The Playful Practice of Saying Yes

An interesting experiment

Our essential nature of pure Awareness is utterly surrendered to all experience. It is pure innocence, openness, intimacy, allowing, sensitivity and availability, an unconditional ‘Yes’ to all experience just as it is from moment to moment, without judgement or preference.

—Rupert Spira

Someone I was meeting with on Zoom recently told me that they have taken up the practice of saying ‘Yes’ to everything. I remember that one of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, would sometimes give people this practice. Of course, lest there be any misunderstanding, this doesn’t mean saying yes to anything anyone asks you to do, nor does it mean not saying ‘NO’ to a child who is about to run out into the traffic. It’s rather about noticing and being the acceptance that is the very nature of the aware presence that here-now is, this mirror-like, space-like openness that is beholding everything. Awareness is always saying ‘yes’ to everything without exception.

When we take up saying ‘Yes’ to everything as a kind of practice—or I’d prefer to say playful exploration—we very quickly realize how often we are saying ‘No’ to what is showing up. Sometimes, as in the case of stopping a child from running out into the oncoming traffic, this ‘NO!’ is a totally healthy, instinctual move in a real-life situation. But often this healthy, instinctual response gets carried over into the psychological realm in defense of a mirage, and that’s the ‘no’ we’re talking about here—defending a mirage (‘me’) from something that, at least in this moment, is only an imaginary threat.

We begin to see and feel how this ‘no’ is a thought accompanied by a bodily contraction, and how this thought is always rooted in protecting or defending ‘me’ or something I identify with, such as my tribe or my opinions.

This ‘no’ comes from and reinforces the thought-sense of separation and encapsulation. It’s about judging, resisting, pushing away, demonizing or othering something or someone. We don’t approve or agree with something or someone, we don’t want something to be as it is, we feel threatened or attacked by something or someone, so the bodymind contracts down into the thought-sense of being this separate little encapsulated me.

The threat is imaginary, but it can feel as if our very existence is being threatened by someone’s opinion. Anger is a giant ‘NO!!!!!’ to something or someone, and under the anger there is usually fear. But often the ‘no’ is much more subtle, just a mild sense of dislike, irritation, worry or unease.

The ‘yes,’ on the other hand, is the natural action of open, unbound awareness. Awareness is always allowing everything to be just as it is. It even accepts and allows contraction and delusion. Awareness might be described as unconditional love, for it accepts everything and clings to nothing. It is like empty space: boundless, limitless, unconfined, open and free. It has room for everything to be as it is, and it has space for new possibilities to emerge. As awareness, we are boundless and free. In the absence of that contracted me-sense, we meet everything with openness, with unconditional love, knowing it as our own being. We respond intelligently rather than reacting from conditioned habit.

Of course, as we soon discover, the thinking mind, posing as me, cannot simply force a ‘no’ to turn into a ‘yes’ through will-power. The very effort to do so is itself a ‘no’ to the original ‘no.’ It gets very subtle. The ‘me’ who wants to get rid of the ‘me’ is just another layer of the same illusion, the same habit pattern. All that can really happen is seeing the ‘no,’ being aware of it, seeing it from awareness, which means seeing it without resistance or judgment. Allowing it to be as it is. Allowing the light of awareness to dissolve the contraction naturally.

Noticing these often very subtle movements of yes and no, seeking and resisting, desire and fear, opening and contracting, selfing and not selfing can happen by giving simple, open attention to the actuality of every moment.

The word ‘meditation’ can mean many different things, but bare-bones meditation as I mean it is nothing other than exactly that kind of open attention. It entails putting aside all our usual activities and doing nothing other than being here. Enjoying the sensory world, seeing the thoughts that pass through, noticing how the attention moves around and how it gets captured by storylines—simply being alive and giving all of this open free relaxed attention.

This can happen while sitting upright on a meditation cushion or it can happen while sitting in an armchair or a recliner, or on a park bench, or in an airplane or on a bus. It can happen while walking or lying down. Sitting still can be helpful sometimes, as can being in a posture that feels open and relaxed, but it can happen in any posture. You can notice the difference between sitting upright and slouching, between eyes closed and eyes open. There’s no right or wrong way. You can experiment.

In the beginning, when people first take up meditation or any other kind of awareness-based exploration, they tend to view it as a very serious result-oriented self-improvement program, and it tends to be seen through a very dualistic lens (success/failure, right/wrong, good/bad, self/not-self, enlightenment/delusion, nirvana/samsara, etc). The exploration itself gradually exposes, wears down and dissolves these dualistic, self-centered, overly serious misunderstandings. But because remaining with the simplicity of "just this" goes against all our habitual conditioning, this exploration of present experiencing does at times require a certain amount of effort. But paradoxically, it is an effortless kind of effort, a relaxed effort, a playful effort. It is a matter of going nowhere (aka being now-here).

The late Peter Brown, a teacher whose expression I enjoy, often said that it doesn't matter what we do, yet he also recommended a kind of deep investigation of present experiencing. He was pointing to a way of seeing and being that was free from the constraints of illusory beliefs and the suffering that entails, and at the same time, he was pointing out that even the illusory beliefs and the suffering are nothing other than this same radiant presence, that it is actually impossible to get it wrong. So it both doesn't matter what we do, and yet it also does matter. This sounds paradoxical or hopelessly contradictory only if we think about it and try to make logical sense of it. But in simply living this, it’s obvious that both polarities are true.

No particular practice is necessary or essential in discovering the kind of freedom and ease of being to which all the best teachings are pointing. And the insights and shifts that come to one person through meditation may come to others through raising a child, living with a severe disability, farming, backpacking in the wilderness, dealing with an addiction or a compulsion, being an artist, being in prison, or in myriad other ways.

One of the things I appreciate about Zen is that it avoids landing on any fixed or one-sided view about any conceptual duality, and dualities are always conceptual, never actual. Free will or no free will, practice or no practice, self or no self, effort or effortlessness, success or failure, something or nothing, yes or no. Zen doesn't land on either extreme. As Dogen said, Zen is "leaping clear of the many and the one." Zen suggests that reality is “not one, not two.” It can’t be grasped by any concept.

And yet, here it is. Ungraspable, but totally obvious. Not hidden in any way. The taste of tea. The green leaves. The cigarette butt and the rusted beer can on the rain-soaked pavement. The sound of the passing train. The ache in the knee. The color red. The aroma of coffee. The cool breeze. The smell of jasmine. The exhaust fumes from the bus. A person coughing. Just this. As it is.

This right now, free of the need for conjecture or speculation, feels entirely sufficient.

—Robert Saltzman

Nothing is missing. Nothing is in excess.

I am the divine expression exactly as I am, right here, right now. You are the divine expression exactly as you are, right here, right now. It is the divine expression, exactly as it is, right here, right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing, needs to be added or taken away. Nothing is more valid or sacred than anything else. No conditions need to be fulfilled. The infinite is not somewhere else waiting for us to become worthy.

—Tony Parsons

Simple. Simple. Simple. Yes, yes, yes. Yes even to no! Infinitely wondrous and new. Always right here. Always right now. Always just this!

Love to all….