I’ve noticed that giving is easier than receiving for me, and also for a lot of other people.I feel inspired to start valuing giving and receiving equal.I can see why receiving is harder: it’s vulnerable trust myself being worthy of receiving.To trust being worthy of the other person’s attention, kindness, care and love, is vulnerable.To trust being worthy of it, not because I was first giving a lot – that would be an exchange of love, attention and concern and that’s just fine – but because the other person wants to contribute in my life. To trust this without an underlying, half conscious feeling of guild or fear of disconnection… I want to trust the other person’s willingness to be there with me. I want to receive without being prepared for losing the contact or feeling unworthy of that abundant kindness. This will be my practice and it’s all about vulnerable trust. I love giving and when I do, I do it out of a willingness to contribute. Out of love. But maybe there’s also …

The most common hindrance for freedom, inner peace, creativity, connection, love, productivity, space etc is self criticism. I see it again and again in my clients and self criticism dragged me down for many years. But not anymore. I believe that self criticism is best cured by empathic understanding of the needs behind the judgement. Early in life, we needed safety. Maybe it was more safe to judge our selves as wrong in some way than to see that our caregivers weren’t able to meet our emotional needs. Maybe thinking of ourselves as wrong in some way was a way to get the need for safety met, because if the problem was our caregiver’s lack of capacity to provide us with that on an emotional level, that would have felt too unsafe. Maybe we instead try to compensate for these flaws we think we have, in all sorts of ways. By over achieving, by helping everyone but ourselves, by always being right, by being intellectually superficial, by being special, by being loyal and just like …