Stepping Stones to Our Souls

What a song, a paradox, and a man with a notebook reveal about the art of receiving?

There is a kind of generosity that looks like love but isn’t.

You have seen it — perhaps lived it. The person who gives lavishly and receives nothing. Who deflects every compliment with a wave of the hand, who absorbs no gratitude, who remains, through every exchange, carefully and safely untouched. We tend to admire this person. We call them selfless. What they may actually be is defended — giving in a way that forecloses rather than opens, that keeps them sovereign and unreachable, and that places everyone they give to subtly, permanently, in their debt.

To give without openness to receiving is, in the deepest sense, a form of manipulation. The transaction flows in one direction by design. And that design has a purpose: it keeps the giver in control. This is not a comfortable thought. But it is a true one. And it is where we must begin.

— — —

Bette Midler did not write The Rose — Amanda McBroom did — but it is Midler’s voice most people carry when they hear it. And the lines that stop you, if you let them, are not the ones about love as a river or a razor. They are these:

The Rose

It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give,
And the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

Four images. Four faces of the same contraction. The heart, the dream, the one who won’t be taken, the soul — each one protecting itself from being affected, from being moved, from being given to. And each one paying the same price for that protection: the very thing it most wanted, forfeited.

The one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give. That line is the key. The inability to give flows directly from the unwillingness to be received — to be vulnerable, to let the exchange be genuinely mutual. You cannot give freely if you pull yourself back from what giving requires you to risk. The open hand and the open heart are the same gesture.

The Rose is not a song about love lost. It is a song about love refused — not by another person, but by oneself. About the soul that mistakes its own protective contraction for wisdom, and spends a life in safety, which is another name for a life half-lived. This is the vanity of a life of control. I can’t dance as I want approval — people may laugh at me. I can’t dream as I want the safety of the shallow end. I can’t be taken, as I need to control everything. And my fear of losing my persona preserves appearance rather than letting me dive into the well of genuine, life-giving vitality.

— — —

Ruth Bebermeyer was a songwriter and teacher whom Marshall Rosenberg — the creator of Non-Violent Communication — cherished and honored. She gave him a song that turns the question of giving and receiving completely inside out. The lines that have you re-imagine living and giving are:

Ruth Bebermeyer — Given To

To receive with grace could be the greatest giving.
There is no way I can separate the two.
When you give to me, I give you my receiving.
When you take from me, I feel most given to.

Sit with that for a moment. The receiver is not passive. The receiver is completing an act of love. To receive well — with presence, with openness, without the deflection or embarrassment that keeps the gift from fully landing — is to give the giver the fullness of what they reached out to offer. It is volitional though. I offer my receptivity, my willingness. When you take from me, I feel most given to. The deepest experience of generosity, Ruth is telling us, is not in the giving. It allowing myself to be received, and responding to that, and rejoicing in it.

This is not merely poetic. When this doesn’t happen, we get depleted, and more and more artificial. Flow is choked off. It is a precise description of what happens between people when a gift of appreciation, of love, of honest feeling is truly allowed to land, in contrast to the high alert stance we so often live in. Something completes. A circuit closes. Both people are changed by it. And when the gift is deflected — waved away, minimized, redirected — both people are diminished. The giver is left holding something they reached out to offer and were not permitted to give. The receiver has protected themselves from being affected, which is precisely what they needed most to welcome.

— — —

Marshall understood this in his bones. When people came to him — as they often did, with intensity and gratitude — and told him how brilliant he was, how astute and remarkable he was, he would stop them gently.

“Please don’t,” he would say, “just tell me if I made your life more wonderful in any way?”

And when they said yes, of course, and began to say how, he would reach for something to write with. They would ask what he was doing.

“This is too much for me to receive right now,” he would say. “But I’m going to record it. And later I am going to let it in.”

There is something almost comic in the image — this man of extraordinary gifts, reaching for a notebook so that love does not escape him before he can properly receive it. But the comedy is the point. Receiving, for Marshall, was not a reflex. It was a practice. It required intention, preparation, the willingness to be genuinely affected rather than graciously deflected. He took it seriously enough to write it down, so it could be fully embraced.

The notebook was not a quirk. It was a discipline. It was the physical enactment of Ruth Bebermeyer’s paradox: I give you my receiving. And I don’t need my pride stoked — I need to know how I gave you value, where it was meaningful, and I can then be grateful, both humbled and enlarged at the value given.

— — —

Ruth Bebermeyer returned to this territory in a second song — less known, harder to find, and searing, expansive, perhaps so revelatory as to be unnerving. It moves the question inward, from what we cannot receive from others to what we cannot receive from ourselves:

Ruth Bebermeyer — Why Is It So Hard to Believe?

It’s just as much a mockery
To touch the truth in me
Unable to receive it,
As to speak hypocrisy.

To stand before the gift of self,
Unable to receive,
Why is it so hard to believe?

If somehow, I could see myself,
Through your honest, searching eyes
Perhaps I could accept myself
And come to realize

That it’s not so incredible,
That love should come to me,
Why is it so hard to believe?

I know how much I love you,
How much I want to give
Your trust affirms my love for you,
And let’s my loving live.

To give is domination
If I can’t also receive,
Why is it so hard to believe?

To give is domination if I can’t also receive. That line does not soften its edges. It names the power dynamic explicitly, not as an accusation but as an anatomy. The giver who cannot receive holds structural power over the receiver, whether they intend to or not. The relationship is permanently unequal. One person is always the source, the other always the beneficiary. That is not love. That is hierarchy dressed as generosity. And it leaves the receiver incomplete, stressed by a dynamic that seems uplifting but somehow diminishing at the same time.

And the verse that precedes it cuts even deeper. It’s just as much a mockery to touch the truth in me, unable to receive it, as to speak hypocrisy. Here Ruth turns the lens inward entirely. The inability to receive is not only about what we deflect from others. It is about what we refuse to receive and then experience from ourselves — our own worth, our own lovability, the truth of what we are and what we mean to the people who have chosen to be near us. And we are mocking by evoking something we are then unable to invite in and be graced by. Hypocrisy is a pretense of love. This is too.

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Why is it so hard to believe that love should come to me?

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That refrain — why is it so hard to believe? — is the question underneath every deflection. Every waved hand. Every notebook that should have been reached for and wasn’t. The person who cannot receive from others almost always begins with a prior inability: they cannot quite believe, in the quiet of themselves, that they are worth receiving. And so the gift, however genuinely offered, arrives at a door that is not quite open.

Your trust affirms my love for you, and lets my loving live. This may be the most precise description of the mutuality of love ever compressed into a single couplet. The receiver’s trust — their willingness to be given to, to believe the gift is real, to let it land — is not passive. It is what allows the giver’s love to exist in the world. Without receiving, love has nowhere to go. It remains interior, potential, unactualized. The receiver does not merely complete the exchange. The receiver makes the giving possible.

— — —

A teacher once offered an observation that has never quite released its hold: there are no real shortages in the universe. Only an unwillingness to receive.

Heard carefully, this is not spiritual optimism. It is something far more demanding. It locates the experience of scarcity not in the world but in the self. Not in what is absent but in what we will not allow to arrive or actualize. The love that is there but deflected. The appreciation offered but waved away. The beauty of an ordinary moment that passes unregistered because we are too defended, too distracted, too busy managing our own interior weather to let it in. The slew of resources we are blind to, the occasions for serendipity — best defined as sagacity in the face of opportunity (for it is about recognizing currently dormant opportunity) — left unrealized, the potential we never acknowledge and therefore cannot avail of.

These are not shortages. They are refusals. And in their accumulated weight, they are what makes a life feel thin.

The canopy wants Lester Levenson and the practice of Releasing highlighted — for approval, for control, for safety — are the mechanisms of that refusal. We are so busy managing the interaction, ensuring its outcome, protecting ourselves from its risks, that we cannot be enriched by it. We cannot be given to. And so we move through a universe of abundance experiencing a private scarcity, and wonder why we feel undernourished.

— — —

Wayne Dyer inverted a familiar phrase to make an unfamiliar point: you’ll see it when you believe it. Not the other way around. The conventional wisdom tells us that seeing precedes believing — show me the evidence and I will update my view. But Dyer understood, as the mystics have always understood, that perception follows interior orientation. What we are able to see in the world is shaped by what we are able to believe about ourselves and about what the world is capable of offering us.

The person who cannot believe that love should come to them — Ruth Bebermeyer’s question, asked with such undefended tenderness — will not see it when it arrives. It will present itself and they will look past it, or minimize it, or find reasons it cannot be genuine. Not because the love isn’t there. Because the interior condition required to receive it hasn’t yet been cultivated.

This is why receiving is a spiritual practice as much as a relational one. It is not simply about being gracious when someone pays you a compliment. It is about developing, over time and with intentionality, the interior capacity to believe that you inhabit a universe that is disposed toward your flourishing — and to act accordingly. To open rather than contract. To write it down rather than wave it away. To say yes, you made my life more wonderful, and mean it all the way through.

And it is beyond the personal. The poet Khalil Gibran reminds us: “In truth it is life that gives unto life — and you who deem yourself a giver, are merely a witness (and a channel).” We open ourselves up to being part of the dance, to participating in the continuum that is the true glory of being. We become conduits and enablers, sparks and kindling.

The universe, in this sense, is not indifferent. It is perpetually offering. What changes is not the offering but the quality of our receptivity — the degree to which we have done the interior work that allows abundance to be recognized, welcomed, and received.

— — —

The practice, then, is not primarily the giving. Most people, when they think about becoming more loving, more generous, more present, think immediately of what they will offer. What they will say. How they will show up for another person.

But Ruth Bebermeyer is pointing somewhere else. So is Marshall with his notebook. So is the teacher with their quiet, devastating observation about the universe.

The practice is as much learning to receive. To let appreciation land without deflecting it. To sit with being loved without immediately redirecting the conversation. To hear what someone says you have meant to them and, rather than swat it away, capture it — or simply be still, and let it in.

There is a format, simple and profound, that embodies this in practice: tell someone how they have made your life more wonderful. Tell them how you feel about it. And encourage them to keep bringing that quality of warmth and care into the world. Three movements. A complete act of love — flowing in both directions simultaneously.

When people encounter this practice for the first time, something unexpected happens. They do not turn to the person beside them. They go somewhere else entirely. A child. A mother. A friend who has been present in ways that were never quite named. And the recognition that arrives — I have never said this fully, to this person, in all the years they have given themselves to me — is not guilt. It is anticipation. The gift has been waiting. The only thing missing was the willingness to offer it. And to receive, in return, whatever comes back.

Which will be more than you expect. Ruth told us so.

And while this can be for the crucial relationships, it can show up anywhere. We were in a restaurant in Baltimore recently, and a young woman brought us the bread. She asked how we were, and it felt genuine, her inquiry into our well-being, clearly worth receiving. Catching her eye, the response came simply: “Very well, thank you, and how about you?” She was briefly taken aback, and then smiled deeply and said: “Thank you for asking.” All evening thereafter we continued to connect. She “adopted” our table and graced us with her warmth. We were blessed. One small opening. One moment of genuine receptivity. And the whole evening glowed with a special light.

— — —

The Rose ends with the image of a seed beneath the snow — apparently lost, apparently dead, waiting for the conditions that will allow it to emerge. Love, the song suggests, is always present beneath the surface. What varies is not its availability but our readiness to let it rise.

Those conditions are not circumstantial. They are interior. They are created not by what the world offers — which is, a teacher once told us, without real shortage — but by what we are willing to believe we deserve to receive. We welcome rather than demand, for demands aren’t needed. You’ll see it when you believe it. The universe does not withhold. We do. And our doubting that is a sacrilege. None of us are smart enough to doubt. There is a wonderful spiritual passage, “If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they would immediately go out.” We give and receive what allows us to shine.

The stepping stones to our souls are not grand gestures or heroic acts of generosity. They are the small, daily, quietly courageous moments of allowing ourselves to be given to. Of writing it down to be able to pay attention to it, rather than waving it away. Of saying, simply and completely: yes. You made my life more wonderful. I am going to let that in. And what a joy to ask you to give me the gift of receiving my love as well.

One stone at a time. Across the water. Toward the self we have been protecting ourselves from becoming. High time we let it bloom.

Omar Khan
Omar Khan is the creator of Loving Assertiveness and the founder of 3S Catalyst Consulting. He works with leaders and organizations across the world on the inner conditions that make genuine culture — and genuine receiving — possible.