Let Me Say No
Dear dreamer,
In my last post, I mentioned how the environment I was in at the Somatic Trauma Healing Immersion gave me a different physical sense of my body than I experience in normal life. One difference was in the slowed rhythm I felt within myself, and another big difference was how connected I felt to my body’s Yes and No.
In little decisions throughout the day:
Do I want to eat here?
Do I want to sit here?
Do I want to attend this session?
Do I want to leave this session?
Do I want to talk to this person?
In each moment, I was able to clearly listen to and trust the Yes or No I was receiving from my body. To do so, it was necessary for me to be able to slow down enough to pause and listen to my body first.
When the systems of our culture have us rushing to produce and consume and survive, there is no time to listen to our bodies. And when we can’t hear the Yes or No coming from our bodies, we often override the message. In many ways, Gabor Maté shares how this suppression of our authenticity can lead to illness, as your body will find an expression of its needs in one way or another.
This is how our bodies offer us immediate access to practicing liberation and sovereignty.
Each day, slowing down enough to honor our body’s Yeses and Nos disrupts the systems that want to keep us disconnected from ourselves and our power.
Kai Cheng Thom models a culture of consent, creating space to celebrate our Nos just as much as our Yeses. She modeled scenarios where she allowed the other person enough agency to pause and consider how they really felt about a proposal. She honored the power of the other person’s No by thanking them for expressing a boundary, concern, or hesitation. After witnessing Kai Cheng, I was amazed to find that I had courage to express my own No in moments where before I might have said Yes in order to be easy, go along with the group, or not disappoint. And when the people around me celebrated my No, I could trust that being true to myself doesn’t have to mean an immediate loss of connection.
To honor our body’s Yes and No sounds simple.
But the more we practice, the more we understand that the pressures of survival and belonging means that an authentic Yes or No is something of great courage.
Nkem Ndefo brings a refreshing breath of reality and grace to these somatic concerns. A reminder that often, this ability to slow down and listen to our body’s Yes or No is a privilege of relative safety. And there are moments when we have to override our body’s consent or non-consent in order to survive: the majority of us cannot say No to exchanging our labor for money in order to survive.
Sometimes, the response that keeps us safe is not the authentic one.
Grace for the moments we couldn’t be true to ourselves because it wasn’t safe to.
AND, we all can find the wiggle room of space where there is enough safety in moments for us to interrupt the urgency, slow down, and honor our body’s Yes or No.
We can begin to discern our relative safety in each moment, to decide how an authentic or inauthentic response may serve us now.
Do I want to end this here? Yes, for now.
This post was originally written for my email list. Join the party to receive my writings hot off the presses!
