When No is Not an Option

I have spent more than 50 years of my life helping others to heal their wounds. Sometimes, the changes have been incremental and sometimes, they have been quantum leaps. The quality of my results with others has been completely interdependent on me authentically living the power of a paradigm shift in thinking about who and what we human beings are: we are quantum… or we are not. It really is a choice… a choice that the forces of/for cultural conditioning claim we do not have. Do I have to be of this world in order in order to live in it? Voila! For most of us, this conjures up instant dilemma! Who would cognitively choose dilemma for her Self? And, yet, unaware, we keep on choosing it, just the same. We keep making the choice to join in, to fit in. THAT IS the familiar story that runs our lives. Even when we are aware, the entrainment to drop into the familiar, hoping for a different result, is pernicious.

So we say YES instead of NO. And we say NO instead of YES. I feel a burn in my chest at the heart level and in my throat as I write this and I feel a frontal headache making its presence known. It is all energy and information, - not good, bad, right, wrong. My heart is letting me know that subscribing to living in the culture I’ve come to know as familiar has created the illusion of dormancy: in truth, it is dead in the water. My throat is reminding me that I gloriously get to choose, like it or not. So, what is it that I am choosing and how is that working for me? My head is letting me know that my emerging future is right here, right now; it is NOT floating out there, in a nebulous, rose-coloured future. All time is now. Am I willing to take the next leap? Will I - as I inhale and exhale my life in every breath - welcome the ‘Fool’ that I AM who knows all… the I AM who knows everything and nothing… the I AM who moves, assiduously, in her world, changing her mind - like deciduous trees naturally shedding their leaves - letting go of my choices of the past, even of one second, one breath ago?

I know that this process is the never ending journey of my life. Being committed to the adventure of becoming Self-aware is what continues to propel me forward. And, in this journey, I keep on picking up the scents of the allopathic familiar (fostering an old belief that any ‘new’ shiny strategy that catches my attention might ultimately fix/save me from my ‘problems’), masquerading as the perfect quantum leap forward, when - in truth - it is, yet again, another fall back into line with the culture. OMG! That is when I become aware that I have run an old strategy, yet again. Different story, different shiny, proofing the power of seducing myself into the promise (make that more like the inauthentic platitude) of Maybe this time, it will be different.

I ask the question: Will I ever wake up? Maybe, I just have!

I thank the godForce that I AM that I am continuing to develop, cherish and sustain a ‘nose’ for the insane and the ridiculous which have sounded, plausibly and logically, like answers to my prayers. When one forgets, Self-Seduction is easy, don’t you know?! It is interesting that we continue to allow ourselves to forget.

Just the fact that I have even dared to believe that I was the problem, did problems and had problems would be ludicrous in the quantum field that knows all truth as TRUTH. The more I remember to choose to BE the I AM that I am, the more fluid I experience my life. My truth in the moment is not yours. Your truth in the moment is not mine. It is all still Truth.

Quite simply, I get to choose to hold myself as god in my own unique world, or not. To BE god, I must own the undeniable force that I AM that comes with that choosing; otherwise, my life becomes, yet again, another platitude. It is like being pregnant; one either is or is not. There can be no in-between, except, perhaps in one’s mind, where laying down the endometrium for incongruence will surely abort desire for what is or could be most meaningful to us, if we stopped to even hear ourselves inhale and exhale.

We are born, innocent. Not very soon afterward, we learn very quickly that there is a god and it is not us. And, so, the entrainment to cultural dogma seeds and germinates itself as a way of life, while the innocence of whom and what we are as quantum biological humans is systematically ripped away from us. We grow up and compliance to that external god, whomever she or he is, in any minute, finds traction in the moment-to-moment - and never requited - longing to be loved, accepted, and fit in.

Sheer insanity. We abdicate our Selves - our deep internal knowing - to fit in with feeling safe in the collective AND, yet, we never feel secure, inside where we live. Love and acceptance can never be seeded in compliance to collective expectation and fear of missing out. And, so goes the journey of our lives; we settle to keep the peace in our worlds, especially with those with whom we have our first experiences of power and authority… our parents/guardians. We do it - in some way or another - by ensuring that we shut up, put up, and don’t rock the boat…. then, we might get to live. YES to others becomes the big NO to ourselves.

It starts when we are children. By the time we have reached adult age, we have learned well to pass the crucible of that power and authority into other hands… only to continue and sustain our own compliance… to what? Some figment of our imagination, a voice taking up the real estate of our minds? We hold ourselves as all grown up, yet we are not; we don’t actually FEEL that way. We step into our parent’s home and we immediately become 5 years old again, relative to personal history, habit and habituation. Later, we step into our boss’s office and we take on the same hue. Deny it or not, fear - even as we deny the potency of its internal grasp in our bodies and our psyches - is the vehicle that continues to T-bone our well-being long into adulthood. UNLESS, we choose to wake up to/as the continuing and never-ending adventure of our lives… not always pleasant, not always easy AND always worthwhile.

The subtleties, the finer distinctions of how fear - as energy and information - is playing out in our individual lives, requires a bloodhound’s nose to unearth its odour. It requires a massive willingness and - dare I say - joy to move beyond the limitations of our perceived realities, into what we don’t know we don’t know…. and, even more importantly, into what we refuse to allow ourselves to know that we already know.

Like there is an internal price I pay myself to not know myself (re: the illusion of safety: what I don’t know won’t/can’t hurt me), there is an even more significant fee I invest in myself to both know and not know not just WHAT I know, but THAT I know.

LOL, let that last statement settle in, ‘cause, sure as shooting, your intellect will not know what to do with this thought! The only way to decode such a thought is in and through the body, no exceptions. Your intellect has to take a pass on this one. It is not designed to integrate anything; its only function is to choose, make decisions. So, decoding information - known and unknown - absolutely requires that I own a willingness to be Selfish in myself, for my Self (truth is I can’t breathe for anybody else; breathing is the essential activity in my life that keeps my body functioning to express the I AM that I am). All of that decoding happens inside the body when allowing it to fully breathe itself, free of any story. Ultimately, there is nothing to figure out.

In my experience of myself and others, letting your intellect take a pass constitutes a game of forfeiture that humans, generally speaking, will just not play, given the distorted and deeply seated belief that honouring one’s Self, first, lacks empathy, humility and compassion in contributing to others. THAT is a cultural no, no. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have polarized the notions of give and receive, the idea of reciprocity, to our peril.

Sure, there have been a godzillion times in my own life when I have taken up my courage…. and, I might add, my humility…. to say Yes to myself, knowing that, when I have, I have been saying No to another. It has felt scary and brought up all kinds of peripheral voices and internal feelings that have served to question my RIGHT to BE the YES in/for my own life. It has taken a willingness to step out in front of the choir of the familiar and to turn my view into the countenances singing the current song being sung… and to choose to no longer sing that song, nor to lend my ears to the vibration of hearing that song, anymore.

We have been raised up to hold that NO is not an option. We have been raised up to believe that NO is not and cannot be essential to our vocabulary. And, yet we are told NO all the time; we hear NO all the time. Have we even noticed that we are the only ones who are listening into that? Not only are we listening into that, we are actively listening for it. At 73 years wise, I am noticing where I am still saying YES in my life, where, in truth, consciously choosing NO for my Self, would far better serve to nourish the already nutrient-dense lining that is the womb of germinal reciprocity.

In my life, for my life, who am I going to serve… first? Who am I going to give my life up to/for, first? If the choice is not for me/in me, first, then how will I ever contribute to others in my world? In the world I am choosing to create for my Self as my internal sanctuary, reciprocity lives without condition, without fear (including fear of missing out), without double binds. Since there is no other voice, inside, except that of my own internal representation of what I think I am hearing outside of me, it is my committed practice to owning the truth of my experience in each moment that nurtures my expanding awareness.

So, my question to you is this: Who are you going to serve, first and foremost? What does it bring up inside of you, when you consider this question?

Singer/composer, Bob Dylan, wrote a tune, entitled, You’ve Got to Serve Somebody. I first hear it sung by Nathalie Cole. It’s a pretty catchy tune that brings home, for me, that we are all here to serve our evolution of consciousness. For me, the title says it all. So, whom are you going to serve?

All meaning is context dependent. Remember that you come first. Just like YES, NO in your world is always a viable option. Stop thinking it isn’t. Congruence is key.