will get back to you with more details about that. And now, my friends, I hope I have sold you on not just the idea of gratitude, but really taking it in and making it part, an elemental essential part of your everyday every moment way of being.

And in that spirit, here is a quote, a beautiful quote from Meister Eckhart, “If the only prayer you every say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”  Again, I am so grateful for all of you. Thank you. Have a beautiful week and I will talk to you next time; bye-bye.