The magic of reciprocity

Receiving is a challenge for me. Giving is delightfully easy. I have intellectually known for many years how important both giving and receiving are in life, but I’ve needed lots of lessons and experiences to reinforce this idea. This past month has been a masterclass in helping me find a better balance.

I am a giver by nature. This natural tendency is also highly encouraged in our world today, especially if you are a woman and in any sort of helping profession. I have always been praised for my ability to give and support others. This praise reinforced that giving is a valued quality to have and makes me a good person. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is only half the equation.

I have said it many times before and will continue to say it, you cannot pour from an empty cup. This encompasses the idea that you cannot live a life of constantly giving because eventually the well will run dry. Usually my next piece of advice is to work on learning how to fill our own cup. How can us givers turn that love back towards ourselves? This is a beautiful place to start cultivating a healthier relationship with receiving; allowing ourselves to receive from ourselves.

I have fully leaned into the idea of self compassion and self love as an incredibly important piece of the journey towards a more full cup. But today, as I was thinking about the lessons I have learned over this past year, a new image popped into my head. What if we don’t just have one cup, but we have many and that led me to a confusing thought.

We all have multifaceted lives full of many bits and pieces. Each part of our lives, each unique resource we contain, may be a different cup. We have a cup for our emotional capacity, physical energy, time, mental bandwidth etc. What if when we fill up our own cup, we are just taking one of our more full cups and pouring it into a less full cup? If we fill a cup up in our left hand from our right hand, we aren’t actually gaining or receiving anything, we are simply redistributing energy. Yes, one cup is receiving and one is giving. But if both of these cups are our own, as a whole, our level of energy and resources hasn’t actually changed.

This brought me back to physics, which I will always nerd out over. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. Perhaps in reality, we cannot fill up our own cups. We can only redistribute the energy we already contain. I cannot create energy out of thin air to fill my own cups up, that energy must come from somewhere. Perhaps learning to give and receive within my own sphere of resources is only a stepping stone towards opening myself up to energetic exchanges within the greater world.

All the cups we contain, they are a closed system in a way. The amount of energy we contain is finite if we keep that system closed. It will recycle and redistribute itself in many ways throughout our lives, but if we do not allow ourselves to open up to the world at large, no energy can come in from the outside.

This becomes especially problematic for givers. In a way, givers learn to turn the faucet on to allow their energy to flow out towards others, but never learn to place their own cups under the faucet of others to replenish the system.

I am incredibly guilty of this. It is the idea of hyper independence, that for many of us Americans, we were raised on. It is weak to ask for help. It is weak to receive support from others. We should be tough enough to find our own way in the world and figure out how to fill our own cups up without using others. Which is absolutely silly because I have never thought that someone else was weak because I filled their cup a bit. It is funny how often we can hold two very different belief systems side by side without realizing it. I would never judge another for receiving from me, but I would constantly judge myself from receiving from another…

This reaction also comes from perhaps filling our cup from another’s faucet in the past and then realizing their giving was conditional. Again, this internalized capitalism is a very strong societal norm that I am working on deconstructing within myself. This idea that life is transactional, meaning giving always comes with expectations. Expectations that you must give in return, equally or more than, to make up for what was given.

But we are not banks and our resources are not the same as money. When we give, it is not like giving a loan to another. We cannot expect it to return to us with interest. Expectations, like usual, will create turmoil within.

I have come to learn that a softer way to move through the world is with reciprocity. A word that may have literally changed my life when I began to understand it fully. Reciprocity is the idea of mutual exchanging of resources that is beneficial to both involved. It is to graciously give when feeling abundant and to graciously receive when feeling depleted, both without expectation. Nothing is conditional when reciprocity is utilized.

In a culture that engages with reciprocity, people learn that there will be seasons of plenty and seasons of scarcity. Life is cyclical just as the seasons. When in a season of plenty, we must learn to turn our faucet on and share the wealth. During our winter seasons, we must learn to close our own faucet and seek to fill our cups up elsewhere. Again, energy cannot be created or destroyed. So if you are in a season of plenty, there is a good chance someone is wintering in your vicinity and vis versa. We are placed in each others lives to exchange energy in this way. To fill each others cups up and be filled by others cycle after cycle.

This is an incredibly long explanation for the lessons I have repeatedly learned over this time off. I first had to learn how to live with reciprocity within my own closed system. Filling the cup in my left hand with the cup in my right hand. This was simply the tiny baby step that helped me to open up to fully receiving from others. Which in a world full of hyper independence and pull yourself up by your bootstraps type of lingo, is no easy feat.

This past month or so has been the ultimate lesson in receiving for me. I have loved many things about living the nomadic lifestyle and camping so much but I miss the idea of home for many reasons. Past Jenna would have felt required to endure the challenge without asking for any support or help. If I needed a place to wash my clothes, take a shower, cook a hot meal, or sleep in a soft bed, I would have paid for it myself. It would have felt weak of me to ask to crash at a friends place and take up space in their lives uninvited.

But current Jenna did just that. When I was feeling a bit depleted in a certain area of my life, I knew that meant that there must be others near me that are feeling abundant enough to share. With this idea of reciprocity in mind, I asked to be filled up by others and graciously held my empty cup below their faucet. As energy filled my system, I was able to pour back into theirs in other ways.

Nothing was even about these exchanges in a transactional sense. I received a bed, shower, clean clothes and a hot meal. I gave by holding space for them to share hard truths and provided little nuggets of wisdom I have collected. And usually I also tried to bake a little treat for them because who doesn’t love a good homemade cookie?! But again, nothing was expected or required of each other. Everything was done out of love.

I am so proud of my ability to ask for help and support lately. Something that I would have considered weak in the past, feels like the strongest thing I could do. And at the end of each stay with these incredible people in my lives, it is always evident that somehow we have filled each others cups up abundantly.

These friends of mine are special. I have been gifted with an incredibly community of humans around me for many many years. But I am just now beginning to lean into it fully. I am finally understanding that to live a beautiful life we must not only give but also receive. And we must do both graciously and with full reciprocity in mind.

When I chose to only give to others and never receive, I am robbing them of the opportunity to give. And nothing flows in a system if one end is clogged. Once we open the floodgates of receiving from the world, our ability to give magically expands. This is the beauty of reciprocity. This is the beauty of living cyclically and with the seasons. This is the beauty of opening up to others and becoming interdependent instead of fighting to stay hyper independent.

All I’m trying to convey here is simple. I needed to quit judging myself by standards I would never use to judge others. Receiving is not weak, it is in fact, incredibly powerful. I am learning that trusting myself and the beautiful people in my life is one of the bravest things I can do. And at the end of the day, reciprocity is a sweet gift.