For my birthday, I'm honouring my YES
Some thoughts about what it's meant to change the orientation of my life from NO energy to YES energy
Today’s my birthday. I’ve just turned 58.
Here’s what I want for my birthday (and for the coming year): More joy. More ease. More courage. More rest. More tenderness. More grace. More time with trees. More hammock-swinging. More book-reading. More seashore-wandering. More truth-telling. More authenticity. More friendship. And... did I mention... MORE TENDERNESS?!
Truthfully, when I look at the list, I realize I just want to keep living in exactly what I’ve found. I want my life to keep blossoming into just what I’ve created it to be. I probably don’t even need the word “more” in front of those words, because I don’t really need expansion, on any front. Much of what I need, I’ve already got. In fact, in some ways I’ve shrunk my life, and that suits me just fine.
In a recent conversation with this year’s cohort for our Holding Space Certification Program, we were talking about “honouring your no” – setting good boundaries and recognizing the limits of your capacity. In the middle of the conversation, I suddenly realized what a major shift there’s been in my life – from I GUESS SO energy, to NO energy, to YES energy.
Let me explain...
My adult life started with I GUESS SO energy. Back then, I wasn’t clear on what I wanted or needed, what was unhealthy for me, or what boundaries I needed in order to thrive. Not only were these things not clear, but I had trauma and social conditioning that made sure they stayed blurry.
My “yes” often sounded more like “I guess so”, because I didn’t yet know myself well enough, and hadn’t done enough healing to honour what I wanted and needed. Plus my attempts at a more self-assured “yes” were often met with “but you’re a girl” or “you shouldn’t want those things” or “you’re trying to be too big for your britches”, so I learned to shrink back into “I guess so”.
My attempts to say “no”, meanwhile, were often met with objections, gaslighting, or coercion, and so I’d usually switch half-heartedly to “I guess so”, to live up to the peacekeeper/people-pleaser I’d been taught to be. My boundaries were often breached, and I had little resources to do anything about it.
In the prologue of my book, Where Tenderness Lives, I shared an allegorical story of The Girl in the Velcro Dress. In her youth, the girl stitched together a Velcro dress, the way her mothers and grandmothers had taught her to do, and then people started attaching things to her dress – expectations, rules, shame, trauma, etc. This girl was living in her I GUESS SO energy, simply accepting what she’d been socially conditioned to accept, not knowing she had any other option.
It was only after she discovered a secret cave under the dress, where she could begin to discover who she really was, that the girl started to realize that she could take things off her Velcro dress and hand them back to whoever they belonged to. She learned to honour her NO.
In my forties, after a period of liminal space, I tentatively stepped into the NO energy part of my life. I started to deconstruct some of the belief systems and social conditioning I’d inherited. I found the courage to say no to the things that didn’t feel right for me anymore – a marriage, a career, a religious belief system... and more. Many of those things were attached to bigger systemic things that I was also finding the courage to divest from and stand up against – capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, grind culture, purity culture, fatphobia, queerphobia, etc.
Because of the trauma I was working to heal during that time, and the social conditioning I was unlearning, my NO was often a very defended NO, coming from a place of woundedness and self-preservation. It meant that sometimes I was belligerent, sometimes enraged, and sometimes even child-like in my expression of NO – like a toddler learning to refuse the food that tastes yucky.
Often the NO was followed by me scurrying for cover, afraid to face the reaction to my NO and protective of the fledgling part of me that still felt very wobbly in those courageous moments. That was the best I could do at that time, and I don’t regret it because it served the necessary purpose. In Jungian language, it was a belated form of individuation.
A few years ago, I began to notice that some of that NO energy had dissipated. I didn’t feel as rageful or belligerent anymore. I didn’t have as much need to be guarded against people’s reaction to my NO, and because I’d developed healthier boundaries, more nurturing relationships, and a stronger sense of self, there were fewer and fewer times when I needed to express the pissed-off version of my NO.
That’s when I started to move into YES energy. Having a more grounded and embodied sense of self-love and self-possession, I was now free to explore what I wanted and needed and what made me feel most alive. I started to explore and experiment, built a business (and then another one), learned to use power tools, came out as queer, created a bunch of things that were meaningful, wrote a couple of books... and the story of YES continues.
Two years ago, when I sold my house and started living nomadically, I stepped even further into my YES energy, actively seeking out the people, places, experiences, and things that brought me joy, with less concern about what other people thought. Like Marie Kondo, I let go of a lot of things that didn’t spark joy and filled my life with those that did. Eventually, I landed here on Vancouver Island, in a much smaller home, living near a lake where I can do much wandering, hammock-swinging, and joy-seeking.
Yes, some of this is only possible because I’m at a stage in my life when I no longer need to raise children, and some of it is because I have financial resources that allow for more choices, but much of it is due to the healing work I’ve done, the boundaries I’ve learned to set, and the choices I’ve made to honour my own needs and desires. (Some day in the future, I will also share more about my journey with psychedelics and how it helped.)
Being in YES energy doesn’t mean I never need NO energy anymore – it just means that I’ve gotten to a place where I can orient my life differently. It’s a time of less defending and more inviting, less self-protection and more self-honouring. That means that even when I express my NO, it can be more generative and less defiant.
I don’t think I could have gotten to the YES stage without first going through the NO stage. NO energy played a critical part in my journey, while I learned that I was worthy of healthy boundaries and worked to heal the codependent part of me that was too attached to other people’s reactions, needs, and emotions.
YES energy feels generative and alive. It’s a more embodied experience of the world. It’s a time of liberation and tenderness. It’s a place from which generosity and love can flow without codependence or self-sacrifice.
In the epilogue of my book, the Girl in the Velcro Dress became the Girl in the Painted Dress, after she’d discovered she could paint the underside of the dress and the paint started to show through in the places where she’d removed the sticky bits on the outside.
It strikes me that these three stages are at least somewhat aligned with the Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes of the female life cycle in mythology, and perhaps that means they are natural and necessary stages of development, not just rooted in trauma and social conditioning. The Maiden is still getting to know herself and is in I GUESS SO energy, the Mother, as a protector of the young (and of the planet), has moved into NO energy, and the Crone, accepting herself and finding peace with the world, evolves into YES energy. (It’s also true that the movement to YES energy coincides with my own movement through menopause, so it’s also connected to my body’s evolution.)
One of the beautiful things I’ve discovered about YES energy is that it’s not actually selfish, in the way my social conditioning taught me to see this way of living. It’s generative and generous. When you’re in YES energy, you want other people to be in YES energy too, and you want to work with those people to co-create a more beautiful world - with systems that replace those we’ve said NO to.
If you’re ready for more YES energy in your life, wanting to build better things for a more beautiful world, perhaps you’d like to join me for my brand new coaching/mentorship circle called Time to do the Brave Thing. I’m convening a small circle of people (maximum of 6) who are ready to be courageous but need some encouragement, cheerleading, coaching, and/or mentorship to get there. Will you join me in this place of YES?
Alternatively, if you’d rather get your encouragement/cheerleading/coaching from me one-on-one, I’ve also re-opened the door for coaching/mentorship.
My book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation, and holding space for oneself, is all about moving through NO energy and into YES energy.
My book tour continues in the Pacific Northwest and I’d love to see you there!
June 4 at 10 a.m. – Langley, WA – Healing Circles Langley, 534 Camano Ave
June 5 at 6 p.m. – Anacortes, WA – Watermark Books, 612 Commercial Ave
June 6 at 6 p.m. – Bellingham, WA – Village Books and Paper Dreams, 1200 11th Street Bellingham
June 27 at 7 p.m. – Vancouver, B.C. – Iron Dog Books, 2671 East Hastings Street
July 4 at 6 p.m. – Nanaimo, B.C. – Windowseat Books, 309C Wesley Street
July 20-21 – Writing with Tenderness, a two-day workshop on Vancouver Island
Registration is open for the following courses, which start in the Fall: