Just Say Yes

Say yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes, over and over to yourself. You can do this for five minutes straight, or longer if you have to and then start to direct your thoughts to some small chore. I find this helpful to say when I wake up at night or just before I go to sleep or when I want to banish some painful thinking from being the focus of my attention. I think one of the things that gets us down, and let's face it our moods change even though our situations remain exactly the same, is the fact that our brain is essentially a defense mechanism that allows us to survive in a basically hostile cosmos; hostile to human life that is since there are so many nasty ways we can be done in. A rock doesn't have much need for a self-activating defense system.

Once we learn language we self-talk in our mind all the time just beneath our level of awareness. What happens when our thoughts are not being naturally directed to some ongoing project or daily activity, since our mind is at bottom a defense mechanism, it is always looking out for trouble. This is it's job; so it can warn us. Essentially our mind is looking for the no-no's in our path, and when left to its own devices spirals down to thoughts of no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no , no , no, no. Thoughts of "no" by themselves are enough to start activating all those stress chemicals.

When we get depressed for "no reason," it may be that we have unknowingly been saying "no" in our minds for hours. We have become a chemical factory due to the alarm that "no" sets off. Probably the first terror we felt as a small child was somebody all of a sudden yelling at us "NO. NO. NO. Don't touch that." The thought "no" is probably all we need to start the old fight-or-flight chemical alarm system going which will, sooner or later, become depression.

This exercise doesn't solve anything "out there." We are not saying "yes" because we like anything that is happening. It is just a mind trick. The "yes" which we are imposing on our mind has an inherent effect on the brain neurons which is the opposite of the no which our mind defense mechanisms have been saying autonomically, over and over, to our brain. A conscious "yes" is a natural antidote to our autonomic "no." "Yes" starts to shut down the alarm system which is activated by saying no, where all our neurons are arcing in the lower primal mind, not much going on in the upper higher mind. As the yes, yes, yes, replaces the no, no, no, the chemical factory shuts down. We will then be able to direct our thoughts to some small chores which will also redirect our thinking into higher-mind neuron arcing rather than the pain coming from the lower mind.

One of the things that I thought "yes" thoughts would do would be to activate, by learned association, other positive thoughts, thoughts associated with "yes" kinds of things as opposed to "no" kinds of things. This would start more neuronal activity lighting up in the upper higher mind. I was sure I was right the other morning. It was almost funny.

I often wake up with last phrase of a dream in my mind which doesn't make good sense. Sometimes it is a sentence I am saying to someone in my dream. So I get these weird snatches of conversation all the time. Things like: "that's the most table I could be without turning into a chair," or "So that is how you keep it from becoming an entrophe?" What happened this particular morning was that I didn't feel very well when I first woke up so I grabbed for the yes, yes, yes to distract my mind from thinking I wasn't feeling good so I could construct a better mood for myself. Then I fell asleep again for just a few minutes. I wouldn't have been surprised, having gone to sleep thinking yes, yes, yes to have waked up thinking yes. But, instead, I woke up thinking on, on, on. Which certainly can be associated with the word yes. And also it is the opposite of the word no. Very interesting. I really like this "yes" exercise.

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