Have you ever put yourself in a situation where you said YES, only to realize a few days, weeks or even months later that you actually wanted to say NO?
Most women have. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve experienced it, including just a few weeks ago.
In simple social situations, in the bedroom, and every space in between
+ Hearing our body’s YES (or NO) is not always easy…
+ And expressing it is a whole other challenge….
In this episode, we’re exploring 4 key factors impacting our ability to feel & honor our bodies to YES (and NO).
This is a really interesting inquiry for the woman who wants to honor her own desires and body MORE.
Why do so many of us say YES when we want to say no?
Why is it sometimes so hard to feel what’s really true for us?
The first factor we have to acknowledge is that so many of us are not sensitive to our body’s YES and her NO.
Our body is always speaking to us through subtle internal sensations.
It’s happening constantly.
Yet most of us have the volume turned down.
When it comes to FEELING the body’s yes or no the first big challenge we have is insensitivity.
I know in my life I’ve really been a chameleon – shape-shifting & changing my desires, my wants, my YES and my NO to suit who I’m around. Pleasing others & meeting their expectations of me.
And in this mode of operating, like many women, I lost the sensitivity to what my body truly wanted.
I over-laid so many other people’s expectations and desires over the top that my inner volume couldn’t be heard.
In the absence of a body-YES or a body-NO we find something ELSE begins to take over our decision making… Our default setting.
When we don’t know what we want, what we feel, what’s true for us or if we simply don’t feel safe asking for what we desire – for many of us our feminine default setting is to
+Contain ourselves
+ Freeze our inner experience an
+ Flow with what’s polite & what’s expected of us to be like.
Once upon a time, this kind of compliance was essential for our survival. When our ancestors were sitting around the fire, if we women were to rock the boat too much, if we were to voice that disruptive-YES, it might mean eviction from the tribe.
We’ve learnt it’s safer to comply, to play small, to be small, and to survive.
This pleasing-reflex is still deeply programmed into our survival brain and can become our default-reflex when we don’t really know what we want OR we don’t feel a deep sense of safety asking for it.
The side effect being (yes we are polite, and liked, and safe) but we’ve dishonored ourselves.
Sometimes without even realizing it, we’ve agreed to something we didn’t want out of shock or survival. We’ve consented to something that our body doesn’t want or need.
And sometimes when the volume on our body’s yes or no is turned down so softly, we might not even realize it.
It’s easy to become resentful, or frustrated in these situations.
Whether you found yourself saying YES to a friends invitation that you really wanted to say NO to.
Or whether you found yourself agreeing to intimate experiences that you realize years later, your body really wanted to say NO to.
It’s not easy to HEAR our body’s yes and no.
Which means it’s often impossible to honor that decision.
So we enter cycles of giving away our power, dishonoring ourselves, and wondering why we don’t know what we want, what we truly want for ourselves. Because if we’re not feeling the YES, what else are we missing from our deep inner wisdom?
Honoring our body’s YES and NO a critical step in honoring the body’s TRUE DESIRES. Because it builds trust.
When we can build up the courage and self-respect to say YES (or NO, whatever the case may be), and we find ourselves SAFE and still WELCOME in the tribe on the other side – we build trust that it’s okay to honor what my body wants.
That safety and confidence build and builds.
Until you are hearing your body’s YES and NO and TRUTH so powerfully, that it is total ease in your body.
I’ve seen this with so many of the women I’ve worked with from around that world. That as they build trust in the relatively small time, YES and NO’s, they build a capacity to take wild leaps in directions that they hadn’t even dreamed the wanted.
On a practical level, some of us may literally ‘hear the body’ audibly with a YES, NO. But not many of us will. It’s just as powerful if you sense, see, feel or know your body’s yes – our yes and our now can be communicated through the body any innumerable number of ways.
For me personally, it’s a FEELING that comes through me. A feeling that was once numb because I had its volume turned way, way down. But like you I’m interested in living & working as an embodied woman, so I’ve learnt to turn the volume up and cultivate the sensitivity to FEEL this YES, and NO.
And trust it.
So the question for you is:
Where are you not honoring your body’s YES/NO right now?
Where are you agreeing to something that’s not a true-YES?
Or where are you saying NO, that you really deeply want to say YES?
I’d love to hear that.
Claiming the YES and the NO that’s available to you here and now builds strength, stamina & trust in your body. It’s the portal to more depth & more power within you.
Let us know in the comments!
P.S For those of you ready to develop more capacity to feel your body, your first step is to develop sensitivity. This is exactly what the at home Primal Feminine Flow practice can help with. PFF is a short gentle embodiment movement practice designed to get you feeling more of the text of your body’s wisdom. You can find out more at www.jennaward.co/flow
