Inspiration for today’s dance video: How many times have you said yes, when you meant no? Hearing your body yes and no is not always easy and to express it authentically, is a whole other challenge. To honour your body yes and no means to be in tune, to be self-disciplined without getting swayed by others. It requires practice. It requires scanning your body for your truth each time you make a decision. It’s having the ability to feel, hear, perceive and sense yourself.
So many people going through awakening & self-realisation are not yet sensitive to the body, to its subtle sensations. Most people have the volume of their body talk turned way down, are feeling numb and insensitive to the body’s signals. Especially if you have been a shape shifter to please other people’s expectations and desires. Often we make decisions based on somebody else’s desires and it becomes our modus operandi.
If we don’t know what we want, feel, is true for us, if we don’t feel safe asking for it, then we freeze and flow with what is polite and expected. This compliance is an old survival mechanism to not get kicked out of the community we are part of. When we don’t know how to feel safe and ask for our needs, we agree to something we don’t want and feel dishonoured, getting frustrated along the way.
Imagine saying yes to a project you don’t really want to engage in and it takes up all your own precious energy or you have sex with someone when you are really not in the mood. That’s giving your power away and you dismiss your own inner wisdom. That’s compromising. It takes trust, courage and self-respect, each time you honour your body. This is confidence building.
Start with the small things in life! What does your body say yes to eating, drinking, sleeping or creating?
As you build trust in the small yes’s in life, you grow your own capacity for bigger “yes dreams” to be lived. A yes usually comes through a body sensation, which oftentimes, a lot of people are numb to because the volume of their body talk is turned down or they have ignored those signals many times. Imagine turning that volume wayyyyyy up and actually listening to the signal. Turn it up to the maximum. Feel that yes. When you start cultivating the sensitivity, it is much easier to trust it.
Become aware when you agree to something and it is not a true yes, or when you are saying no but actually want to say yes. Take action and it builds further sensitivity. Building trust in your body, begins with trusting what you feel right now. Start honouring your yes and no more. Also, become aware when you are part of a group and you are just saying yes to something because the majority in the group is saying yes, but your own truth is a no. Honour your own sovereign yes and no’s and don’t be afraid to be the odd sheep out!
This is the starting point to develop greater sensitivity within yourself.
One of the first things going through self-realisation I had to learn was to get back into my body again and listen to its signals, so I could keep my own sense of balance. In the past I was way, way, way out of balance most of the time because I lived outside of my body and had little self-awareness. I would be swimming in everybody else’s flow.
I had to become aware of what my body is telling me it needs right now in terms of people, food, creations, sleep, self-love, etc. I had to learn to manage the people around me so I would only connect with them when it feels good and not out of “automatism” or “patterning”. I became more aware when something feels good and when it no longer feels good, starting from the use of technology, Social Media use, phone use…and when I needed time off.
I quickly became aware of the switch when something moved from feeling good to starting to get abusive. Sometimes that switch would happen very quick because I didn’t quite spot it at first, ignored it and then it would get louder and louder. I needed to pay attention to honour my own sense of balance, which I had to develop at first.
Another thing that was really challenging was to stay authentic. During self-realisation I literally felt like I was fragmented, my aspects had taken over the driver’s seat and were constantly shape shifting. I also hadn’t integrated my wisdom in real-time just yet. I still had chopped parts and pieces of myself off and wasn’t in full acceptance and honouring of my entire self. I wasn’t showing all of me, only parts of me that I thought were accepted.
I would still bend over and mould myself to other people’s needs. Wisdom was always coming after the experience vs. now it can be experienced simultaneous. I wasn’t able to be authentic real-time, I was always catching up on realisation hours/days/weeks later. Often times people told me they can’t trust me because I was still developing aspects to protect and shield myself from the truth, I was still moulding myself into shape for what I thought was expected of me in each moment. I was protecting rather than being “real” in “real-time”.
Being a people pleaser by nature in the past, I was also easily seduced by outside energies. I could see how outside energies started to work on me and I wanted to play into energy dynamics of others instead of staying true to myself. I had a real challenge to stick to my yes and no’s without being swayed by the other person, change my position to please someone else or play into their expectations.
Finally, I had to learn to be self-disciplined, meaning I had to learn to stick to my word and act on it, not to constantly twist my own truth for others. Trust me, it is a real art and discipline to master! Embodiment is key otherwise I would lose trust in myself and situations became highly confusing, self-abusive and I would start self-fragmenting again to please others. I lost myself many times in the outside world during self-realisation only to find myself eventually coming back to my own sense of balance again, but each time I returned I was able to stay home with my sense of self longer. With my Yes’s and No’s a little louder each time.
Dance Instructions: During today’s dance I am going to invite you to:
1) Feel your body throughout the whole dance
2) Feel how a yes feels in your body through dance
3) Feel how a no feels in your body through dance
Dance your own dance of integrity!
In the past, I have been quick to override my no and turned it into yes to please someone else. The closer you get to the truth, to the core of you, the more important it becomes to stay aligned with that truth. You are becoming more sensitive to yourself and other people, and it’s easy to mistake other people’s stuff as yours. It’s quite easy to get out of balance.
In order to stay true to yourself, you need to have a sense of alignment within yourself. An integrity within yourself. The ability to act on your intuition and knowingness. Once you have that within yourself, you can also have it with others in various situations i.e. work, playtime, sexy time, etc. Once consent and integrity are there and you can stick to your word, you trust yourself. Then people can also respect your “truth” and they can either meet you in your truth, or not.
Be prepared to lose people every time you speak your truth and know that this is part of life.
Let’s see if you can stay connected to your body throughout the whole dance.
I’ll challenge you 🙂
The entire full length dance video is included in the Sensual Dance Package available here:
