If you want nice things to flow easily to you, you must become an allower.
By nice things I mean clarity, inspiration, joy. I mean money, relationships, insight. I mean art, objects, health, relief, rest, success… basically anything you can want or imagine wanting.
There is so much available, on its way, waiting for you to allow.
As I write this on a clear January morning I pause for a full minute, closing my eyes, and allowing the sunlight spilling through the window to penetrate my eyelids. I allow myself to bask in the subtle warmth, and to appreciate the dazzling orange and yellow and red swimming before me.
I allow myself to feel the elevating effect on my mood, and I allow myself to enjoy that elevation without any reservation or doubt, or any hurry.
Then I allow myself to feel myself at the leading edge of a hundred thousand years of human beings finding satisfaction in the precise way I am allowing myself to find satisfaction in this very moment. Through my allowing, the feeling grows into a sense of belonging, coherence, and deep well-being.
All of this a product of my gentle allowing. None of this a product of force, hard work, problem solving, or sacrifice.
There’s so much richness and abundance hovering at the margins of my reality until the precise moment I decide to become a receiver of it and allow it to flow into my experience.
The job of allowing is easy and joyous. It’s so easy that some of the clients who seek me out are initially skeptical. Shouldn’t it be harder? Shouldn’t there be struggle first, and then reward? Is it even moral to receive so much without earning it?
My bio-hacker friends like explaining to me how our mitochondria have evolved to harness the sun’s energy and feed it to us, and I like hearing about these marvelous discoveries. I reflect on this perfect intelligence of evolution as I soak in the rays.
A minute later, I am back at work, writing this for you.
Every so often, at least once a day, I ask myself the same question; a prompt to help me get my vibe right, tune myself to the energy of receiving, and make myself an emotional match for the enjoyment, nourishment, satisfaction, and abundance that is my heart’s deepest desire.
This question, the prompt, is my invitation to myself to become more of an allower, right then and there.
Here’s the question I ask:
“If I suddenly accomplished all my goals, acquired everything that I want, and became successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, how would I spend the next minute?”
It’s an evocative question, and I respond earnestly and playfully. If I have fully satisfied all my goals, if all of my desires have been fulfilled… what now? Who will I be? How will I inhabit this moment?
The clarity comes, and it is the same every time. I already know the answer in my head, but I wait for the feeling of it to arise in my body.
I want to enjoy myself.
No, even better, I want to enjoy My Self. “Enjoying myself” can slip into an abstract concept, one step removed from my actual felt experience in the now. Enjoying “My Self” makes it real and present. Me enjoying Me.
My Self is the vehicle of the experience I am having, and I want to enjoy not only the experience, but the vehicle allowing the experience too. My Self.
I have a Self that wants to be enjoyed, and it wants to be enjoyed by Me, and I want to feel My Self as the Me enjoying the Self that wants to be enjoyed.
Self enjoying Self. The gap between the one who wants and the one who has, between giver and receiver is finally bridged. I am the bridge, and I feel it, and it feels good. It feels really good.
I want to feel good. If I had accomplished all my goals, and become successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, I would want to take a minute and feel really good. Satisfied. Nourished. Triumphant. Proud. Excited. Relaxed. Successful. Full. Abundant.
If I had accomplished all my goals, and become successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, I would bask in the subtle sensations of Me-ness in this very moment, and I would take in as much satisfaction as I possibly could.
And so that’s what I do each time I ask myself this question. And each time it becomes even better. Even more.
It’s become a bit like drinking from a firehose, in the best possible sense. There’s no way I could become a channel for all of the joy and wonder and delight and satisfaction that wants to flow in me, but it’s fun to try. And as I repeat this process I feel my capacity for embodying all that good stuff expand.
Through the counseling and coaching work I do, I’ve discovered that each of us has a limit on how much exuberance and joy and satisfaction we can handle at one time. At a certain point it becomes too much, like a circuit breaker switching off, and some people reach that threshold quickly.
But that limit can be expanded, that capacity can be increased through desire and intention and practice and repetition, and I know of nothing that feels better than feeling that capacity grow over time, and knowing that I did that for myself because I love My Self that much and I want to enjoy My Self as much as I can in this blessed life, in this blessed body.
That’s how I felt a few moments ago when I closed my eyes and allowed the feeling of the sun to delight me and connect me to the richness of my life. And that’s how I feel now as I continue to write this for you.
My allowing of that previous moment has flowed into this moment, and will flow into the next moment. I continue to feel joyous, wondrous, enriched, and energized, and I expect it will continue because that’s how it works. I know this now first-hand.
Because I take a moment now and then to play this little game with myself, I have built some momentum with the feeling it creates. It doesn’t take much to get that momentum going again whenever I want, and once it’s going it wants to keep going because it feels good. My job is simply to allow it, and to enjoy it.
The enjoyment step is most important. Don’t skip the enjoyment. Skipping the enjoyment strips the whole project of value. Your enjoyment is the point. Everyone who is connected to themselves in any substantial way knows this. Your enjoyment of Your Self is the cleanest burning, cheapest, most sustainable fuel for animating your life.
- Allow.
- Enjoy.
- Repeat.
Sometimes when I talk about allowing, people confuse it with a kind of tolerating. Allowing is not tolerating. Tolerating is a word we use to justify letting something unwanted into our experience. That’s not the only meaning of tolerate, but it’s the one I want to address here.
The person who goes to work in a hostile workplace learns to tolerate. The person who grew up with neglectful or abusive parents learns to tolerate. The person in a stale, loveless relationship learns to tolerate.
People who become good at tolerating unwanted experiences tend to lose connection to their easy relationship to wanting, and to constrict their allowing of nice things to come to them. The energy of tolerating is very different from the energy of allowing.
The problem with too much tolerating is that it necessarily comes with a lot of self-protection. People who are in tolerating mode must protect themselves from the unwanted feelings that come with enduring the unwanted experience. This is done through desensitizing: numbing and hardening the senses, including emotional sensitivity. The very substance of your inner guidance and your life purpose becomes deadened and denuded.
This emotional self-protection is like armor, and it keeps out the wanted along with the unwanted. The strategy might seem like it is working for a time, but eventually the downside catches up.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Even if you find yourself in an unwanted situation that you must tolerate (we all will sometimes), you can decide to allow nourishment and satisfaction to reach you in some form. You can remain connected to the most lively part of yourself. You can re-start your emotional apparatus and regain access to feeling. You can learn the art of emotional discernment so that it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing.
How to do this?
Consider my story of sunlight from just a few minutes ago. The world (including your inner world of thought and feeling and sensation and imagination) is full of wondrous and satisfying phenomena, poised, waiting to stream into your life experience in every moment.
Look for the simplest example of this available to you right now. You’ll need to let feeling be your guide, which means letting down your guard. For me, it was noticing the brightness of the January sun. It could also be the feeling of sitting up straight or breathing more deeply or feeling your love for something or someone. It might be appreciating the texture of bark on a tree that you walk past every day. At its best, it always becomes
Once you get the hang of it you’ll realize it’s the simplest thing you’ve ever done for yourself, and you’ll probably want to share it with everyone you care about.
Allowing nice things to flow easily to you starts with allowing good feelings to become active in you, and you can learn to do this in all sorts of circumstances or conditions if you are willing to find satisfaction and enjoyment in your inner experience in the moment, without insisting that your outer circumstances change immediately.
Rest assured that your outer circumstances will change over time if you decide to allow for inner enjoyment and satisfaction first. It just takes a little time for all the physical, outer parts of your experience – the people, places, things – to catch up and begin to reflect the changes you’ve made inwardly at the level of emotion or feeling. All that physical matter tends to operate more slowly than the lightweight, nimble energy within.
Please understand that the kind of allowing I am talking about must be felt as physical sensation if it is to deliver real enjoyment and satisfaction.
You might like the ideas I am offering here, and the ideas are very good, but they are symbols of the experience, not the experience itself. At some point you must evolve the good ideas into actual felt experience if you are to answer the call of your heart’s desire and fulfill your deeper purpose, which is not to find satisfaction only in ideas, but to apply them in practice and receive the benefit physically.
To use my earlier example, if I take a minute to close my eyes and notice the heat of the sun on my face and the colors swimming behind my eyelids, but I allow myself to feel nothing, then there is not much value.
There’s not much value because there’s not much satisfaction. Not much enjoyment. Not much feeling. The value is all in the feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment, not in the idea of it. Many people are unsure of the difference. Find the difference for yourself.
Many of the hundreds of clients I’ve had the privilege of knowing force themselves to meditate or journal or exercise or do yoga, but they take no enjoyment in it. They do it because it’s supposed to be a good or healthy or helpful thing to do, and they hope that one day it delivers some benefit.
I had a daily meditation practice for years that I did not particularly enjoy, but that did provide some benefit. It helped me relax. Helped me clear my mind. Helped me feel some inner peace and connection. But once I decided to allow My Self to enjoy that time sitting quietly with My Self, it became electric. I could feel the actual pleasure in it and the benefits became pronounced and real.
Pleasure. That’s a word I haven’t used yet in this story, but it’s a good word to include. Enjoyment is pleasure. Satisfaction is pleasure. Clarity is pleasure. Flow, inspiration, love, connection, ease… all synonymous with pleasure, and all related to the body.
Some people are uncomfortable with the word pleasure. It activates resistance or sadness or even anger. I’ve seen lots of this in my counseling practice. There’s always a good explanation, always some negative association with the word, established from some unwanted experience in the past.
If you want to become an allower of nice things to flow into your experience, it will benefit you to befriend pleasure; the word, the idea, and the actual experience in its physical forms.
If you want to learn more about allowing, about becoming a channel for pleasure and nourishment and satisfaction, I can help.
I can explain it more fully, answer your questions, lead you through the embodied processes that make it real. I do this through a series of weekly scheduled calls. Email me to request a client package if you’re interested.
I’ve also put together a free audio course. The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery is a series of audio recordings that describe the process of becoming an allower of all things satisfying and delightful. It includes guided embodiment exercises to help bridge the gap between the idea of allowing and the actual experience of it.
There are 30 one-minute meditations too. Use them daily to support your success, satisfaction, and well-being as you learn this life skill and begin putting it to practical use and enjoying what it provides.
There is nothing more practical than feeling good. Feeling good is the reward of a good life, and the inspiration for a good life. It is the foundation of well-being, and both the product and the engine of 14 billion years of evolution.
No matter your current circumstances, you can start to allow more of your evolutionary inheritance into your life experience with just the ideas proposed here, and a few simple practices.
If you’re ready, it will come quickly.
If you want help, reach out.
As always,
All My Best,
Justice Schanfarber
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