On Saying Yes to Life
It's hard to say a full, complete Yes to life on earth, just as it is. In fact, most people never do. Yet this refusal to say Yes to life has many consequences. It means that we do not and cannot fully say Yes to ourselves, since we are a part of life. It robs us of the deep peacefulness that comes from aligning ourselves to the larger movements of the universe. And it diminishes our power, our ability to manifest changes in our lives. After all, how powerful can we be when we’re pitting our small human fists against the much larger body of the world?
Essentially, when we do not say Yes to life -- to the great stream of energy which contains us, and which we contain -- we condemn ourselves to living a kind of half-life in which we must always remain frustrated and at odds. Since we are a part of life, there is no way for us to be at odds with life without also being at odds with ourselves.
We often have misconceptions about what it would mean to say Yes to life. For instance, we might imagine that saying Yes to life would mean saying Yes to war, rape, child molestation, concentration camps, and torture, as well as to many smaller acts of harm. If our childhoods were abusive, we may think that saying Yes to life also means saying Yes to whatever abuse we received.
It’s understandable and even appropriate that we don’t want to grant approval to these kinds of phenomena. They do not deserve our approval. And yet, these disturbing phenomena do exist on earth. In fact, the emotional patterns they stem from exist within us, as well. So by attempting to separate ourselves internally from “sin” or abuse, in the very act of separation itself, we are also separating ourselves from ourselves, from life, and from love. Because the essence of love is non-separation, connection, embracing of all apparent conditions and contradictions, any separation, any act of rejection or judgment, distances us from love. This means that the remedy for the terrible problem of separation -- and for its terrible consequences -- is, and can only be, love.
When we respond to horrors with hatred, resistance or refusal, we fill ourselves with the energies of hatred, resistance or refusal – and then those energies flow from us out into the world. When we respond with judgment, we are filled with judgment, and that judgment flows through us and adds to the heavy load of judgment already present in the world. And then not only the "outer world" that we see around us, but also the inner world we experience, becomes very bleak. Often, then, we become so cramped inside, in response to that bleakness, that very little life force can find its way in to soothe us, illuminate, teach, enliven and inspire us. Thus we condemn ourselves to live internally in the very state of non-love which we deplore in the outer world.
This is one reason why people who devote their lives to "service," to "working for good," sometimes grow so cynical and despairing. Over time, so much judgment and resistance to what is “wrong” in the world becomes braided into their beings, as part of their effort to do “right.” On one level, they are perceiving things accurately. From the human perspective, there is a great deal that is wrong in the world. And of course, despite the greatest effort anyone can make, the wrongs of the world continue unceasingly. Unfortunately, through judgment and resistance, people actually add more fuel to the burning fire they had hoped to help put out. The energy of condemnation is a boomerang; it condemns both "subject" and "object," those who condemn as much as that which is the target of that condemnation. Hatred, judgment, resistance and condemnation are cognitive and energetic states that are essentially anti-life. No stance that is anti-life can truly work in favor of life. It is that simple.
Yet if resisting terrible things simply creates more of them, what is the alternative?
On a human level, it can be difficult to see the answer. Yet the answer is everywhere around us, all the time. The love of the sun, for instance, shines equally on everything. The love of the rain falls equally on all things, without judgment or discrimination. This kind of encompassing, non-discriminating love is available constantly, to all of us, from the unseen realm. This is the love that says Yes to all of us, no matter where and who we are, no matter what we have done or left undone in our lives. And receiving this Yes, experiencing the truth of it, can help us become more able to extend the same Yes both outwardly and inwardly, toward all we see and experience.
This Yes does not render us unable to change internal or external realities; on the contrary, it is the position from which we are most able to make change, because we are working with rather than against the forces of life.
-- Excerpted from Soul on Earth: Living and Loving Your Human Life, by Ruth L. Schwartz