I am experiencing an irresistible urge to attempt a further clarification of what I mean by ‘yes to all of it’. Sometimes people think I mean a thing I do not mean which is frustrating and I would like to do what I can here to maximise the chances of you all getting what I’m on about. Let’s see how I go. Maybe it will be a disaster. Maybe it will go ever so well. You just never can tell with these things. So you try and then you try again. Fail again, fail better, as Beckett said.
Sometimes people think saying ‘yes to all of it’ means saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes our way. But it does not mean that. That would be a drag. You would have to say yes to all sorts of things you did not really want to do. What would be the point of that?
Sometimes people think that saying ‘yes to all of it’ means not ever avoiding the tough stuff, always ‘facing up’ to it right here right now. That would be horrid. It would be like hell! No rest for the wicked they say, and that’s what this would be like, constantly confronting the most challenging aspect of your situation without any time to appreciate the lovely stuff or just to have a break. I suppose not ever avoiding stuff does sound admirable in some ways but, anyway, saying ‘yes to all of it’ does not mean that either.
Now saying ‘yes to all of it’ is starting to sound as though it does not mean anything at all, that it is what we are doing whether we know it or not. But it does not mean that either. It is possible to not say ‘yes to all of it’.
Saying ‘yes to all of it’ is a way of orientating yourself to your experience of the world, of saying to yourself, and accepting that, ‘This is what is happening right now!’, that ‘This is what is the case’. And when you say this to yourself you are referring to everything that you are experiencing in that moment: the stuff in the world you are hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, the thoughts running through your mind, the sensations in your body, the urges you are experiencing, and the movements you are making. You might not like it, you might not want it but it is what you have got right now. Saying ‘yes’ to it simply means being consciously in touch with what you are in touch with as opposed to some version of sticking your head in the sand, pretending/wishing that the world is/were not as it is.
There will be times when what is happening is that you are taking a bit of a breather from the trials and tribulations of living and this is absolutely saying ‘yes to all of it’ provided that you are taking this breather with full awareness, that it is an intentional act.
There will be other times, many times, it may even be the norm, when you fall off this horse and, without choosing for it to happen, you say ‘no’, you find that you have just quit, shut down, checked out, that your head is firmly stuck in the sand because the whole organism that is you just does not want to know. This can happen to varying degrees. There will be times when you involuntarily shut down to the whole thing and other times when you shut down to a little bit. This is not saying ‘yes to all of it’ but the very next step is to say ‘yes’ to the ‘no’, to open the door just a chink by accepting that, right now, the organism that is you, with its unique learning history, cannot and will not accept it all; the shutdown is not what you chose but it is what has happened – right now, this is what is the case. And this ‘yes saying’ is not a prelude to overriding the ‘no’ as if it were some kind of mistake. That would be to say ‘no’ to the ‘no’. There are no ‘mistakes’ in the domain of behaviour, in the sense that there is no alternate universe in which we could have done otherwise. ‘The rat is always right,’ as the behaviourist, Burrhus Frederic Skinner is reputed to have said and, when he said this, he meant that lab rats’ behaviour is exactly the behaviour they have been trained to emit, even if is not the behaviour experimenters were trying to train. So when we encounter a ‘no’ in ourselves we do not simply persist in whatever it was we did that produced the ‘no’. We don’t label the ‘no’ as ‘a problem’ and then locate it and its ‘cause’ inside the behaving organism that we are, declaring ourselves ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ and demanding that we try harder. We do not say ‘no’ to the ‘no’, we say ‘yes’. The ‘no’ is the correct response given the immediate context and learning history of the organism that is us, and the only thing that can bring about change – given that our learning history cannot be altered – is a shift in our immediate context.
The ‘no’ is an indication that some aspect of context is functioning automatically as a threat. The organism is in self-protect mode which is just as it should be. Better safe than sorry. There are two possibilities here: 1. The situation resembles some previous situation in which the organism was indeed threatened but which is not ‘really’ threatening now. In this case, the organism is not actually responding to the situation as it is but as it believes it to be, based on perceived similarity to a previous situation. 2. The situation really is threatening now. If 2 is how things are, then some form of fighting, fleeing or hiding is the way to go. In other words, if the threat is real, we need to say ‘yes’ to our ‘no’. If it’s 1 then we need to explore. In order to decide whether it’s a case of 1 or 2 we have to be willing to take a risk and explore at least a little bit. We have to allow ourselves to be in contact with the potentially dangerous situation as it is for long enough to decide whether it really does constitute some kind of threat or whether it’s actually harmless but stirring up our ghosts. We have to say ‘yes’ in order to attain a truly conscious ‘yes’ or a truly conscious ‘no’. This doesn’t mean rushing in where angels fear to tread. We need to fear with the angels and tread carefully, say ‘yes’ to the fear in the sense of being willing to feel it and willing to be guided by its wisdom. To mix metaphors, we need to dip our toes in the water to find out if it really is scalding hot or freezing cold before we take the plunge. Anything we can do to resource ourselves to do this scary thing, to change the context so that treading carefully feels doable, is what we need to do.
Inveterate conflict avoiders like me find it really hard to say ‘yes’ to their ‘nos’ because saying ‘yes’ to a ‘no’ often entails asking for something different from someone in our context who is doing something that we do not like. If the prospect of conflict feels like a threat then we are likely to say ‘no’ to our ‘no’, to say nothing instead of giving voice to our pain and our wishes, to just keep on grinning and bearing whatever it is the other person is doing. This is a recipe for relationships in which resentment builds, while satisfaction drains away. Saying ‘yes’ to our ‘no’ here, also means tuning into and saying ‘yes’ to whatever it is that we really want. Us conflict avoiders are often big people pleasers (flip side of the same coin) which means we’ve put more effort into working out what others want and need than into working out what we need ourselves; we often have some work to do when it comes to knowing what we want.
So, you see, the thing about saying ‘yes to all of it’ is that it means that in any given moment you have options. You can opt out for a bit but you don’t have to. With time even the hard scary things you used to avoid become a bit interesting, sometimes painful opportunities to learn and grow from because when you say ‘yes to all of it’ you notice that everything is connected to everything else which makes bad stuff kind of good (if you’re willing to be in contact with it) and good stuff kind of bad (if you are not willing to let it go). It makes a ‘no’ to what you don’t want a ‘yes’ to what you do. There’s a gorgeous richness to this which takes us beyond binary evaluations. There is nothing that is definitively bad or definitively good only a world which is constantly giving birth to itself in an infinite variety of forms: sunsets and rainbows, flocks of birds bursting into flight, plumes of smoke, the rustling of leaves in the wind, cities and empires that rise and fall, and unique human beings who evolve into the people that their mutual interactions with each other in the world enable them to become – unique processes, unfolding once and once only in time and space, each one adding another layer of complexity to the never-ending cosmic dance of everything.
Yes To All Of It 