Yes and No

Recently, I heard a quote that really resonated with me, and I’ll paraphrase it here: “If someone asks you to do something and your response isn’t immediately, ‘Hell, yeah!’ then it’s probably ‘No, thank you; not this time.’”

I know I’m not the only one to have overcommitted myself, whether out of a sense of duty or out of genuine interest and desire to contribute or be involved in something. We all bite off more than we can chew from time to time, though a challenging task for me has been to determine, beforehand, what is enough and when to say “enough is enough.” In filling our responsibility cup, we have to be wary of trying to hold more than we can handle; we don’t want that cup spilling over into an unmanageable and costly mess.

So lately I’ve been returning to the above quote each time I need to decide whether to invest my time in something new. We can rationalize in our heads the pros and cons of any decision until each choice looks right. We can let our hearts have a say and find ourselves feeling compassion, desire, even passion for whatever is seeking our time and energy. Most useful in these decisions, though, is our intuition, which is guided by the third chakra (between the eyebrows) but which is also rooted firmly in the “gut,” so to speak. That’s why our language is full of phrases that speak to the importance of this belly center as a seat of our intuition; we feel a “gut instinct,” and people might ask us, “What does your gut tell you?” In the chakra system, this navel center is the place where power, autonomy, will, energy, and fire reside.

That “Hell, yeah” resonates from the belly, beyond thinking and rationalization. Likewise, the “No, thank you; not this time” can be felt as a quietness in the belly, when that resounding affirmation isn’t there. So try this the next time you have a decision to make: quiet your mind’s judgments, feel your breath growing deep, and draw your awareness to your belly. Ask your question. Then feel the answer.