Saying yes to the universe is kind of like unlocking a gate—you don’t always know what’s on the other side, but it’s usually where your soul has been nudging you to go all along. The tricky part, though, is that saying yes doesn’t just mean saying yes to the good stuff. It also means saying yes to the hard, the meh, the uncomfortable, and the downright “ugh, not this again” moments.

Most of us are in the habit of saying no to the things that scare us, stretch us, or pull us out of our comfort zone. We stick to yes only when it feels safe. I know I do. And a lot of the time, our no’s come from fear—fear of failure, fear of pain, fear of losing control. On the flip side, many of us also have trouble saying no when we really should—thanks to conditioning, people-pleasing, or just wanting to be liked—even when it chips away at our integrity. Two sides of the same coin.

What makes this all more complicated is that we’re afraid if we say yes to something we don’t like, we’ll be stuck with it forever. Truth is, nothing changes until we acknowledge it exists. Saying yes isn’t the same as blind acceptance; it’s more like opening up a dialogue with life. It’s telling the universe, “Okay, I see this. Let’s work with it.”

And yeah, I’m not religious, but there’s that old phrase about God not giving you more than you can handle. Strip away the theology, and it’s really about trust—trust that we can handle what’s in front of us, trust that we can learn from it, uncomfortable though it may be.

I was reminded of this while watching Chris Hemsworth’s second Limitless series on Nat Geo (yes, also because…Hemsworth). There’s an episode on pain that really stuck with me. Pain is real, but not all of it is life-threatening. A lot of it is our mind amplifying the discomfort, making us say no more often out of fear. And I thought—how much of my life have I spent avoiding things just because I didn’t want to feel pain?

The real question is: what will it take for us to start saying yes? For some, it takes a crisis—a wall you can’t ignore or climb over. For others, like me, it’s a quieter shift, a natural unfolding that brings you to the point where saying yes feels less terrifying than continuing to resist.

Honestly, saying yes is often less exhausting than the constant no. That’s the first thing I had to realize. It’s not easy at first—it can feel scary and messy—but when we begin experimenting with saying yes, even just in small moments, something shifts. We start to feel less like we’re fighting life, and more like we’re in symphony with it.

And little by little, the pain loses some of its power. The fear loosens its grip. We stop running from the hard parts and instead lean into them, realizing the only way through is…well, through. Yes is where life begins. Yes is where resilience grows. Yes is where trust grows.

Yes—is where joy sneaks in.