Last year, I learned about being a YES! to life. This definitely transformed me, but then it is also what caused a breakdown for me when I got back from India.(http://iambeinglove.blogspot.com/2010/02/with-tricia.html) I was back in reach and receiving so many invitations from my beloved friends. I really didn’t want to go to these things. I love them and wanted to see them but I wanted to stay at the beach, at my church, with myself to write and be. I had learned to be a YES!, so I had to say YES to their invites, right? But then a friend informed me that being a YES to myself may mean being a NO to someone else, and that is okay.

This weekend I got present to everyone’s YES looks different. And that YES is not a response but a way of being. Did I get that before? I had made up that it meant that I said YES all the time, to everything. Now, I get that I can be a YES with my whole body and still say NO. Wow!!!!! Powerful shit! HA. Do you get it, though?

I can carry my body, my self, as a yes or a no. I can most definitely hold my body in a way that is unapproachable, in a way that says, “Do not talk to me, in fact don’t even look at me!” It can say, “I don’t have time for you!” We can say so much with our bodies, with the space that we create ourselves to be in. We can be a big fat NO with our entire being. I can also carry my body as a YES. I can be an open and inviting space for the people around me. I can hold myself to be approachable, to be love inspiring, just with my body, without opening my mouth, without even pasting a smile on my face 24/7! Pretty freaking crazy, shiot! (Purposeful typo).

This way of thinking about YES came to me in the yoga teacher training that I attended with Baron Baptiste this weekend (holy crapolo inspiring). He brought these ideas up in the form of the yoga practice, too. In yoga, I can be a yes with my body and that doesn’t’ mean that I say YES to every pose, to every challenge that the teacher offers, but that my body is open and that I am listening to it. That I don’t automatically surrender to the thinking of, “NO, I can’t do that. I am not going to even try that. That is crazy. There is no way”. Being a YES in yoga is opening myself up to possibilities of what my physical body can do, right now in this moment. Not approaching poses from how they have showed up on my body before or how they look on someone else’s body. It is operating from a place of non-judgment. Non-judgment to the teacher for what they are leading me through, non-judgment of what my body is today in this practice and also not making up rules and limits for myself. I am holding myself open to what is available in the here and now. I am being a YES with my body, my mind, my heart, my soul, my entire being.

(artwork courtesy of Jackson Nash)