A Matter of Trust

Everyone loves to give advice. Our media feed is full of articles on what to eat, wear, prevent disease, how to decorate our house, and more. Just today in my news feed I saw articles about how I am holding my phone wrong, how to be a better tourist, how to keep my energy up as I age, choosing the right carbs, and believe it or not, the definite guide to pool chair etiquette.

How, when we are inundated with so much advice, do we decide what to believe?

In his book Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn describes the foundations, or attitudes, that are considered fundamental for cultivating a mindful approach to life. These attitudes are all interconnected and cultivating these attitudes will deepen your meditation practice in addition to enhancing your energy, creativity, and well-being.

The fourth of these attitudes is trust.

Part of mindfulness is learning to trust yourself. You are the only one who lives in your body and experiences your thoughts. As you spend more time in mindfulness practices, you start to tune into your own experiences and awareness. You learn what is happening in your body and mind in each moment as it comes. You are unique. Experts can give all kinds of advice, but only you can try different experiments and judge what is true for you. The best authority in the world on you, is you.

As Kabat-Zinn says, “Developing a basic trust in yourself and your feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It is far better to trust in your intuition and your own authority, even if you make some “mistakes” along the way, then always to look outside of yourself for guidance. If at any time something doesn’t feel right to you, why not honor your feelings? Why should you discount them or write them off as invalid because some authority or some group of people think or say differently? This attitude of trusting yourself and your own basic wisdom and goodness is very important in all aspects of the medita­tion practice.”

Here are a few ways to cultivate trust:

• Trust yourself. You have all the inner resources and strength needed to navigate any challenges that come your way.
• Welcome uncertainty. Instead of resisting change, see if you can be open-minded and trust change and uncertainty as a normal part of life.
• Surrender control. We all strive to control our life outcomes as much as possible, when in reality this is not possible. Things don’t always happen on our time scale. By embracing the fact we cannot control much of what happens in life, we can open ourselves to experiencing life as it does unfold in its own way.

As we continue to practice our inner trust, we begin to believe that we are enough. This can have a ripple effect on how we trust and interact with others as well. As Ernest Hemingway said, “the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

I’ll end with some lyrics from one of my favorite songs, I AM by Beautiful Chorus with India.Arie:

What I seek, I have
What I want to know, I understand
All I wish I could, I can
Who I want to be, I am