Yield Right of Way

Heart road sign

“In order to create a life you love, you have to let love lead.”

Years ago, as I was transitioning from being an energy healer to a transformational life coach, I created the above statement as a tagline for my new business. For me it was elegant in its simplicity, honesty and clarity.

Over time – and after, perhaps, one too many marketing courses – that simple statement began to feel like a stale cliché. So I dropped it. I created new taglines and different points of focus for my work. Yet here I am today, seeing that tired old statement with fresh eyes and feeling, again, its elegant wisdom.

There’s something about the word “let” that resonates deeply with me. It is kind and allowing. So often we are conditioned to believe we have to “make things happen” through strong-willed effort. We go after what we want with the steely determination of a hunter tracking down its prey. We strongarm our seemingly lazy, timid or unfocused selves into a forced march toward our goals.

It’s one way to make a certain kind of progress. But it’s not the way of Love.

Love neither requires nor responds to force although, paradoxically, Love itself is the most powerful force in the universe. That’s really the point. With the infinite, unbridled power of Love at our disposal, we don’t need to force anything. Instead, we need to invite Love in and let it have its way with us.

We need to yield the right of way to Love.

But how do we do that? As I pause to contemplate that question, I’m reminded of an experience I had about a year and a half ago, while I was journaling. A realization came to me in a way that I could only capture, initially, as an image. The image was a small circle surrounded by stars, which themselves were surrounded by a much larger circle. The outline of the large circle was soft and fluid, indicating the organic nature of the circle. It was expanding. The inner circle, by contrast, was small and tight. Its outline was a heavy, unbroken line.

The inner circle represents the “small self” and the stars represent its dreams or desires. In our usual way of thinking, we see ourselves as small or “not enough” in some way, and we see our desires as things that are outside of us, which means we have to go after them. And going after them can be difficult, hampered as we are by our misperceptions of “not enough-ness.” At the core of that small, tight circle lives a belief that we aren’t worthy of having what we want, or that we don’t have what it takes to get it, or that we have to work hard and beat the competition in order to claim it.

The large circle represents the Large Self, which is Love. From that perspective, we see that what we want is already within us. We realize that what we want is an expression of who we are. We don’t have to go out and get it. We simply have to recognize our desires as aspects of ourselves and allow them to shine.

The shift from small self to Large Self requires that we open the inner circle. It is an opening to Love. It is an expansion of our self-concept from who we thinkwe are – small and “not enough” – to who we really are. As we expand our self-concept we expand our powerful Presence. And as we expand our Presence , we naturally realize more and more of our heartfelt desires.

So how do we expand our self-concept? This brings us back to the question of how we yield to Love – and the answer to both questions is one and the same. We yield to Love by yielding to the heartfelt desires that are an expression of the Love that we are. And in yielding to those heartfelt desires we are expanded by them. Through our desires we express more and more of who we really are.

We need to let our desires in, to open our arms and say Yes to them. What we desire in our hearts is not selfish; it is what Love desires for us, through us. It is in our highest and best interest to say Yes, to open and receive and accept the fullness of the desire.

I have often told clients that to create what they want in their lives, they must first give themselves permission to actually want it. That’s true for all of us. But in order to actually realize our dreams, we are called to do more than give them permission to exist. We have to yield fully to them. To accept them as the seeds of growth and happiness that they are, and to give them fertile ground in which to flourish.

The potency of this was brought home to me through the teachings of Neville Goddard, a 20th century mystic and metaphysical writer and lecturer. In his book, Your Faith Is Your Fortune, he describes prayer as an act of yielding to our desire, allowing it to overtake us completely. We do that in the privacy of our imagination, surrendering so fully to the desire that we become one with it.

In Neville’s words, “Prayer, then, is recognizing yourself to be that which you desire to be rather than begging God for that which you desire.”

In that act of recognition, we literally give birth to our desire in our consciousness, which is the template through which it manifests in our physical world. Or as Neville would say, we form an impression in our consciousness, and every impression in consciousness becomes an expression in lived reality.

This is what it means to let love lead. It means surrendering completely to what you really want, which is yielding to the Love that you are. It means treating your dreams with respect by acknowledging, trusting and nurturing them. It means creating space for them in your life. It means protecting them from the voices of doubt and criticism. It means spending time with them in your prayers, imagining and accepting their fulfillment as your reality.

You are a creator. You are meant to flourish. Your desires are not outside of you, waiting to be obtained; they are inside of you, waiting to be expressed. Their abundant beauty and vibrancy and delight are expressions of you, the real You.

Yield Right of Way to them. Just say Yes.

Share This

Leave a Comment





Subscribe