There's a question that lives underneath almost every threshold moment:
Is this resistance — or is this knowing?
Am I avoiding something I need to walk toward? Or is my body pulling me away from something that was never mine to begin with?
We've been taught to distrust our no. Especially as women. Especially as mothers. Especially as anyone who's ever been told their hesitation is fear, their boundary is avoidance, their refusal is a block that needs clearing.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes the no is old armor. Sometimes the contraction is a wound speaking, and the medicine is to move toward the thing anyway — shaking, uncertain, doing it before you're ready.
But sometimes the no is the cleanest signal you have.
The difference isn't in the no itself. It's in where it lives in your body.
Resistance has a grip to it. A tightness. A looking-away. It's usually accompanied by a story — I'm not ready, I'm not enough, what will they think — and underneath the story, there's heat. Something unmetabolized. Something that wants to move but can't yet.
Discernment is quieter. It doesn't argue. It doesn't need a story. It's the hand pulling back from the hot surface before the mind has a reason. It's a settling, not a clenching. When you check in with it, there's nothing to push through. There's just — clarity. A clean no that doesn't need to be justified or overcome.
One needs tending. The other needs trusting.
The hardest part is that they can look identical from the outside. Someone watching you turn down the opportunity, leave the relationship, refuse the strategy that "everyone" says works — they can't tell the difference. Only your body can.
Which is why the most important skill I teach isn't how to push through. It's how to listen well enough to know which one you're in.
That changes everything. Because once you trust your own no, your yes means something.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.