The oldest, shortest words—“yes” and “no”—are those which require the most thought.
PYTHAGORAS
There are only two ways we show up on our mat and in life: as a yes, or as a no. Yes carries the energy of possibility; no carries the energy of resistance. Yes expresses your willingness to claim your power and use it to discover the real meaning of commitment. Yes invites you to expand and to come into your full creative expression. It opens you up and affirms your willingness to be teachable when you don’t have the know-how to get where you want to go. Yes affirms the existence of a destination in the practice beyond mere physical gain.
No shows up with very different energy. It is closed, rigid, and often stubborn. It takes the form of excuses, complaints, procrastination, resistance, frustration, and so on. No impedes, or flat-out stops you in your tracks.
You are always in a dance of yes and no. Being a yes for anything automatically makes you a no for something else. In fact, if we cannot point to what we are saying no to, then our yes means nothing. If you are a yes for peace, you are a no for war. If you are a yes for creating vibrancy and health in your body, you are a no for ingesting junk food, doing drugs, and so on. If you are a yes for full acceptance in your relationship, you are a no for criticizing and trying to change the person you love. If you are a yes for growth, you are a no for procrastination and stagnation.
Looking at this from the other side of the lens, we see that saying no is the action of saying yes to something else. In my younger days I was a no for yoga. I would not have it, would not practice it; my yes was for defying everything my father wanted me to do. In my youth, my consequence for any misbehaving or poor grades at school was that I would have to attend my parents’ yoga classes, the one thing I resisted most. While in their classes, I mostly couldn’t wait for every pose and every part of the class to be over. I would count the breaths and the minutes, willing time to move faster. Being a no for yoga bound me to time while in the practice and locked in a steady mantra of “Is this over yet?”
I’ve since come to learn that in contrast to no, yes allows for a sense of timelessness and the joy of being fully in my experience. In my early twenties, while on a meditation and yoga retreat at my parents’ retreat center on the beach in Central America, I experienced the unique and profound result of the practice. I felt a strong, energetic warmth emerge up from my solar plexus and take me into a state of feeling completely carefree, safe, and wholly awake and aware. That fundamental shift in my being altered my life forever. It was like I really got the practice in body and being. From that moment, saying yes to the practice was a natural expression for me.
I share this with you to invite you to engage in your own inquiry of “What am I a yes for in my practice?” and “What do I refuse and say no to?” Or, to put it another way, “How am I showing up on my mat and in my life?”
Yes and no take the form of emotional energy, and emotions contain vibrations. That sounds esoteric, I know, but in your body and your being, you can feel it as something tangible. Think about when you’re around someone who is angry; you can feel that vibration of rage, can’t you? Similarly, someone who is happy gives off a different kind of vibration, radiating a sense of lightness and joy. These different vibrations of yes and no have an impact on your body, and on your energetic capacity to support or block what you’re up to in the pose and in your life.
Emotional vibrations fuel our actions. In other words, being a yes or being a no will dictate what you do or don’t do. Consider that when you are inspired by the possibility of something, your body vibrates at the perfect frequency to support you in achieving the thing that inspires you. The energetic vibration of yes carries the emotional energy of enthusiasm, which translates into action. You are naturally moved and inspired to create and achieve.
An important personal discovery for me was when I got clear that the only way I could impact my practice was through action. The pose does not care what I intend, how committed I am, how I feel, or what I think, and it certainly has no interest in what I like and don’t like. Take a look and see for yourself that poses only really evolve for you when you act into what you want to create. When you are a yes for what’s possible in your practice, you will act. And out of that action, you will expand and create a new physical reality.
My 15-year-old son, Malachi, participated in a Level One teacher training I led in Arizona. After the training, he was all lit up about what was possible in his yoga practice. On our first day home, he said to me, “Dad, I haven’t tried it yet, but do you think I could press from Crow Pose into handstand?” I responded, “Be a yes for it and see what happens.”
Malachi smiled, set his hands on the floor right in the middle of our living room, and took Crow Pose . . . then pressed straight up into handstand! He didn’t ask how to do it; he asked, “Can I do it?” and the answer was a resounding YES. Regardless of whether he was able to achieve handstand from Crow Pose or not, he empowered himself to be a participating player instead of a spectator to his own experience.
You may want to rise up into handstand from crow, or silently jump forward from Chaturanga, and that desire is great. It matters. But it is only half the game. The other half is being a YES—fully, wholly, and honestly—for what you are aiming for. To aim true in the pose is to be a yes for the results you want. It’s not magic. You won’t rise up into a perfect handstand simply through embodying the energy of yes, but you will find that being a yes inspires you to take the actions needed to move from where you are to where you want to go.
Those who fall into the trap of people pleasing tend to say yes when they really want to say no. In the practice of yoga asana, we can try authentically saying yes to what we want. I call this aiming true. Carl Jung said that all consciousness begins with an act of disobedience. Our dignity is found in our ability to say no to the things we don’t want—to disobey the urge to say yes when we really want to say no—and open the door to saying yes to pursuing our true desires.
Today, on your mat, are you a yes for deep, rhythmic breath (called ujjayi), or a no? If you are a yes, it will enable your breath to carry you with ease. Are you a yes for a fixed, steady gaze (drishti) or a no? If you are a yes, it will give you the action of focusing your gaze with intent and fire. Are you a yes for lightness and play on your mat, or a no? If you are a yes, your practice will be buoyed by joy.
It’s important to know where your inner compass is pointing; this is how you consciously map your path. If you don’t have it set to say no to resistance and complaints, then by default you may inevitably say yes to procrastination. If you’ve been saying yes to procrastination, it’s important to get to the cost. Is procrastinating getting on your mat to practice yoga or meditation costing you the vitality, vibrancy, and health you want? Remember, to be a yes is to act.
Saying yes to the practice of saying no to the habits and thoughts that no longer serve you becomes a great source of strength and confidence.
In any pose, I’m always dealing with what is actually happening in my physical body. I can accept and empower what is so about my body or I can oppose and resist what’s happening. Being for your body exactly as it is, and as it is not, is acceptance. The energy of yes is acceptance. Saying yes to accepting how things are and how they are not is a choice you make moment-to-moment, breath by breath. You can choose to be a yes for exactly how the pose is and how it is not, or you can oppose and resist. Yes holds the space for acceptance, and acceptance is the place from which you empower your body to generate some new result in the pose.
Being a no for what is happening in your body is opposition. Opposition produces tension in your body and manifests as rigidity in the pose, both physical and emotional. Ordinarily, if we experience strong sensations or physical limitations, we oppose what’s happening in our body. To be against something is to be in reaction to it. In our body we experience that as stress, discomfort, contraction, and shortness of breath. We don’t like that our bodies won’t or can’t do as we want, and emotionally, that leaves us with complaints, frustration, and resentment.
I’ve met many people who have faced serious health challenges and crises. Most went through an initial period of being angry, resentful, or even in downright denial about their illness—all perfectly understandable reactions. But the ones who I am always most amazed by are the ones who get to the idea that resisting what is so is actually causing them greater emotional suffering than the illness itself. Accepting what was going on allowed them to flow with the new demands of their bodies in a much more empowered way.
Acceptance of what is and is not happening—in a pose as in life—creates a mood of peace. As you engage in the dance of yes and no in the pose, you will discover that the muscles and the mood of your body becomes flexible and malleable in the energetic vibration of yes, and the experience of rigidity and unneeded hardness will begin to dissolve like ice in the warm sun.
Every student has his or her no pose. Maybe even more than one. You know your no pose: it’s the one that makes you inwardly groan when the teacher calls it out, and likely leads you to automatically think, Ugh . . . I don’t want to . . . I can’t do this one.
But you actually don’t know for sure that you can’t do that pose. What you’ve come up against isn’t necessarily a physical limitation. Resistance can be very deceiving behind the many masks it wears. Maybe you haven’t been able to do that pose in the past, but what about today? The yogis say you can never step into the same river twice, because the current is always shifting and changing. You’ve never stepped into this exact river before today. Not with this body, not with today’s particular energy, with the specific number of bites of breakfast in your belly, with the earth tipped on its exact axis. Perhaps up until now you haven’t had a breakthrough in this pose, but that was then. What’s possible today?
Every pose is a new opportunity, each and every time. All the work you’ve done up until now has been to lead you to this precise moment, to face precisely what you’re facing. Yoga is a dance of dealing with what is, and allowing yourself to fully experience whatever you’re experiencing right here, in the moment. In life, we so often resist what we don’t like or don’t want to do. Here, on your mat, is a safe opportunity to see what’s on the other side of that. Physical asana is a measure of some higher possibility.
Put your attention on what you want to have happen and be for it, and watch the magic unfold.
What are you a yes for today?
You want to balance a practice that works with a practice that counts. The challenge is to recognize that just because you’ve gotten your practice to a place that works for you emotionally and physically doesn’t necessarily mean that it matters. A practice that matters is tied to something deeper: the powerful, spiritual, alive energy of yes.
The only two forces at work in a pose are aliveness and patterns that block our aliveness. As patterns are dissolved and experienced out, our body becomes clearer and the flow from pose to pose begins to make more sense. It’s funny, but when the more alive you emerges from behind the smokescreen of all those patterns of resistance (created by the energy of no) and begins to participate in the practice with resolution and directed focus of being a yes, the practice really does take on a purpose. It all somehow makes sense in a fantastic way.
There is no use searching externally for purpose, or trying to “pull it in.” It is already available right here in the pose. Just focus on clearing out and letting go of what is between you and aliveness: your energy of no. Aliveness and purpose are practically the same thing and they are both created by yes. The purpose is greater aliveness, so every time we create greater aliveness, the purpose of the practice is being served.
The answer to how we create greater aliveness in our bodies and in our lives is always yes.