The First Yes
I have been not so gently moving through the theme of belonging. And not so much about belonging to the other, community, and the Cosmos but belonging within myself. Walking into my own inner home and feeling welcomed, received, and cared for. Here is what I discovered: I had been relying on external belonging to charge me with life force. What happens when that charge is repeatedly denied? When life decides to teach you how to generate your own energy and not rely on taking from others, then you have to pause and return to the source of your life— God — and examine your relationship with your mother because even though God is the ultimate Creator, your life came through her. When our relationship with the life that came to us through our parents becomes interrupted or rejected, our experience of our own life force can become fragmented. How do we return to the flow?
Belonging, it turns out, was never something to find out there. It is available to us at any given moment. Very often we mistake the outside world as the source of our vitality and forget the well within us. It always starts with a clearing away, so we can open space for the sacred depths of unfolding. As Toko-pa Turner writes in Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, “Strike a holy grove of silence where you can listen as you long to be heard, see as you long to be seen, recognize where you want to be relevant, needed and necessary. Sink down into your estrangement, and let the grief of your disappointment be the moisture that baptizes the seeds of your potential, so they can finally break open.”
From that clearing, the first step is acceptance. We accept our mothers and fathers, not necessarily by condoning everything we experienced in their care, but by accepting them as our only possible parents. By gesturing toward acceptance, we move toward restoration of the family system: everyone is rightfully included and belongs.
In the story, There is No Such Thing as a Dragon, Billy Bixbee wakes up one morning to a dragon the size of a kitten in his bedroom. He tells his mother, but she says, “Billy, there’s no such thing as a dragon.”
Billy trusts his mother. So he ignores the dragon he clearly sees. As they both pay the dragon no attention, it grows and grows.
At first, it was just a small problem, eating Billy’s pancakes. But then it eventually started to get in the way of day-to-day things like cleaning the house, brushing teeth, and getting ready for bed.
Eventually, the dragon was so big, it took over the entire house and the Bixbee family lost control of their home. It ended up on the other side of the neighborhood because the dragon carried their home on his back when chasing after a bakery truck.
Finally, when Billy’s dad came home and asked what happened, his mother was able to listen to Billy, and see the dragon for what it was, real, and really big now.
As soon as they acknowledged the dragon, it immediately became kitten-sized again.
“I don’t mind dragons THIS size,” said Mother. “Why did it grow so BIG?”
I’m not sure,” said Billy, “but I think it just wanted to be noticed.”
Long story short, dragons feed on our own voluntary blindness. The more we refuse to see them, hear them, or recognize them, the more they grow. Dragons hide in the relationship with our parents.
In order to feel like we fully belong in this world, we have to open ourselves to receive the life that came to us through our parents.
Receiving feels less of a decision and more of an unclenching.
For most of my life, I thought belonging meant reaching, toward a person, a room, a version of myself someone else would want to keep. Receiving asks for the opposite. It asks me to stop reaching and notice that life has already arrived. It was here in my breath before I asked for it. It was here in my blood before I earned it.
The first sign of receiving is rarely joy. It is relief. A softening somewhere beneath the ribs, an exhale I did not know I had been withholding for years. It is almost embarrassingly quiet. Just a body finally permitted to stop straining toward something it had never actually lost.
To accept my mother is not to condone what happened in her care. It is to stop refusing the channel itself, the one through which my own life first arrived. The dragon in that story did not need to be fought. It needed to be seen. My own reaching, I am learning, was never hunger for connection. It was a dragon asking to be noticed, a thread between us that had quietly gone severed long before I understood why. My mother never stopped caring for me, but something in me had stopped receiving it, and I spent years reaching outward for what had simply been waiting, all along, to be seen.
For a long time, I mistook external confirmation for vitality. Taking life force energy from others worked. It charged me. It kept me moving. Until it stopped working, until the charge I depended on was denied again and again, and I was left standing in the same room, empty, wondering why the lights had gone out.
Generating my own energy does not look like effort. Taking was effort, performing, proving, staying alert to whether the supply might run dry. There was the waiting, the long and painful waiting to be acknowledged, seen, heard and recognized. Generating looks more like return, to breath, to sleep, to sun, to the plain unglamorous rhythms of a body that was designed to be alive on its own terms. Like a sunflower, rooted in soil, turning its whole face toward the sun without asking permission, without performing the turning for anyone watching.
I am learning to test this in small, unwitnessed moments. Can I feel moved by something beautiful with no one there to see me feel it? Can I metabolize my own worth without waiting for someone else's response to confirm it exists?
I am noticing that what I give from that fuller place is different in kind from what I used to give. Depleted giving needed to be received, appreciated, returned, or it would quietly curdle into resentment. What moves through me now, when I am actually rooted, does not require the same return. It simply moves outward, because there was finally enough.
I am starting to understand that these were never two separate lessons. Receiving is what makes generating possible. You cannot turn toward your own sun until you have first let yourself be reached by the light that was already here, the one running through your mother, and through hers before her, all the way back to the source that needed no permission to give it.
The dragon does not disappear because we fought it into kitten size. It shrinks the moment we finally look. What is left, once we are no longer spending our whole lives refusing to see, is enough life force to root, to turn, to give from fullness instead of hunger.
Life already chose us. We are here. We were given breath before we accomplished anything. We were loved imperfectly before we became worthy. We were part of a lineage before we created anything.
And if we desire to hear the deeper tunes, we must keep believing in dragons, angels, unicorns, and all the other magical creatures that our world has marked For Children Only.
