In a world that can seem oppressed by all that is going on around us – climate volatility, political chaos, increasing inequality, gender dynamics, and a pandemic – it can be easy to let our minds drift into the negative.
When our minds wander down this corridor, we are consciously or unconsciously saying ‘No’ to what is around us. To be clear, this is an internal ‘No’. One that isn’t explicitly voiced but resonates within us, whether we know it or not.
In an energetic sense, it causes us to create tension and stress in our bodies and we begin to close off. This ‘no’ can train a path in our minds and bodies and we can become rigid in our position against the thing or things that we reject internally.
Left unchecked for long and it can shape the form of our lives in profoundly negative ways and seep into every aspect of our lives from how we clean the house to how we interact with our closest friends and family.
So what is the solution when we are stuck in the negative?
It’s to bring a ‘Yes’ to the ‘No’. That means paying attention to our inner reality and being honest to ourselves in the fact that we are, in fact, resisting some element of reality.
This can be a longstanding ‘No’ that’s been attached to some past event that we still haven’t been able to recover from or to accept or it can be something more transient, although I think the former tends to be the most prevalent.
Longstanding negativity can come in the form of the loss of a partner, or job, or personal attribute that we identified with. It can come in many different forms but whatever it may be, holding onto our resistance to it only keeps us firmly positioned in a place of ‘No’, and the longer we remain there, the longer we suffer.
By bringing a ‘Yes’ to the ‘No’ means actively and consciously choosing to embrace rather than reject the situation that we perceive as unacceptable. It means looking inside ourselves and actively saying ‘Yes’ to what is.
When we do that, we release the negative attachment that’s long been held inside of us and we clear the way for something new to come in.
In effect, we are allowing life to flow through us, and on its waves, something new – and likely needed – will come our way; when we get out of our own way, we let life run its course and we become an active participant in that flow.
Alternatively, when we resist the flow of life, we suffer for it. We remain closed to whatever direction life tries to present itself and, in doing so, we remain stuck in our presently unhappy circumstances.
Life will not always give you what you want but it will always give you what you need (I’m paraphrasing from some quote I heard long ago) but it takes an active choice to bring a ‘Yes’ into the ‘No’.
So pay attention to yourself and when you’re feeling resistant to some aspect of your life. What are you saying ‘No’ to? And what happens when you bring a ‘Yes’ to it instead?
This will take practice but keep turning your ‘No’s’ into ‘Yes’s’ and watch how life unfolds for you and around you.
Keep stumbling,
Bringing a ‘Yes’ into the ‘No’
