Trust starts in the body because everything starts in the body: love, compassion, kindness, abundance…all the things.
And when we cannot trust (or love, or have compassion for, etc) our selves: we cannot have it for others.
There’s no way we can be nicer to others than we are to ourselves.
It might look like we can. It might appear that we’re just very very very very very very very very very very very very very giving/compassionate/trusting with others.
What we actually are is manipulative as fuck.
And duh—of course we are! We fuckin’ better be!
Because what’s true in our bodies, what our bodies know, is that we had to be manipulative, perhaps very quietly so but still very definitely so, to get our very fucking basic needs met during a time when we had to depend on others for our very basic fucking needs.
We didn’t want to be manipulative—what two-year-old, or five-year-old, or 16-year-old, wants to have to resort to manipulation to get what the body instinctively senses should be given freely?
So, when I use the word “manipulative,” please know that I don’t mean it negatively or as a judgment.
I mean it, actually, as a badge of honor. You manipulated your way through and up and out like you had to, and you did it. You made it. And it is so so so very good that you made it.
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The issue, though and of course, is that now, you can’t peel it off.
You can’t stop manipulating to some degree—meaning, you cannot trust yourself the way you really want to, the way the body wants to, the way the body instinctively knows it can.
How to regain this trust? How to trust yourself, how to trust your body again?
Because there was a time when you did trust your body. Even if it was in the womb as you floated among those loving waves of waters—and those waters were loving even if your birth mom’s pregnancy was horrendous, even if she was horrendous—but even if that is your only experience of bodily trust: it is an experience of bodily trust.
And that is the first piece, is knowing that you have indeed known self-trust before. That it is not foreign to you. That it is not separate from you.
It’s actually right here.
In this right here and right now.
In the right-now breath you’re taking.
You could not want it, could not yearn for it as you do, if were separate from you.
That may not make sense at first—as in, if you have something, you don’t have to want it, right?
But what I am saying is: you cannot yearn for something that you don’t already instinctively know.
(But what about when I yearn for someone I have a crush on to love me back, or I yearn for a certain person to love me, and I know for sure they never will?
That does happen. But the love you’re really yearning for (unconsciously) is your own love. You won’t see this, though, without a process of self-examination like Byron Katie’s The Work or, dare I say, IM. Until you do this kind of process, you’ll just wanna slap the shit out of me for saying something so incredibly stupid and obvious, and I understand in advance. But back to the lecture at hand…)
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So, how to access this self-trust that I am claiming is right here and that I’m swearing you instinctively know, even though you’ve only been through hell and high water spending loads of energy and money and time busting your ass, maybe for decades, to access it?
I’ll tell you!
Start with this right-now moment. Start with what is here: your own triggered self. Start with your yearning for self-trust.
Slow down.
And really feel the yearning. (And I know, I know, this is the last place you want to start. Give it five minutes.)
Let it come up now, that yearning that is so warm and steaming and thick with wanting and trying so, so, so hard.
Slow down even more.
Let it come up some more.
Slow even more. More again.
And now, here's the critical part: don’t do anything to, or with, the yearning. Pull back your hands lest you do something to it...and just...see it.
Just see it.
Say to it, “I see you.”
Feel it see you seeing it.
This is the beginning of reclaiming your self–trust, is being with the yearning for it--and this is how to be with it.
The yearning for your self-trust is the unconscious expression of it. It is its unconscious expression.
In other words: your self-trust is, indeed, here.
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And when you will see your yearning, when you see it without doing something to it—something like setting about to resolve to figure out how to resolve it, that is—and can you feel the “chasing one’s own tail-ness,” the circular-ness, of the “setting about,” the “doing” mission??? And it’s okay, we all go on these missions, until we don’t anymore—
But when you will see your yearning for self-trust and not do something to it:
Then the unconscious expression of your self-trust—your yearning for it—can become conscious. It will become—it will reveal itself—as your self-trust.
Your self-trust is made conscious by your willingness to be with your yearning for it.
This is true, by the way, for all the things we yearn for.
But self-trust is huge, I know.
This is how manipulation—ohhhh, sweet little manipulation, so innocent, working so hard, keeping us alive—this is how the utterly magnificent manipulation dissipates. (Love your manipulativeness, by the way. It kept you alive. It got you here. That’s all it’s been waiting for, by the way, is for you to recognize it, to see it, and say thank you. You cannot see it without being grateful for it, though.)
***
When we will see our yearning for our self-trust, then we will be reunited, consciously, with our actual self-trust.
We will have greater trust in our bodies.
Or: we will have more and more access to the self-trust, the bodily trust, that has been there all along, that never left us.
And our niceness to ourselves, and to others, will be more and more genuine, agenda-free niceness. Because we’ll feel-know, more and more, that we can finally afford it.
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