Trust is an interesting concept. I hear this theme come up mostly when people are talking about their relationships to other people. In fact, trust is actually a relationship with yourself. Once this trust in oneself is established, most everything else can fall into place. This is an abstract concept and one that we are not taught about with the principles of trusting.
Let’s start further back. We have many ideas of how our life should be. We have patterns that we get into where we have high expectations for our life based in preconceived notions that we were taught, followed by disappointment when our expectations for our life do not manifest in the way that we had anticipated. Unfortunately, when this pattern occurs it stops the flow of our life. Instead of moving forward we hold fast in our resistance to the way things are and thwart our desire to change the outcome.
Here is the interesting piece to this. We are desiring to create our own outcomes. Yet, we create based on our lived experience. We cannot create outside that map. How happy are you with your past? Many of us have regrets and would like to move past where we have been. Yet we are trying to do so with a map of only where we have been. This doesn’t make sense does it?
We very much limit ourselves when we resist the new or unknown. Yet, as Virginia Satir said, “People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” Living our lives is about being in the flow of change, living without preconceptions of how we “should” live. Surviving, on the other hand, is about resisting change and staying in what is known. So the question becomes – Do you want to “live“ your life or do you want to “survive” your life?
In order to “live” our lives we must trust ourselves. And in order to trust ourselves, we must take three active steps. The first step is to let go of our old fears. These fears are based in our previous lived experiences. Any time something in our life triggers these fears, we are wired to go into a state of survival (fight, flight, or freeze). It is most definitely an active and effortful step for us to overcome our fixed reactions to these fears. The second step is to let go of our programming and conditioning. These are the unwritten rules that we abide by that were taught to us by family, society, culture, and religion. While we may choose to keep abiding by some of these unwritten rules, we must be able to know when the rules don’t serve us any longer. What we must be able to do is recognize when this programming and conditioning is telling us we “should“ be a certain way, fueling our resistance to change, and then learn to put those particular unwritten rules to the side. For the last and third step we must learn the art of allowing things to be as they are, rather than trying to impose our own belief of how they “should“ be. This may seem on the face of it to be a passive step, however, it most definitely is effortful for us to stand aside and allow life to flow rather than impose our own ideas of how it “should“ be.
When I start to talk to people about trusting themselves as the answer to moving into “living” their lives rather than “surviving” their lives, I am often met with the same resistance. This resistance comes in the form of statement such as, “But doc, if I don’t work towards my goal I might fail.“ Or, “Doc, if I don’t have expectations I could fall into bad habits. I know what is ‘right’ for me and I need to work towards this, or I will be working towards what is ‘wrong’ for me.” Both of these fears are based in a threat that is framed by what we know from our past lived experience. We are using the map of the past to judge the future in these examples. These statements of resistance also make the assumption that living in trust of ourselves is somehow a passive strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So how does trusting ourself help us keep moving forward “living” our lives? That is a great question. Without trust in ourselves to be able to handle whatever comes towards us in life and see the value of it, we will live in our own fear that nothing that comes towards us has value unless we give it value through our own past lived experience. Trust in ourselves then becomes the ultimate goal. We want to be able to trust that we can live into whatever comes our way. Trust that whatever the future has in store for us has value, even if at first we don’t see that value. Trust that the new map for our lives will reveal itself and may have no resemblance to the one we already had in mind. And trust that this is as it should be. Once we learn that we can trust ourselves to take on whatever comes our way, nothing can stop us.
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