154 Enjoying Yes

The practice of Awakening is that is saying Yes to your Self and letting everything else go.  When you experience the qualities of your Being, i.e., Love, Peace, Joy, Fulfillment, Happiness, etc. for any reason during your day, say Yes and let Your energy flow.  When anything other than these qualities of your Being come up, let them go.  Let them expend their energy, unwind, start to release, look around and notice all is well now, soak up this direct experience of safety and wellness, melt, and then affirm your truth in the moment....what you are truly feeling.  "I am Happiness, or I am Peace, or I am Joy, etc."  This "Yes" practice supports Clearly flowing with life rather than reacting against triggered emotions, thoughts and perceptions. Enjoy the flow of Yes!

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

William: 0:00

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hello, this is William Cooper. I trust you're doing well today. This is a practice to support your awakening and it's a very simple practice. It's simply saying yes. Yes to yourself. Yes to the beauty of yourself. Yes to the exquisite qualities of your being, love, peace, well-being, joy, happiness. Saying yes whenever you feel a flow of these qualities, love, peace, joy, and happiness within. They're all flowing from your being like a light. So say yes whenever you feel them, even if it's just a little bit. Say yes. Enjoy. That's who you are. Saying yes as you express yourself inside. You know, even when you treat yourself poorly, when you beat yourself up, why do you do that? It's not nice. It's maladaptive. You do it because you love yourself, right? You push yourself so hard and beat yourself up so that you meet a deadline. Why? Because you love yourself and you want to get a raise, or you want to do well at your job, or you promised that you would get the task done. So you beat yourself up oddly and certainly maladaptively because you love yourself. Or if you put yourself down, maybe you want to be a part of a group and they look at life a certain way, which requires you to beat yourself up. So why do you do that? Because you love yourself. On and on and on. Everything you do, you do because you love yourself. But sometimes the way that we treat ourselves is maladaptive. So let's let that go. In this practice, we're going to say yes to our inner beauty, our inner peace, our inner well-being, and we're going to let everything else go. The maladaptive ways of treating ourselves. Hang on to the fact that we love ourselves, but let go of everything else. The maladaptive ways that we're expressing it, perhaps. To start, let's look at how others have described you, your essence, your true self, your true being, without the maladaptive overlay and distraction. The kingdom of heaven is within you. Christianity. By understanding the self, all the universe is known. Hinduism. That's from the Upanishads. God dwells within you. Yoga. Atman, which is your individual consciousness, and Brahman, which is universal consciousness, are one. That's from the Vedanta, which is the core of the Vedas, the deepest spiritual knowledge in Hinduism. Look within. You are the Buddha. Buddhism, of course. Heaven, earth, and human are of one body. Neo-Confucianism. Those who know themselves know their God. Islam. Knowing yourself is knowing the Tao. Taoism. The soul is the embodiment of the divine within. Judaism. There is that of God in every person, the inner light. Quakerism. Again, from Christianity, from Galatians 5.22, the fruits of the spirit, which is the same as your beingness. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are the qualities of you, your being. So, you say yes when you feel any of these qualities flowing within you. Even if it's just a little bit, it's all coming from being. Say yes. Let them flow. Even if they start with just a little flow, say yes. Let them flow. Encourage yourself to let your true self flow. Let everything else go. This is your practice. Say yes. And anything that's not that, you let it go. That's the path of awakening. The path of yes. Something to be aware of, if you're not already, is that there are two kinds of thoughts and memories. There are explicit thoughts, memories, and emotions. Those are the ones that are obvious. You see them. You feel them. And there's another category, which are implicit thoughts, memories, and emotions. You don't see them. They're so deep. They're like the lenses we look through. When you look through sunglasses, if you've had them on all your life, even though they color the world green or yellow, you don't notice it. You just think the world is that way. Do you ever wake up worried, or thinking incessantly, or frustrated, or unfulfilled, or anything that's other than peace, love, happiness, and relaxation? Perhaps you wake up tense and stressed, worried. Well, those are implicit thoughts, memories, and emotions. And just like you let go of everything that's not love, joy, and peace, it's good to be aware that you can also let go of these implicit thoughts, memories, and emotions. Just like you do with the explicit ones. You can watch them. You can let them expend their energy without believing them, without diving into them. You just let them unwind. You look around and notice everything actually is okay. Breathe in. Let them receive that well-being. And slowly, they begin to fall apart. Because you don't jump into them, you've heard the phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together. Well, you're not jumping into them, so they're no longer wiring together. They fall apart. And as they fall apart, you can actually aid the rewiring of your neurobiology by affirming what is actually true. Whatever you're experiencing flowing within you, you can affirm it. I am happiness, or I am love, or I am light. I am peace. When you affirm these truths, they help your flow continue because you'll have crosswinds of the old habits. I am hurt. I am unfulfilled. I am worried. I am anxious. You'll hear echoes of that in your nervous system. So as you continue to rewire, you explicitly state your yes flow, your truth. I am peace. I am love. I am well-being. I am happiness. Whatever you're feeling, whatever you feel inside, express it in these truthful affirmations. You could do that all through the day as it suits you. That supports your rewiring, your awakening. That implicit lens that you used to look through is no longer there. So now there's only clarity, peace, love, and joy. You flow rather than react through looking through some faulty lens that creates delusions, almost like you're living life through a kaleidoscope. You think it's real, but it's really not. Instead, now the kaleidoscope is gone and you live life connected. You connect in love, peace, and well-being. That's the path of awakening. So your practice is simply to say yes to everything that's good, to just say yes, and to enjoy beauty, love, peace. When a flicker comes up in you of happiness or love or peace, just say yes and enjoy it. Take a breath. And when anything that's not that, when tension, stress, anger come up or are triggered, let them flow out. Let them go. If you'd like a little bit more support and explanation of this process, I would start at podcast number one and work your way forward. In these podcasts, I've taken what I found to be the most effective process over my last 50 years, and I put them in these podcasts step-by-step intentionally to support our paths of awakening. I hope you enjoy them. And if there's anything that doesn't resonate, please just disregard. Okay. I trust you have a good day and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Take care.