Inhabiting Welcome

We’ve been exploring how to inhabit, along with the idea that invitations are daily occurrences. The invitations come from diverse sources and range from requests to know ourselves more intimately to tenderly meeting another. Inhabit does not mean to understand, contain, or define the vast and mysterious and its invitations, but to become available to its movement within ordinary life. 

Inhabiting begins with attention: noticing the invitations as they arrive, and taking them seriously enough to carefully consider what they mean. This kind of attention usually carries a curious quality to it, one that leaves room for wonder at what is actually being asked.

I’m realizing that becoming available to the invitation requires something of me: willingness. There is a difference between something arriving and actually receiving it. Often the invitation does not arrive as a voice from above, but comes through a compliment, a conversation, or a face across the table. Learning to receive may look very much like learning to receive one another.

Consider what happens when someone offers me a compliment. I say thank you out loud while privately dismissing it with thoughts like, it was nothing, anyone could have done that, or it is not deserved.  The compliment arrived and I acknowledged it, but I did not receive it. When I take time to sit with this I sense that something was interrupted between the giver and the receiver, a small rupture in the exchange. The offering was made, but I did not allow it to reach me.

The same quiet interruption shows up in larger places. We say we want relationship with others, proven by the bookshelves filled with guides to better relationships, and social media followers pointing to the connections in our lives. But does reading a book, or having a following, tell us anything about our willingness to receive?

To actually receive another person (or an invitation) requires a willingness to be affected. Are we willing to notice and actually experience their gladness, shyness, anger, vulnerability, and even their grief? Receiving asks us to be present enough to encounter what is actually here in both ourselves and the other instead of retreating into what we think we know.

Being present in this way takes practice. I am learning to notice when I am not receiving, which is a valid response to an invitation. I notice that I minimize or deflect, or move into judgement and explanation in numerous encounters. Those are times when my personality (the managing self of our earlier reflections) steps in and decides what it likes and does not like before I have experienced what is really unfolding.

Also, there is a difference between acknowledging an invitation and welcoming it for consideration. Mere acknowledgment keeps me standing outside the experience to decide from a safe distance, while welcoming means I am fully engaged with the content. What arrives as an invitation, whether compliment or judgement, becomes a gift once it is received, and both the gift and the giver are allowed into my heart.

Welcome does not mean everything is wonderful. It does not require me to approve of what is happening or pretend that suffering is anything other than suffering. Just as receptivity is not blind compliance, welcome is not approval. It simply means I am willing to nakedly encounter what is here.

I notice that when I am willing, something changes in the exchange. The fragrance of the other person becomes apparent, and while I may not like the fragrance, I can smell it. Sometimes it is kindness and sometimes it is selfishness. When I meet the fragrance of kindness there is a light, airy sweetness to it, while the fragrance of selfishness is heavy, dry, and pungent.  

I do not mean fragrance only as a metaphor. There is something I actually sense when I am willing to be present in this welcoming way. Liking and disliking may arise, but welcoming dispels the need to reduce myself to such labels, and in the moment there is simply an allowing of what is here.

I know I have returned to my personality structure when willingness falls away. Everything becomes flatter, almost two-dimensional. The moment is dull or the other person becomes only an idea. At these moments the other is offering an invitation to look within at the constriction of myself, which holds a sense of evaluating rather than encountering.

When I am willing to practice welcome, there is ease in the exchange between giver and receiver. A desire emerges to see the other person as they are in that moment, to experience their gladness or vulnerability as well as my own. Perhaps this is what willingness asks of us: not simply to notice what arrives, but to participate in receiving it. When we can’t receive then the inner work is to find out why.

We can take this practice into our daily lives by noticing the moments when we are not receptive and become curious about our reaction. We can inquire by asking ourselves what we are unwilling to encounter or what parts of ourselves are we protecting? What happens if, just for a moment, we don't retreat into what we already know, and just stay present a bit longer?

Inhabiting the vast and mysterious is the simple act of becoming available to the various invitations, to receive them and allow the heart to be touched, and to let the quality of the encounter shift us towards welcoming. We choose to inhabit not because we understand it, but because we desire to participate.