By Ethan DeFord, Integrative Alchemy (www.alchemy.link)
Hello Alchemists! My name is Ethan, and (among other things) I work with clients as a health coach to help them reduce stress, increase happiness, and feel more involved and empowered in their lives and their health. The critical part of this work happens within ourselves: how we see and relate to the world around us fundamentally shapes our entire life, and our ability to navigate it.
Consent
Today, I want to talk about the Alchemy of Consent, but less about the consent we give to others, and more how we consent within ourselves. At its core, consent is the process of saying Yes or No, right? We have, thankfully, been growing cultural awareness for this practice in social interactions and the significance of receiving an enthusiastic Yes, and not overriding someone’s No. I want to bring your focus to what this can mean in our relationship with ourselves.
Be aware, there are several conscious communication communities that can provide practical and powerful practice opportunities in getting in touch with your Yes’s and No’s, as well as developing your ability to express them clearly with others. If you haven’t experienced this before, and hearing that struck a chord for you, please reach out; I would be delighted to refer you.
Have you ever been asked to do something, and your immediate instinctual response was, “Ugh, no, I do not want to do that!” Have you ever been asked for something, and you felt a swell of excitement at the thought of providing it? This is your internal compass telling you where you’re currently aligned. It is the product of a lot of different influences from your personal history, your worldview, and all of the stories you’ve been developing about your life. Whether you’ve felt drawn to something or repulsed by it, you have then decided and declared whether you will do it or not, sometimes overriding this sense of orientation. I don’t have to tell you, your life feels very different when you agree to do something you feel repulsed by, compared to when you say No to it. Being able to hear this internal Yes or No, honor it, and then speak to it, is a major element of health and happiness in your life.
Personal Alchemy
“But wait!” you say, “If we are reasonable adults, life includes things we may not want to do, but we have to do them anyway!” Most tend to agree: not everything that needs doing is fun or appealing to do, but we know we need to do at least some of them. What I am going to explore here is how we can reconcile healthy consent within our lives as responsible adults, because, make no mistake, so long as you are doing things that you are genuinely opposed to doing, you will suffer, whether that suffering takes the form of guilt, shame, resentment, contempt, despair, or depression.
There are two major skills that I want you to start considering: Acceptance & Willingness.
Acceptance
I am going to propose this concept to you, and I am inviting you to take note of any resistance and stories that come up as I do. I’ve found that some people find this concept challenging before they fully understand it, but if you can bear with me, it will make a profound shift in your mindfulness practice.
Acceptance is a skill and an ability that is employed in the moment of witnessing, the process of receiving the moment we are in. The Acceptance I am talking about is the ability to not fight against what is present.
This is the first place people tend to get stuck. On hearing this, anyone with morals, beliefs, or social values may be appalled by the notion of not fighting against certain things that conflict with your principles, in every way you can. After all, most people believe that there are things in the world that need to be opposed, such as injustice, exploitation, or unlawfulness. I am not trying to suggest otherwise. Rather, I want to point to a simple and important tautology: what is present, is present. As an example, if you stub your toe on the coffee table, you experience pain. The pain is real, it is present. In some future moment it may no longer be here, but it is right now. When the pain is present and we wish it weren’t, when we reject it, when we refuse it… this is the essence of suffering: refusing to accept what-is. That rejection is also the foundation for actions like cursing at the coffee table for its crime against us, or cursing ourselves out for being stupid or clumsy or inattentive, or whatever shape our negative self-talk takes. Those patterns are not any sort of service to our well-being, and they rely entirely on the absence of the sort of Acceptance that I am describing here.
It is simple to say: “What is present, is present.” The art of Acceptance is letting go of the idea that you have any ability to dictate what is allowed in your moment. You cannot. What is present now is the product of what has come before. If you have a desire for change, change only occurs between now and the future. If you are hung up on trying to deny what is present now, you are actually impairing your ability to participate in that change, by failing to connect with the actual place you are starting from: Here. Acceptance, like relaxation, is not a practice of adding, it is a process of letting go of things that aren’t serving you. In Acceptance, the thing we are letting go of is resistance and opposition to the present outcome of the confluence of past events.
As another less charged example, let’s consider Racism. If I were to tell you to Accept Racism, you may find the suggestion very alarming and start thinking that I am an amoral monster. I hope, however, if you’ve followed what I’m saying, you may start to understand that the call to accept racism, is purely the call to acknowledge that racism exists and is present. If it weren’t you would not be upset with me for suggesting that you accept it. What I am NOT calling for is that Acceptance be about encouraging, supporting, advocating for, or empowering the things we are accepting! We are only accepting that something is present, it is in our field, it is part of this infinitesimal moment. The idea that we need to reject them even being here, now, or else they will “win” is a fallacy that only deepens our suffering. The only way for us to effectively create change, is to fully embrace where we are and what is present with us, and to find ways to change how we show up as we move forward. Denying that something is present will never help us get to a Here-Now where it isn’t because it blinds us to a part of our current reality.
Willingness
In every moment, each Here-Now, we are in a state of dynamic exchange with our world. We are receiving and we are giving, no matter what shape that takes. These are never not happening. Acceptance is something that we can do or not do in the receiving element of our relationship with the moment. Willingness is a skill that exists as a parallel in the giving element of our relationship with the moment.
Willingness is the mode of being internally aligned to what we are doing as we are doing it.
When we are doing something, but we are not doing it willingly, it is like driving with the emergency brake on. There is a drain on the system, we are dragging, and we are pushing through our own resistance, spending energy both for and against what we’re trying to accomplish. These energies are canceling each other out within us, and so we are wasting both efforts.
For a tangible example, let’s consider doing the dishes. You and the rest of your household are dirtying dishes, all day every day, but in the division of chores, you are the one who has been assigned dishwashing duties. If you show up to your chore grumbling and resentful that you have to wash these dishes, then the whole way through the process you are spending energy resisting the thing you are also doing. You are choosing to oppose while also choosing to proceed. Imagine, instead, that you are skilled at bringing Willingness to the table, you know why you are doing the dishes, and you have let go of your resistance to this task. Now you are better able to focus on the task, you aren’t dragging your feet, before, during, or after, and you feel no sense of resentment for the duty. Doing the dishes no longer has any more costs than the time it takes you, and the resulting dryness of your hands.
By cultivating the ability to be Willing and consciously applying it to our choices and actions, we take the brakes off and our actions become more effective and more efficient.
The Alchemy of Consent
We focus a lot on the significance of consent when it is used socially. Saying Yes or No to others. But in our every-day lives, we have the ability to access consent within ourselves, and to resolve the conflict of violating our own consent.
Within Acceptance is the ability to actively consent to things that we have no (further) say over, because they are already here, now. We cannot say “No” and have them cease to be.
Within Willingness is the ability to consent to the things we are choosing to do. If we choose to do them, but are withholding our willingness, we are essentially overriding our own consent.
Doing the work to be clear on our internal experience of Yes and No, of alignment or opposition, is invaluable to showing up to life with authenticity. When we feel it and can express it, we feel relieved. In every moment, life is full of things that we like or want, that we are glad are here; there are also things that we detest, fear, or oppose, and we wish they would go away. Once they are here, we can’t make them leave by rejecting them. Neither can we create meaningful change by loading our chosen actions with sand bags of reluctance.
The application of Acceptance and Willingness, allows us to sink deeply into our present moment, to reduce suffering, to relieve ourselves of energetically wasteful patterns, and to empower our ability to make choices which move forward towards a future moment that is more aligned with our deeper senses of value, meaning, and purpose.
Integrative Alchemy Health Coaching
I want to give you a glimpse of the sort of work I do, and how some basic exercises can help you cultivate Acceptance and Willingness through a path that will resolve some of these tangles.
One exercise I do with clients is called the “Plural of Why.” Healthy consent stems from being able to recognize whether you are, in this moment, a Yes or a No to what you’re being asked, and having the liberty to express that honestly in the form of consent or refusal. Honoring that feeling is important, but if you only ever stay at this reactive level, you will miss out on really getting to know yourself, let alone opening doors that will enrich your life. The Plural of Why is an exercise in first acknowledging your current instinctual reaction to a request and, while honoring it, probing into where that reaction comes from. When we start to look below the surface, we can develop a compassionate view of where our instincts flow from. Sometimes, this allows us to dismantle previously unconscious patterns where we resist or sabotage ourselves. Sometimes, this helps us understand the deeper personal meaning behind our choices such that continuing to make them becomes a radically self-affirming act. Without this sort of unpacking, “intuition” is indistinguishable from prejudice. When we accept what is in front of us, and we’re clear about why we are choosing our path, then Willingness becomes far more accessible and empowering.
Another exercise is one I call “Releasing Obligation.” This exercise begins with a process of challenging and reconfiguring our internal narratives. In response to a demand, whether it comes from someone else or from within, we only have two possible responses: Comply or Resist. Compliance with a demand or obligation robs us of the joy of getting to consent freely, knowing that we can say No without imposed consequences. By identifying how we are obligating ourselves, we can remove this thief of joy. Once we have passed through this process, we find that we can either let go of things we weren’t Willing to do that we don’t actually need to do, or else we discover genuine Willingness by removing the sense of obligation and discovering our authentic motivation. When we can release the binding of obligation, we can feel pleased to do the thing, or else be relieved of it without guilt.
The goal of my work is to help each of us be happy with our choices. If you think that being happy with your life is a privilege either provided or revoked by your life circumstances, by things outside of yourself, then I’d highly encourage you to try working with me. We are capable of so much when we can learn how to stop fighting ourselves.
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