Say YES to YOUR Life
What four words have asked of me across a lifetime.
When I was twenty-four, my family gathered for my younger sister’s wedding.
Instead of walking Allison Joy down the aisle, we carried her there in a coffin.
She was eighteen when she died by suicide.
The night after her funeral, I found myself in her bedroom in her fiancé’s home. Her wedding dress hung in the doorway, a haunting reminder of the future she had been preparing to enter - and the life she would not live.
I did not know what to do with the enormity of her absence. I did not know what to do with my grief, my anger, my guilt or the unbearable questions that seemed to have no answers.
So I prayed.
I asked God to give me something - anything - a reason, a thread, a handhold.
And from somewhere deep inside me, four words came:
Say YES to Life.
I did not fully understand them then.
While I said YES to Life at twenty-four, it has taken me decades to understand what those words were actually asking of me.
At Twenty-Four, YES Meant Stay Alive
At that age and in those circumstances, saying YES was elemental and fundamental.
It meant staying.
Remaining here.
Getting through the next hour, and then the next day.
It meant continuing to build a life even when some part of me was not entirely sure that life could be trusted.
By then, I had already survived experiences that had taught me to be careful, vigilant and highly attuned to what other people needed and expected from me. I became strong, capable, responsible and useful. I learned how to anticipate problems, manage complexity, take care of others and keep moving forward.
These qualities served me.
They helped me survive. They helped me succeed. They helped me raise children, build relationships, navigate a demanding career and eventually support other people through the complexity of their own lives.
I rest deeply in the understanding that survival deserves our respect.
It carries us through circumstances for which we may have had neither language nor sufficient support. It helps us function when stopping to feel the full weight of what has happened might overwhelm our capacity to continue.
Sometimes survival is the YES. Vital and necessary.
And surviving is not the same as living.
For many years, I lived largely from the neck up. My mind was brilliant at analyzing, anticipating, organizing and problem-solving. It knew how to make sense of things, or at least how to keep trying and learning. It knew how to perform competence even when the rest of me felt frightened, frozen or far away.
My mind helped me stay alive.
But I had lost contact with much of my heart, my body and my own aliveness.
When Protection Completes Its Original Assignment
The qualities I developed to survive did not simply disappear when the original dangers had passed.
They became ways of being.
I became the person everyone depends upon, the one who reads the room, anticipates what could go wrong and carries what other people cannot, or will not, carry for themselves. Many of us high achievers / performers do this.
I became highly accomplished while remaining internally braced.
I created a life that looks good from the outside and still found myself wondering:
Why am I not happier?
Why am I still waiting for the other shoe to drop?
Why do I have so much difficulty resting, receiving or allowing myself to need anything?
Where did I go?
The armor around my heart had once been necessary. It protected something tender when I did not yet have the capacity, support or power to protect it in other ways.
Eventually, however, that armor began keeping out more than pain.
It kept out joy.
Intimacy.
Tenderness.
Spontaneity.
Pleasure.
Even love.
This does not make the armor wrong. It may simply mean that a form of protection that once saved me has completed its original assignment. This can be true for any of us who find ourselves stuck in survival mode.
Our work is not to attack it, shame it or rip it away before we are ready. Our work is to recognize what our focus on survival has done for us, listen to what it still fears, and develop the present-day capacities that allow it to loosen.
Later, YES Meant No Longer Disappearing from My Own Life
There are many ways to remain alive while gradually disappearing from our own lives. See if you recognize yourself in one or more of these:
Do you disappear when you become so identified with your roles that you lose contact with the person inhabiting them?
Or maybe you disappear when you become fluent in everyone else’s needs and unable to name your own?
Perhaps you disappear when you silence what you know, override what you feel or make yourself smaller to preserve belonging.
Many of us disappear when we organize our lives around being useful, agreeable, successful or needed - and call it love.
At times, the more direct word for this is self-abandonment.
I use that term intentionally, although I understand why it can feel heavy. Most of us do not consciously decide to abandon ourselves. We adapt. We accommodate. We do what appears necessary to remain safe, loved, included or successful.
And, little by little, we may leave ourselves behind. We become lost.
My YES had to evolve.
It could no longer mean only staying alive or maintaining the life I had built. It had to include staying present to myself within that life.
This did not happen all at once. It has been a long pilgrimage from mind to heart to body, supported by therapy, coaching, depth work, loving relationships, honest conversations, and an increasing willingness to feel what I had once needed not to feel.
It has required me to become curious about the places where I leave myself and compassionate toward the parts of me that still believe doing so is necessary.
A True YES Is Not Compliance
Saying YES to your life does not mean saying yes to everything life, or other people, place before you.
It is not compulsory optimism.
It is not putting a happy face on everything.
It is not relentless activity.
It is not filling every available space with achievement, always looking for the silver lining, offering someone else grace, or persuading yourself to be grateful for circumstances that are hurting you.
And it is not agreeing to every request, opportunity, expectation or demand.
A true YES may ask you to:
· Rest when productivity would be more socially rewarded
· Grieve what cannot be repaired or recovered
· Tell the truth when silence would be more convenient
· Leave what you have outgrown
· Receive love without immediately trying to earn it
· Risk being seen
· Set a boundary and allow someone else to be disappointed
· Say an unequivocal NO to what diminishes you
Every meaningful YES contains the discernment to know what must also receive our NO.
Without discernment, yes can become compliance.
Without a relationship with ourselves, yes can become another way of seeking approval, avoiding conflict or proving our worth.
And without the capacity to say no, our yes cannot be fully trusted, not by others and not by ourselves.
Now, YES Means Sovereignty
At twenty-four, saying YES meant staying alive.
Later, it meant recognizing where survival had become self-abandonment; where I was disappearing from my own life in order to preserve belonging, maintain relationships, meet responsibilities, or sustain the life I had worked so hard to build.
Now, it means belonging to myself deeply enough to participate consciously in my own life.
This is how I understand sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not isolation, self-sufficiency or freedom from responsibility to anyone else. It is not refusing influence, rejecting support or insisting that we always get our way.
It is the capacity to remain in relationship with ourselves while we are in relationship with other people.
It means listening inwardly without closing ourselves to what others know.
It means allowing our yes to be a yes and our no to be a no.
It means making choices from the intersection of the personal, professional, practical and spiritual, not dividing ourselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts, or leaving essential pieces of ourselves outside the rooms we enter.
It means cultivating enough inner authority to participate in our lives with awareness, agency and choice.
Sovereignty is not control over life.
It is the growing capacity to stay with ourselves as life unfolds.
Healing Is Not an Endless Self-Improvement Project
Many of us who have done years of inner work are exceptionally good at identifying what still needs attention.
We know how to examine our patterns, revisit our histories, name our wounds and search for the next insight, modality or practice that might finally resolve what remains unresolved.
This work can be invaluable.
And… healing can become another arena in which we relate to ourselves as a problem to solve.
You know you’re doing this when you hear yourself saying:
“If I can determine what is wrong with me, perhaps I can finally fix it.”
What if nothing is fundamentally wrong with you?
What if your next move is not about becoming more proficient at repairing yourself, but about increasing your capacity to inhabit, celebrate and enjoy the life you already have?
Healing, as I have come to understand it, expands our capacity.
Our capacity to feel without being overtaken by everything we feel.
To receive love without immediately bracing against its possible loss.
To experience joy without waiting for something terrible to follow.
To remain present during discomfort.
To hold grief and gratitude at the same time.
To stay connected to ourselves when someone disagrees with us.
To risk wanting more - not only more accomplishment, but more intimacy, beauty, pleasure, meaning and aliveness.
Healing is not the final destination.
It helps us become more available for life.
What Is Life Asking of You Now?
My relationship with those four words continues to evolve.
At twenty-four, YES meant staying alive.
Later, it meant recognizing where survival had become self-abandonment and where I had begun disappearing from my own life.
Now, it means belonging to myself deeply enough to participate consciously in the life that is mine.
I suspect the invitation will continue changing as I do.
Perhaps this is true for you too?
Saying YES to your life does not require you to know exactly where the road will lead. It does not require certainty, fearlessness or a perfectly articulated plan.
It asks for your participation.
Your presence.
Your willingness to notice what is calling you forward - and what may need to be released so that you can respond with clarity, confidence and curiosity.
So, I leave you with the questions that have become increasingly alive for me:
Where are you surviving skillfully but no longer living fully?
What form of protection may have completed its original assignment?
Where might you still be abandoning - or slowly disappearing from - yourself?
What is life asking you to say YES to now?
What clear NO might make that YES possible?
And, perhaps most important:
What would it mean to say YES not only to your life, but to yourself?
What might that require of you?
And what might you be willing to do about that, right now?
Love,
Dori
A Few Questions About Saying YES to Your Life
What does it mean to say YES to your life?
Saying YES to your life means choosing conscious participation rather than merely moving through familiar roles, responsibilities and survival patterns. It means remaining in relationship with yourself and becoming increasingly available for truth, love, grief, joy, choice and possibility.
Can saying YES to your life require saying no?
Yes. A meaningful YES often depends upon a discerning NO. Saying YES to your life may require declining expectations, relationships, habits or responsibilities that cause you to abandon yourself, disappear from your own life or diminish your capacity to live fully.
How do we move from surviving to thriving?
The movement begins by honoring the strategies that helped us survive while noticing where they now limit intimacy, rest, joy, authentic expression, self-trust or aliveness. Thriving develops as we build the capacity to remain present, listen to ourselves and make choices from current truth rather than allowing old protections to make every decision for us.
What does personal sovereignty mean?
Personal sovereignty is the capacity to belong to yourself and remain connected to your own knowing, values and agency while participating fully in relationships and responsibilities. It is not independence from others or control over life. It is the ability to remain in relationship with yourself as you meet life consciously and make discerning choices.