Imagine spending an entire day in the expression of your authentic “yes” and your authentic “no” exactly in the moment of their rising.
Yes, eggs for breakfast, no hot sauce. Yes, wakeup in silence with the sunlight on your face. No phone before 8am. Yes, greet the day with gratitude, with delight because everything truly is for you. The very flow of your day sings as everything unfolds in perfect timing, matching your capacity and desire in every moment. And it’s more than okay to say no or change your mind. In fact, your connection to your no is imperative for you to have a safe and fulfilling relationship to Life. Another way to define abundance is to feel free to say yes or no. Easy to say no because we know we don’t have to settle from desperation. Easy to say yes because we are in alignment with our own deserving. When we trust every need will be met in the moment it is required, we flow with Life like water.
If you find yourself agreeing to what others want for you and over-riding your desires, you will slowly erode your connection to Truth and to Life. When you can’t say no, you will lose your yes. When there is incongruence at this basic level, we traumatize ourselves. Without your yes and no, you lose all personal integrity and it becomes automatic to blame others for asking and taking too much from you. Without present-centered connection to yourself and authentic expression to others, you will forget you are responsible for your own life.
Much of psychotherapy focuses on creating healthy boundaries. Whether you are healing from codependency, relationship stress, anxiety, depression, or any number of other neuroses or trauma responses, boundaries tend to be a big focus in any kind of therapeutic process. You may have been told you need to soften your boundaries if you fall towards avoidant behavior. Or you may have leaky energy and need to erect boundaries yesterday! I find all this boundary talk to be useful in a remedial kind of way, but ultimately it’s a shallow band-aid for a paradigm that’s already expired. This kind of therapy was born from a codependent-narcissistic culture, false systems of hierarchy, and an underlying perception of separation at the core.
You don’t need boundaries or communication techniques if every yes and every no is a natural uprising and easy expression. Without shame, there is belonging to yourself. Without explanation, there is embodiment. Honoring your yes and no builds trust in yourself and makes you trustworthy to others. This is paramount to any relationship or creation, that it comes from Truth! Until we get to unity consciousness (full integrity and belonging to Life as Life), behavior modifications and therapeutic techniques are like rearranging the layout of a house that’s on fire.
I used to be someone who couldn’t say “no.” This created trouble and suffering for myself and everyone in my life. I thought I was making myself like-able, but beyond all the drama, no one actually knew who I was. Shedding the “good girl” has been a lifelong extermination (and I love her so much!) Ironically, it is when we want to help so badly that we end up creating more effort and clean-up than what we were trying to avoid in the first place (usually our own anxiety). Once I cleared the distractions, addictions, and excuses from being present to myself, I was shocked to discover that everything in my life needed to change, and that this inner listening was a constant tool to fine-tune the exact right circumstances, environment, people, and feelings to create the perfect mirror for myself, in every moment.
In order to get this present, I had to find stillness and silence. I am still learning to quiet the regurgitated trash of my mind and feel the truth of my heart. There is a sober, determined voice inside. There is a vibrating, electric love in my cells and in my blood that is pulsing me home. It took me years to truly come home, building the muscle to move out of the habit of mental looping. With repetition, I discovered presence itself is benevolent, is alive. But it wasn’t until I decided to consciously forge a relationship with specific avatars of divinity that I came out of the conceptual level of meditation and finally surrendered into being held.
Perhaps at base, the therapist and the priestess are of the same path. I had to hang up my hat as a therapist because it became too hard not to talk about God openly anymore. I’m not quite sure what I am anymore, which is probably a good thing. A priestess knows that everything can change in an instant, and that it doesn’t have to take years to heal. That is, once you know how to open your heart, and say “yes.”