Truth Bomb Tuesday: It starts when you decide to say “no”.
Your life is defined by what you accept.
We give a lot of attention in the success journey to what we can achieve. What we can make happen and manifest. What we can engineer in our lives.
This is a big part of it.
But more than this, our journey begins with what we accept.
Life is a treasure chest, but you won’t always be offered the best of it.
Sometimes, you’ll be offered nothing more than a dusty old trinket from the bottom shelf that nobody wants.
Life is testing you. Do you accept it?
Do you say yes, I will settle for a 9-5 job, working for peanuts in an industry I hate? Do you accept that?
Do you accept living with financial insecurity for your entire life? Do you accept never having the resources to help and support the people around you?
Until you offer life a firm and decisive “No”, your journey doesn’t begin.
People think the first step is setting your sights on what you want. It’s not. That’s the second step.
The first step is giving a big fat ‘no’ to the things you are just not going to settle for anymore.
And sometimes, it takes way more courage to say ‘no’ than ‘yes’.
Is there more to this? Is there something I’m not saying?
There is. Because just as life will offer you crappy old dusty trinkets, life will also offer up its fair share of abuse.
It will present you with people who want to abuse you and take advantage of you. It will give you people who delight in breaking through your boundaries and torturing the precious child that lives within them.
It will offer up people so broken, hurt and disconnected from their bodies, that they will resent the strength, integrity and wholeness that you carry in your person, and want to violate it.
Let’s not sugar coat things. It’s a cruel world, especially for the sensitive and heartfelt (which is everyone, really).
Life will offer you abuse and abusers.
The question is, will you accept it?
Offering a “no” here is one of the most courageous things a human can do. It’s takes incredible will to maintain your integrity and reaffirm your boundaries, often knowing that it’s going to make your road even harder.
And sometimes, even ‘no’ is not enough, and the powerful will find a way to break through and hurt us.
But that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. It doesn’t mean we have to stay silent and accept injustice where we see it.
(Being human and maintaining our humanity is about fighting injustice where we see it.)
Even when the weight of power is against us, we still have the power to say “No, we do not accept this.”
This is where our journey begins.
Our journey to healing and to wholeness starts with drawing a line in the sand and saying “no”.
Let it ring loud.
DB.