ASK and You Shall Receive

This morning I woke up remembering a dream I had last night in which my mom and sister had discovered an amazing new workout. They were telling me all about it and I wanted to try it but in the midst of asking my questions about it, my mother started her own workout with the video and my sister was in the midst of hers. My mother had said that doing the workout with just the video and not the book could cause you to be misaligned and possibly hurt yourself, so even though I had one of the videos right in front of me, I was looking for the book so I could do it properly. And in the dream I was so frustrated because both of them were doing their workouts and nobody seemed willing to help me and I felt a familiar feeling of exclusion and rejection. When I woke up, I felt that this dream represented an old paradigm that I have been healing and moving out of, and I rejoiced. And then as I wrote about the actual details of the dream in my journal, I also realized that there had been no point at which I had actually asked either my mother or sister for help. Because they had both begun their workouts in the midst of my asking questions about the workout system, I had assumed that they were too busy to help me and that if I asked I would be rejected. So then I felt angry and frustrated and hurt and excluded - in the dream.

In a few weeks' time I will be returning to NYC after living in London for 6 months, and it occurred to me that I would love to be welcomed home at the airport by my sister. But I hadn't asked, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here. And now I see that I have been doing the same thing I was doing in the dream - not asking for help or for what I need for fear of getting hurt or rejected.

And the truth is that these are coping and self-protective patterns that I have developed over the course of my life for a reason. I have a wonderful family and many of my friends envy my relationships with them, but of course we are not perfect and I have had some painful, hurtful experiences with them, and one of the ways I came to protect myself was to analyze the behavior of the people around me to try to guess their mood and not communicate my needs directly, thereby isolating myself. And then I get to resent them for not fulfilling my needs!

This is an awareness that I can apply to so many areas of my life - my work, my friendships, my love life, and even my spiritual life. The saying is: Ask and you shall receive. It's not just "you shall receive." You have to ask. And I think that's part of why prayer is so powerful and important. GodGoddess is right there for us. And the divinity and love in other people is right there for us.

But we have to ASK.

So now I'm off to email my sister the details of my return flight to New York.