#529: Saying No Creates Space for Your Yes

0:00We have to start to have reverence and appreciation for the new awarenesses because if we reject the awareness, we reject the wisdom that's inherently trying to change us. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Markov's podcast. Today we are hitting you with a solo episode. So I'm going to share with you some things that I've read that have really just gone, you know, my mind just being blown through them and bringing on witnesses to my behavior, my just in self-reflection, just brought up things that I want to share with you. And, you know, I think often the things we're processing are kind of being processed collectively. So I hope that in sharing these things, it offers you some insights about your own circumstances, your own behaviors, your own way of being in the world and that we can all move together towards creating a more loving, open, boundary, secure space. One of the things that we don't know about boundaries or

1:00just, you know, boundaries around ourselves, which isn't just about keeping bad things out, but it's actually about bringing good things in. And when we can actually sit with the truth of that, that boundaries are just so important because they protect your purpose, they guide your purpose, they protect your being, they also protect people you're in relationship with, they're being. Recently, I was reading this book from Rachel Maddox, that's called Rebloom. And so we're going to put the link in the show notes for it. It's absolutely incredible. And in one of the chapters on boundaries that I was reading, I was just like, damn, this is good. And the line was, your medicine isn't medicinal, if it isn't also serving you. God, like sit with that one, right? Your medicine isn't medicinal, if it isn't also serving you. Gosh, I could think about that on many layers, like as a teacher, as someone who shares, like if I'm sharing about medicine like boundaries,

2:02how are mine? If I'm offering medicine in my relationships or to the world, am I offering medicine to myself? And in the last couple months, especially, I've really just come to realize that I don't guard my time with things that are just like total fuck yeses. You know, it's almost like we become conditioned. And it's almost like I've awakened to this before. And then I sort of go down, maybe old slippery paths or things that are just not, I'm not aware of yet. I always think whenever we might think we go backwards or relapse or whatever that is, it's still just a slippery point that I've allowed more in, like an old way of being is still there that as you continue to up level, as you continue to grow and take up more space. And just there's always like there will be things that you just haven't seen yet. And that's what the gift of awareness of the pain of recognition that, oh fuck, I let that shit slip or I let that boundary go or I haven't really prioritized myself or my time and look how I feel now as a cost of continuing to allow that to go,

3:07knowing there were feelings coming up like, oh, this doesn't, I don't know if this is a line, I'm not sure. Well, now you in hindsight can look back and go, fuck, I am sure, fuck. And I was talking to a friend today about how one of the hardest parts of awareness is we look back, let's say, relationally. And I go, oh, man, I could have done this. I could have, I didn't accept the love that I wanted. I didn't, you know, if I had just done this differently and we end up in this prison of regret. And what happens is is that we now are made aware of a way we could have been and we're only aware of the way we could have been because of what we did. So like the thing that we regret not doing differently, we only know that we would do differently because we didn't do it the way we now know we could. Do you see that? It's kind of a mind fuck because what we desperately want to change, we only know we need to change because of what we know from not doing it the way we want to now. I hope that makes fucking sense because I get it, but I'm like, oh, cross the T,

4:12do the, yeah, to get it, like we have to start to have a reverence and appreciation for the new awarenesses because if we reject the awareness, we reject the wisdom that's inherently trying to change us. So if instead, if I have that shame about something that's different or possible or a choice that I wish I could make, I have to sit with it and let it, and I'm going to share some of my Francis Weller's words, as Francis Weller would say, let it cook you, right? Any firmings say that before. So how do we do that, right? Like the awareness of a sentence like you're, you're medicine is not medicinal if it isn't also serving you. If you're a people pleaser, if you're someone who puts people ahead of you, if you're always about taking care of everyone else, your medicine is not medicinal if it's not serving you, right? Like how can you possibly show up for everybody and not yourself? Gosh, to like recognize how that feels for you and what you know, what we need in that

5:15recognition of like, fuck yes, like I'm making this medicinal, this medicinal for me too. And that, I've just felt that of men. You can't call it medicine if you're not living it, if you're not breathing it, if you're not inhaling it, if you're not whatever, you know, injecting it. And you're in your being, being with the same things we teach, the things we tell our kids to do, the things we, we want to model, we must be an integrity with that. And yeah, just recognizing that. And there's another line from the book where she says, embodying the tension of our know is the magical heat that alchemizes space for our yes. That beautiful, embodying the tension of our know. There is such tension in a no. Maybe we're afraid of disappointing, maybe we've never claimed our needs ourselves. So there's such tension in the no. And so that tension actually is the magical

6:18heat that alchemizes space for our yes. So in sang no and the tension of it, the like fear of it, the there is heat that actually creates space for our yes. Oh, oh, oh, right. I mean, that's beautiful. And what it really does is it brings awareness and compassion for the tension. Like, oh, this tension is actually serving me. And yes, you know, when we are not used to putting boundaries in our lives, there is a dysregulation that often occurs, right? Like, I'm not sure. I mean, people might not like me. This is how I normally keep connection is by collapsing and not having boundaries, you know? And so as we do that, when we say no, we start to sit in the dysregulation of the space that we're not familiar with, the space of like, oh, I've got to create more capacity for this discomfort. Well, now if you could see that it's comfort as being the thing

7:20that's actually alchemizing the space for what is a yes for you, you can at least sit in and be like, oh, yeah, this is this is cooking. This tension, this tension is actually creating a different future. It really is. A future we're not quite familiar with because we've never lived in the space of that. No. And there's a saying that you have to wait long enough for the miracle to arrive. As I can you just, oh, right? And I think in that moment of transformation, which I'm really blessed, I just got to interview Joe D'Spenza and he talks about like, you go from being the known, like your known personality, your known self to the unknown. So you go from like a known way of life moving to now unknown and you're moving towards joy towards possibility, right? So can you do that? Can you sit in the sacred tension that allows you to step into this space of being medicine for yourself too? I think we all can and I'm inspired by it. And you know, there's that I love

8:26the commitment I made years ago that as soon as I learn something, I must change that I will always live at my highest level of knowledge. So as soon as we learn something to be an integrity with our knowledge is to change. All right. And the second thing I wanted to share with you are the words from Francis Weller. And they're from his book The Five Gates of Grief. And I'm going to read this out for you. It's just so powerful. A brief note on blame. Having worked with people for more than 30 years in my practice, it is clear to me that finding a target to blame is effortless. Nothing is asked of us when we simply assign fault to someone else for the suffering we are experiencing. Psychology has colluded in the blame game, pointing an accusing finger at our parents. While many of us suffered mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents. They needed a village around them. And so did we. Of course, we were

9:32disappointed with our parents. We expected 40 pairs of eyes greeting us in the morning. And all we got was one or two pairs looking back at us. We needed the full range of masculine and feminine expressions to surround us and grant us the knowledge of how these potencies move in the world. We needed to have many hands holding us and offering us the attention that one belagged human being could not possibly offer consistently. It is our deepest grief that the village did not appear. It is our deepest grief that the village did not appear. You know, becoming a father, I am becoming much more conscious of this. Coming a father has done a few things. One, it has made it so that in the exploration of my childhood and the things that I've repeated or patterns or coping strategies and all that, I've had gratitude for my parents in the ways they have shown up.

10:33But becoming a father has made me really just appreciate them in such a deeper way. I've always had appreciation. But man, I'm like, it's more potent now. It feels more visceral. You know, maybe it's so that I reached out to them and just made sure that I acknowledged that. Just how much I see them and I appreciate them and recognize the struggles they went through and the things they moved through and worked through to bring me up and raise me as the man I am today. And the second one is that how much village is just so important, how much, you know, I'm not American, but I look at the American maternity leave policy and I'm like, how? Like, I wonder how not valuing the maternal is impacts both not just the mother but the child in society as a whole, you know, and learning about birth. I mean, that's a whole other thing. But just

11:33how medicillized birth has become. And I did a podcast episode with Dr. Nathan Riley on that, who's in OBGYN and it was just so powerful. But now moving into the birth process, just seeing how crazy it is, how medicalized it's become in, you know, the grief of not having a village and how little social support so many of us have, but especially as parents. And I don't know about you, but I've felt sort of this collective conversation of this craving of village, craving of nature. And I think it's because we're becoming so digitized. Our lives are so digital, zoomed in all the things that we are just desperately craving to come back to Harpeats, to being in connection with forest and land and desert and, you know, just being with the world. And that I think is the lesson that we can learn from children is they are just with the world. They are just in the presence of the world. And in each moment, and, you know, we project onto

12:38them right and wrong and don't get me wrong. I don't mean that from a space of like morality and true right and wrong. But I mean, like, outcome driven, like, you got to get this right. You got to win that thing. You got to, I just observed that with my 14 month old nephew, just how much I wanted him to like put the right farm animal in the right box. I didn't say that to him, but I could see my body being like, that's not where the sheep goes. Like, oh, I want him to get it right. And I saw him, you know, put like a little farmer through the sheephole. And I just thought, wow, like he actually has this right. Every time he doesn't do it right, quote unquote, he actually learned something. And the thing I learned from witnessing him and being with him was that being with the world was actually the whole point of the fucking game he was doing to just be present for there not to be an outcome. And gosh, I just think about how outcome driven we become, you know, and how if we try to achieve something and it doesn't achieve the thing we hope, we think it's a failure as opposed to seeing all the beauty of the path on the way to. And

13:44that's why there's that saying that it's the victories in the process, not the outcome. And we're always in process, aren't we? Like, we're always in process. We're always in a space of moving towards a new goal, a new possibility, or maybe away from pain and suffering, which means we're moving towards lightness, well-being. Can we be in that? Just so present to each moment of that, you know, when I was saying before we go from the known to the unknown, it's to be in the presence of that transformation because that's where we make better decisions. That's that tension that creates possibility. And yes, I say all of that because maybe you're also craving village, maybe you're also craving community. And we must create that, you know, what we crave, we must create. And so can we move our lives towards the things that we so desire instead of being the victims of it not being here right now, which is not to negate the pain of it, but to say

14:45can that pain inform us? Can it make it so we create something that we so desperately crave? And when we're thinking about our work in the world and the way we're making our way through the world and what's important to us, can we really commit to drawing sacred boundaries around putting our energy towards what moves us to the life and the way we want to feel? Can we can we commit to that? To just honor our time as such a sacred thing and this doesn't mean we're not going to have things we feel like we have to do, but how many things are on our schedule that are time wasting? How much time do we spend on our phone that we could be spending building something? Ah, I mean, this is the gift, right? I think about how much gratitude I have for the ability to be alive. And I haven't felt that way as much in the last three years. And I don't mean that I haven't wanted to be alive, but I've just thought like, ah, there's so much suffering. And you know, Francis Weller says that you know your soul's awake when you're enraged. And I've just thought like,

15:48what can I create with this now, with this feeling of what I want and who I want to be? And it's so easy to slip out of integrity, but just as easy as it is to slip out, we can slip back in. We can truly, truly make choices that change our state, our bodies, our being. And I've been meditating for probably gosh, it's about out of the last month, probably like 26 days. And starting the morning, each morning with an hour. And then some form of exercise, you know, four to six days a week. And the transformation I've occurred just by reprioritizing these things that just they were existing, but they weren't, they weren't so fucking important. And we have to take the things we value it. And we have to make them so fucking important. And if we don't make them important, no one else will. And if you don't design your life, someone else will. And you won't like what they come up with. And then you'll be a victim in a martyr to that. You know, my mentor, Alzen Bird

16:52recently said to me when I was like, Oh, man, I just feel this like martyr energy within me. And she said, you can't be an abundance and martyrdom at the same time. And I thought that's so true because like ultimately martyrdom is sourcing power through presenting as well as me, right? And you know, I looked up the etymology of the word martyr, which was witness. And I thought that was crazy because when I thought of the word martyr, I thought, well, I think the martyr in me just wants to be witnessed. And then I looked it up. We looked it up together, Alzen and I, and it was witness. And it was like, Oh my God, that's crazy because the martyr in us does want to be witnessed so that we can reach towards it. Like, what can I do to turn this into power instead of trying to source power from it? Because it's not powerful. It's a, it's like vampire energy. It's like the world is happening to me. And it's like, I want to happen to the world. So how do you happen to the world? How do you embrace your life this week, this month, this year, this fucking decade? And you know,

17:56truthfully, right? We know this. No one's coming to save us. But can we take the anger we have, the sadness we have, the joy we have? Can we turn it into a transformative step? And we can, and I can feel all that stuff like cooking in me. So this is just a gentle reminder of however this hits for you, sits for you, for us to create village, for us to make sure our medicine also serves us. And also that our medicine doesn't just serve us, you know, the balance. If you're listening to this, if you could go and one way you could support the podcast is to give it a five star review, I have a written review, there's a so helpful. If you can also subscribe so you don't miss any episodes, I've got some crazy amazing teachers coming and more solo episodes to come to. Much love. Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode. If this episode resonated with you, one of the best ways to support the show is to go subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss anymore. Leave a five star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to it, or share the

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