Giving and Receiving – And the Sacred Marriage - an excerpt from the forthcoming CREATING A SACRED MARKETPLACE 

- by Barbara Wilder

It is in the act of giving and receiving that we can find the key to the Sacred Marriage. The notion of giving and receiving has been a conundrum in the past. We learn even today in some of the most highly spiritual and integral teachings and programs that we just have to learn to give and from giving we simply become open to receive. But at the same time as these well-meaning teachers say this they also say, that we must not give with the expectation of getting something back.  And what they mean is that we should give generously and know that it will come back to us abundantly.  And that is the truth. But there is a subtle blockage to our understanding and thus the fulfillment of that truth in most people’s lives. And that is that culturally we have been taught a very deceitful idea that sticks with us deep in our subconscious minds, and that is the saying from the Bible, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

            Let’s look at that simple phrase, and examine how it has affected our collective subconscious.  Because to shift the paradigm, and open our hearts and our pocketbooks to Money as Love, and thus become capable of co-creating a sacred marketplace, which can only come with the sacred marriage, we will need to transform this outdated belief structure.  

So, if it is more blessed to give than to receive, then it follows logically that the giver is blessed.  And that’s a lovely thing. It is good to give, if we are truly giving from our hearts.  The problem lies in what happens in the minds and hearts of the receivers.  If it is MORE blessed to Give than to Receive, then the logical next belief is that the receiver is LESS blessed, or even, not blessed at all. This is imbedded in our deep cultural subconscious. Thus, no matter how much we are taught that if we give from our hearts we will receive, the very idea of receiving can actually be loathsome to many, because it is not blessed.  Also, because it is better to be a giver, it follows that the receiver is less than or  smaller than the giver.  This an insidious construct of the dominator cultural consciousness or the shadow of the Divine Masculine that we must dismantle to be able to enter into the Sacred Marriage.  This idea that something has to be better than another thing is what keeps separation/duality functioning.  But when we look at the truth that Giving and Receiving are two parts of the whole, and that one cannot exist without the other, then duality melts away and unity takes its place naturally, and this is what creates abundance for All. 

So, how do we transform this? How do we transmute giving and receiving into Oneness?  It’s a lovely concept, but because we have lived for over five thousand in this culture of separation and the belief that some are better than others, or dominate over others, we now need to train the receiving part of our emotional psyches how to open and accept the gifts of the giver from a place of equanimity and more importantly safety.  Most people’s receptors are not trained to receive, and in fact are trained through their own personal, as well as cultural history, that receiving, or asking or expecting to receive more money or more freedom or more of any of the wonderful gifts of the Divine Universe results in punishment.  A simple example is the wife and mother who daily gives selflessly to her family, but is castigated by her husband for asking for more money to pay the bills, or for asking to take some time off to do something for herself.  Many many women are even abused physically as well as emotionally for asking for more money or more freedom. Our culture doesn’t pay well for the gifts of wives and mothers.  In fact there is no pay.  This extends out into the whole community and affects men as well. When a man asks for a raise for doing good work, he often is refused the raise and even fired for asking. In the past in this country, and still in many other places in the world, a person can be fired, or even killed for asking for more, no matter how much they are giving.

Another piece of this puzzle is that we are asked in this unbalanced culture to make trades that are unbeneficial to our psychological wellbeing to receive money.  The most sinister of these is loss of our sovereignty. Who owns us when they give us money?  The company we work for? The man or woman we are married to?  To create a sacred marketplace, each one of us must come to the marketplace as sovereign beings.

As we talked about in the Self-Love chapter, when we love ourselves completely, no one can dominate us. Thus to become receivers, we must heal the wounds of abuse that have created walls in our collective and personal psyches that were actually necessary for our physical safety and survival in the past. To do this we must give and give and give love to ourselves, and gently begin to trust that we will not harm ourselves, and with practice we will begin to feel safe enough that the walls will fall, and we will become free to open our hearts to receive all the love and abundance and goodness that is the birthright of every person on this earth.       

Giving and receiving are actually energetic exchanges.  The energetics of giving is easier because of the belief that is it Blessed to Give, and because historically we have not been punished for giving.  On the other hand, the energetics of receiving are stymied.  Because the fear of retaliation, abuse, punishment, is so prevalent that our receivers are blocked to the signal that would open the energetic doors to let in the good, the Money as Love. Our doors are shut for protection.    Thus, as we learn to love ourselves we must include the healing of the fear of receiving.  This brings us back to the era of duality that we are moving out of and thus this healing of the receiving becomes instrumental in the creation of unity and the sacred marriage first within ourselves, thus making us ready to create a sacred marketplace that is the external expression of the unity within.  

The shadow of the Divine Masculine, the domination impulse creates a duality, which makes the giver feel that he or she is above the lowly unblessed receiver.  Thus to receive is not so easily achieved, because there is this subtle but all pervasive repudiation of what the teachers tell us, that when we give we naturally receive.  Because when we give, our subconscious mind that is part of the great collective mind pattern makes us feel better than those we are giving to.  And when we receive our subconscious feels a bit less than, or even feels guilty, and we can fall into self-hate. 

Also, giving and receiving are different for men and women.  Women naturally give. Being nurturers, life givers, caretakers, we naturally know how to give.  When we are taught over and over in prosperity workshops to learn to give, women are sent into a very weird place, because this is not something we need to learn.  It is women’s default mode.  What women don’t know how to do naturally is to receive.  This is exacerbated by the cultural mindset that it is not considered blessed to receive. This is a deep feminine wound that has been ingrained in the female psyche over the past five thousand years.  When women lost ownership of themselves and became the property of men, they lost the ability to receive abundance directly from and for themselves, and thus they had to find alternative ways to receive.  And that was by giving their most precious gifts, and hoping that these gifts would help them just survive.  This is very evident in the act of prostitution, which is actually the shadow of the Sacred Marriage.  

Let us look at the archetypes here.  We know that divine masculine heroes of the past five thousand years were always in search of the elixir that would heal their communities. To find this elixir and return with it to the community, was often a lifelong quest. The elixir was always the feminine aspect of healing, nurturing, and abundance for the entire community.  The most notable of the quest elixirs was the Holy Grail, which though transformed during the Christian era to be the cup that Christ drank from at the last supper, originated much earlier, and like the round table that Guenivere brought to Arthur, it was the search for the Divine Mother.  The Divine Mother is the ultimate receiver. She is the cup into which the Divine Father pours the holy wine.  The Mother Earth is the grail, the Father Sun is the wine that fills the grail. When the seeds are planted, they gestate deep in the womb of the Mother Earth. Into that womb the sun shines its rays until the seed is warm enough to burst forth from the earth and become a luscious plant that grows and creates abundance for all who eat of it.  When a man enters a woman and plants his sperm in her cup, her grail, a human being is created.  This is the sacred marriage.

This Holy receptacle was demonized during the era of duality. Thus the act of receiving was no longer considered holy or sacred. Where once the High Priestesses of the Divine Mother received men at Her altar and performed the sexual act in the sanctity of the temple and the sacredness of Divine Love,  now the great priestesses were called prostitutes and their holiness was considered the act of the devil that tempted men away from the path, or shadow of the Divine Masculine.  To reinstate the Divine Feminine to Her place in our sacred consciousness we will need to honor once again the holiness of Divine receiving.  And when the Divine Masculine enters and fills the cup or the grail of the Divine Feminine, this will heal the separation, and the Divine receiver will once again be married in Love and Grace with the Divine Giver.  And from this all abundance is created for all who participate. 

Whether you are man or woman, I invite you to bring your Divine Feminine receiver onto your inner altar to receive all the Goodness that is available to you from the Divine Masculine within yourself, and you will find yourself lifted to the higher vibration of money as love, where great abundance flows effortlessly for all.  This is the sacred marriage within, and the beginnings of the sacred marketplace that will be co-created by all who take the vows of balanced and holy giving and receiving. 

Excerpt from CREATING A SACRED MARKETPLACE - By Barbra Wilder

Copyright © by Barbara Wilder 2014

 Art by Krystle Smith