LETTING YOURSELF SAY YES
By Allison Wilner
It was a hot morning in August when I received the Egypt retreat announcement. As I read Deborah’s description, I felt a warm, vibrant energy and an undeniable knowing. I’m supposed to be on this trip.
Right on the heels of this knowing, my stomach immediately dropped. How would I pay for it? How would I arrange the time off at work during a busy season? What about international travel during COVID? I’m also mostly deaf and use a cochlear implant to hear. Trying to understand speech through masks made travel feel particularly daunting.
Going began to seem impossible. A ‘no’ tried to take hold as I pressed myself into a crowded subway train. As the train left 14th Street, I felt that initial ‘yes’ return strongly. It was still there somehow, in the midst of the fears, anchored into the base of my spine.
I did my best to relax into both my fear and the excitement of my yes. I felt my body begin to loosen as my thoughts shifted towards possibilities. Well, if I were to try to make this happen… where would I start?
I didn’t realize it then, but I see now that this experience was integral in teaching me about how polarity can expand us if we allow it to. How when we choose to consciously hold both our fears and our true desires, our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ or ‘not yet’, without trying to minimize or eradicate one or the other, we might begin to sense how vast and capacious we are. And from that wise place, we can begin to get curious about what might be possible.
The more I could let my ‘yes’ hold my fears and doubts, the more practical possibilities opened. There were times before I fully committed, and even after I had sent in the deposit, when I slipped into my ‘no,’ when it seemed ridiculous that I would even consider going. It required continually coming back to my center to navigate those tides of doubt.
On the day I left for the retreat, my fear was so intense all the way to JFK that I really questioned whether this was the right choice. I later came to understand that part of the terror I felt was because I was sensing how much transformation would come into my life as a result of this decision.
Holding back tears of panic, I made it through check in and went into a bathroom to breathe. I put a shaking hand to my heart to steady myself. Splashing some water on my face and then looking into the mirror, I was surprised to see, rather than panic, a clear steadiness in my eyes.
I flashed back to the moment right before I communicated my decision to end a relationship. I was shaking in another bathroom, this time in my apartment. I looked into my eyes and felt the steely grace of my intuition flow forward to meet my gaze. You know it is time. You know what you must do. You don’t know what is on the other side, but I do. And it is the next step of your becoming. I thought, If I can’t trust this part of myself, I can’t trust life. I can’t trust love. I can’t trust myself. And I don’t want to live that way.
I felt that same strength come through again as I met my eyes in the airport bathroom. It did not take away my terror. But there was something else in the room with me now. My intuition. My knowing. Steady ground.
Element Retreat 2022
I boarded the flight and strapped my seatbelt tight over my hips, afraid I might stand up and run off the plane. I breathed. I held my own hands, one in the other, and squeezed.
I pictured walking off the plane and returning to my apartment, having said no to the trip at the last minute. I felt my life deflate around me like a popped balloon, all of the aliveness and possibility available to me in going on this trip just evaporating. It was the safer choice, but it was a lifeless one. While imagining walking off the plane brought some relief to my terror, it also felt like trying to fit myself back into a life and an identity that had already expired.
As the plane taxied to the runway and then took off, I felt that knife edge where fear and excitement are almost indistinguishable. I felt my life asking me, Will you take my hand? Will you trust me?
Did the fear evaporate? No. But I felt the energy of adventure, the beautiful possibilities of the unknown there with me, alongside it. And I realized that through my willingness to experience that terror, I had become big enough to be with the twists and turns of my emotional experience without backing out of my truth. And this choice was part of a growing chorus of yesses to the life that was calling me forward.
The trip itself, the sacred sites we visited and the relationships that bloomed from it, brought endless blessings into my life. But the biggest one came before I left. And that was meeting and learning how to trust even more deeply the steady and true compass of my own heart.
There is a common quote about how it’s not about the destination, but rather who you become along the way, and this experience really gave me an embodied understanding of the wisdom of this teaching. Because what made the truly life-changing post-retreat transformation that I went through possible was the trust in myself that I had built through the process of saying yes.
I went to Egypt to experience the sacred sites, and what I came to understand was that my own body, my own words, and my own voice are the sacredness that I had been seeking. This internal sacred space was what I leaned into when I made the decision to leave my job five months later, and the same part of me that I relied on to guide my departure from NYC, my home for seventeen years.
My life was asking me to become who I needed to be to hold a bigger vision, to become the person who could say yes to adventure, who could hold space for my fear, and make room for the growing courage I needed to create a new life for myself.
At the core of this process was an inner dialogue that put me in touch with the depth of some of my oldest fears and the strength that comes from becoming the person who can meet those fears with compassion and not yield to them. No one from the outside could empower or convince me. This strength had to be sourced from within. And because I built this foundation within myself, I can rely on it as a true compass for guiding the choices that continue to support the unfolding of my path.
