Tracking Yes - The 5 Essential Skills
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Please enjoy this guide to “The 5 Essential Skills of Tracking Yes”, a transformative way of relating to life and creating expansive possibilities with whatever life sends your way.
If you practice these steps whenever you feel off balance, they will restore you to a grounded sense of yourself and an emodied connection with your natural curiosity, wisdom and power.
And that’s when the magic happens.
THE STEPS
There are infinite ways you can bring the energy of yes to meet your direct experience, but here are the key touchstones:
1) Full permission
Instead of trying to push it away, or declaring, “I don’t like this” or “I don’t want to feel this way”—let yourself have your experience, completely unedited.
Let it have its voice in you, including all the emotions, stories and opinions that are rising up.
This is the first yes—everything gets to be here.
2) Unconditional friendliness
See if you can meet what’s here with an open, non-judgmental heart. Notice where there’s resistance to your experience—what does that feel like? Moment by moment, open to what’s happening, exactly as it is.
Find the sweet spot where there’s nothing to change, nothing to fix, no ‘problem’ to solve.
This is a practice of engaged allowing and noticing—while not following the compulsion to DO something about it.
3) Love and Curiosity
Love does not mean convincing yourself that you LOVE what’s happening—that’s a spiritual bypass. Love means bringing your full attention to how you’re responding. It’s a process of becoming intimate with your experience.
Curiosity is the opposite of judging and fixing. It’s wanting to know more of something from a place of love.
Instead of focusing on what you don’t like—look for what’s going on with you that has you not like it.
And then get curious about that.
Example: you wake up feeling anxious - can you bring your full presence to this—instead of trying to get distance from it? Are you able to feel what you’re feeling without attaching to your story or opinion about it?
Tricky tricky this one.
Sometimes you have to clear these first three steps fully before you’re ready to open to the next two:
4) Wisdom and Magic
Life always presents you with the opportunity to perceive and receive what is here in addition to whatever you’re currently feeling and thinking about. The specific experience you’re having is a part of your world, but not the whole of it.
Look for the ways you are supported, empowered, and have what you need to meet exactly this thing.
Your community—those who love you and care about your well-being
The wisdom you’ve received—from others and from your own direct experience
Your talents, strengths and skills
Your creativity and resourcefulness
A belief that life/the universe is for you. (If you don’t think so—consider trying it on for a week or two and see if it gives you a bit more breathing room.)
Expand the space by tapping in to gratitude. What are you appreciative of and thankful for in this moment—not in spite of, but along with, the challenge you’re facing.
Track the through-line to magic.
What’s here that’s working? Find one thing—it’s an ally.
Finally, use your wisdom to identify your disempowered beliefs around this experience, and be willing to challenge them. This requires courage. Our limiting beliefs are created as a protection strategy, but ultimately they keep us stuck in a story of struggle and powerlessness.
5) Play
Play is one of your most valuable assets. You are a naturally creative being, and the spirit of play connects you to your creative nature.
Play takes you out of past/future thinking and brings you into the present moment.
When we’re resisting, judging or complaining, we’re focused on what we want to be different, rather than being in an engaged, open relationship with what’s here now.
You can feel hooked, AND ask yourself empowered questions:
What do I want to make of this?
What’s trying to get my attention?
What’s the opportunity here for connection with myself, with life, with others?
What do I notice if I don’t actually need things to be different right now?
When you’re willing to challenge the belief that you are powerless in the face of circumstances, you start creating your experience from the inside out. You’re choosing to see life as an ally. Once this happens you’re in the game and on the adventure.
Adventure has inherent risks and challenges—but you get to decide how to meet them.
You can align with fear and worry that things might not work out—or you can reach deep and find your curious, kind self and embody the wise warrior you are, courageously navigating your own remarkable journey.
You can trust yourself to figure this out. How do you know? Because you have figured out every single thing that has ever happened to (for) you up to now. You have always been co-creating with all that has come your way.
Through conscious attention to your experience and how you’re showing up for it, you come to trust that you’re always in a loving partnership with the intelligence of life.
Now friend, you’re Tracking Yes.
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