‘Yes but …’

In choosing this card your Higher Self has indicated you are ready to make a commitment to the path and changes you seek.

Everything you think of and say ‘yes’ to (are excited by) has a ‘but’ attached to it because you find safety in the word ‘but’. ‘Yes but’ is a non-committed stance that keeps your fear of loss at a distance. If you fully committed to the changes or dreams that you seek, you would face the possibility of failure. So the ‘Yes but …’ is a form of control designed to slow down or even sidetrack the progress of events to a pace you are comfortable with, sometimes moving toward your goal and sometimes taking you in another direction altogether. ‘Yes but’ symbolises and gives voice to your self-doubt. ‘Yes’ and ‘but’ create the duality within you. ‘Yes but’ is a denial of love. It is the fear of love, it is the fear of getting what you want, it is the fear of not getting what you want. ‘Yes but’ is your mechanism to stay put in the same place, same time.

‘Yes but’. Those two words hide your insecurities about what you expect to receive. They represent the spirit measure of your self-esteem and tell you where the boundary of your expectations lies. Rather than recognise that your ‘Yes but’ masks a fear of loss and that the loss and emptiness exists within you, you avoid loss altogether. You say to yourself and others ‘Well I tried that’, ‘I tried dating’ or ‘I tried the dating site’, yet your effort has been less than fully committed. You have only tried once or twice. Through the stance of ‘Yes but’ you share your woes to garner sympathy from others and respond to any suggestions with the response, ‘I did that already and nothing happened’. And so ‘Yes but’ is really a way for you to keep safe in the status quo. You accept that you will be content with this amount of love. You will not worry yourself about gleaning for more and you will not hope for more. You tried it and it didn’t work.

‘Yes but’ is a statement of control limiting the damage or effects of what has been said to you. Someone can encourage you to pursue your dreams and upon hearing their words you are quickly ready to take control of the conversation with ‘Yes but’. In your control you manage your fear of loss, of disappointment, a fear that you will feel empty (if you fully committed to your dream and it did not happen). Regarding your desire for love, your underlying fear is that you will not get it and so you approach this aspect of life from the perspective of the inner child who learned conditional love. It is the inner child that enacts the fear by saying ‘Yes but’ to protect you from disappointment. Your inner child knows deeply about loss. They learned this through the loss of safety, or not having their needs met. The child asked but did not receive and this has limited your expectations as an adult because your inner child learned that no amount of pleading or tantrums brought the results or love that it was seeking. The result now is a feeling of resignation.

Some children have parents who are not able to listen or are so busy they can’t listen. The parents want to give but living in their circumstances they can’t. The child hears the voice of their parent say ‘Well, we’ll see’ and then believes that if they are good enough, say enough prayers and (later as adults) meditate at least twice a day and say ten affirmations a day that their parents will give them the acknowledgement and affirmation they are seeking. However, most times they are left unfulfilled.

The child then, after time and again asking for, believing in and not receiv-ing what they want, experiences a feeling of loss (or emptiness). The voice of ‘Yes but …’ is the internalised voice of your parents’ that said you would have to wait until ‘later’ to have what you wanted – after you got all your chores done – when you deserve, when you’ve earned the reward. For some children ‘later’ never comes – there are always more tasks to be done. They are therefore never deserving, never good enough. As adults their parents’ voice is now their inner voice reminding them there is always another chore to be done so that chores never seem to finish. Over time this experience with repetition of expectation followed by a let-down creates a fear of loss. The child builds a protective casing around themselves so that they will not have to experience the depth of the feeling of loss and its subsequent grief ever again. With their hope and expectation kept alive by the inner voice, ‘Well, we’ll see’, the child keeps saying ‘yes’ to life. However, the ‘yes’ is always and immediately followed by the more forceful ‘but’ because the child believes that dreams do not come true for them.

To manage the feeling of emptiness that loss incurs and to avoid not feeling loved, you the adult keep yourself busy. You simultaneously juggle three or four projects unable to fully commit to any one of them. You jump from one goal to another or become embroiled in one drama after another to escape feeling the goal close to your heart – the thing that you deeply desire.

The point about ‘Yes but’ is you never fully commit or partially commit to your dreams or you don’t expect to experience your dream. You are just too busy sprinting on a treadmill – running in place – replacing your fear of loss with more stress and exhaustion.

Commitment is the key to living your life free of the ‘but’. When we are committed fully to our dreams – as part of the journey – we face a fear of loss, we face the doorway. This doorway is a path of growth in which success comes when you face the loss you fear. At the moment that loss now has a power over you. You may be confronting an actual loss of a person or a pet in your past or you are facing the loss of never being acknowledged as the person you were when you were little. Name the fear of that loss; the loss of safety, the loss of innocence, the loss of the right to be you. And then see the loss from the lack of acknowledgement for what you experienced.

See your doorway as your path to building the emotional skills you are learning, such as not to judge or not to fear abandonment because you as the adult have done the job of protecting yourself. You have been in control with your ‘Yes but’. However, you are ready to let go of this way of keeping you safe. To do this you acknowledge what you really desire, not what Spirit wants, not what you think you should want or what you think society dictates is the right thing. Listen to yourself. You are ready to commit fully to what you want to do. This is the way to pass through this doorway. Instead of ‘Yes but’ you are now ready to say ‘Yes … and what’s next?’