God Says Yes To Me

by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

 

I heard this poem the other day and was asked, “Where is God telling you YES in your life?”

At first, I thought there’s a lot of YES in my life! My life is chock-full of creativity and projects to work on, fulfilling relationships and questions to ponder, experiences to taste. Daily, I am faced with challenges that nudge or sometimes shove along my growth and transformation intellectually, emotionally, vocationally, and spiritually.

The thing is, I don’t know that it’s G-d who tells me YES. God IS yes. God is one big YES! It’s my responsibility to respond affirmatively. It’s my responsibility to decide if I’m ready, capable, and willing to take on what life presents to me and if I’m motivated to pursue something beyond obstacles that arise.

In all honesty, I know that, sometimes, I say YES too much! There are so many things I want to do! There are so many things I want to experience! There are so many things I want to, at least, TRY!

But, what does that do to my YES?

A few summers ago, I took a life-changing class from an energy healer, Elisa Novick (check out her website here). One of many things that has stuck with me all this time is this:

Elisa asked us, “If you had ten opportunities to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ how many times will you say ‘yes’?” Most of us in the class responded seven to ten times.

Elisa replied, “There’s a tendency in New Age communities to think that we should say ‘Say yes to life, say yes to everything!’ But, what does that do to your ‘yes’? What happens to your energy if it’s spread between all of those yeses? Now, imagine what happens to your energy if you say ‘yes’ only once or twice? Imagine how strong your ‘yes’ will be then!”

Her point was that our energy can become weak and diffused if we say yes too much. This is an important lesson for someone like me who wants to do everything and has a tendency to burn out. Of course, I’m not the only one affected. I know there are times when a project I worked on could have been better if I had been able to give 100% instead of 89%.

Elisa spent much of the class leading us in exercises to strengthen our energy fields so that we wouldn’t “leak” and give too much energy away to others or, conversely, allow ourselves to be susceptible to taking on the energy of others. This is an important lesson in setting energetic boundaries in our interpersonal interactions. We don’t have to take on the emotional baggage of anyone else. We can be empathic and maintain our energetic integrity.

This is probably a blog for another time, but I would argue that I’ve become more empathic because of lessons like Elisa’s as well as learning about conscious communication. Both of these are ongoing practices of mine.