The thing about trust…
The truth often doesn’t make sense.
I know, annoying.
Trusting ourselves is not always going to logically track. It may never, in fact. In fact, it may run counter to what our thinking mind thinks is correct. It may run counter, even, to what our heart is reaching for with its sweet little heart-arms.
The trust I’m talking about lives in our bones. It lives in our spine: the channel through which divine intelligence runs. It courses daily through the trunk of our body-tree—as does all the nourishing goodness that comes up into us from the earth. (I’m told this is our birthright, which feels right.)
It comes in flashes, pictures, feelings. In inexplicable understanding. It’s always there. Always, always. Most of us have just been trained out of feeling it.
We get in our own way by trying to figure out what we already know.
We get in our own way by trying to feel better about the thing we know—less sad, less afraid…
We get in our own way when we try to craft explanations for what we know so we can justify it to whomever asks.
I think I started trusting my knowing when I gave up trying to explain it.
I don’t have to answer for this. I realized. Anyway, I can’t.
Yes! chorused my whole system in immediate and certain response. Yes, said my glowing skeleton. That’s it, cheered the soil that cradled me, the mycelia that anchored me. That’s it.
It went like that for a while. Me saying, “I know. I know!” and leaving it at that because there was nothing more to say. Simply letting the knowing reverberate. Proliferate.
And then, so slowly (like, over years and years) I began to say what I know here and there. Slowly, so slowly, I got better at it.
Then came the most dangerous-feeling thing of all: acting on the trust. Saying the “no” that might break hearts (including my own). Taking the step that seems not at all intelligent or remotely justifiable.
Since I’m in my body writing this, my thinking mind isn’t readily coming up with specific examples. Rather, it’s offering broad categories like …
Quitting the thing
Starting the thing
Going on the long journey
Leaving the person
Leaving the practice
Reaching out at last
Risking rejection
…and so forth. All of it corresponding to the ever-increasing time spent in residence: in my body, in the seat of my being, the throne of my solar plexus, the featherbed of my sacrum. At home in a place of wordless safety and illogical steadiness, where knowing could find me.
Of course, occupying ourselves this way also puts us in much deeper touch with mortality. The brevity of this stay. The blink of time we get here. Mary Oliver’s famous line, “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” makes so much more sense from this place. I get so little time to softly love. So few chances left to eat oatmeal with strawberries and cream, listen to my friend cry, my dog snore...
Still, it can be so hard to trust. So impossible-feeling, with all the patterns within us, the people who need us, the inner child who fears retribution, the outer world that is so insistent on homeostasis (or at least complacency). It all feels so dangerous, and our protective logical mind, our loving heart, are going to throw themselves in the way of trust again and again to keep us from peril.
But it’s the knowing—and the trust in the knowing—that connects us to joy. If you look back over your life you’ll see that those moments you trusted, no matter how infrequent they were, no matter how hard, were in many ways also the most easeful. That’s because you were moving with life, not fighting it.
Some of those moments hurt. Probably a lot of them did, and will. It’s the thing about bodies, about hearts. They hurt. Not all the time, but joy is only one point on an entire continuum of feels. If we’re going to have one, we have to have them all.
Plus, a main feature of learning, of growth, is that old calcified knots get busted up in our psyche. Like any deep-tissue work, it’s gonna be ouchie.
We can’t be happy without this part. We wouldn’t be human without this part. We can trust it. We can trust that it will swing back in the direction of gladness. The deeper we go in one direction, the farther we can stretch in the other.
What have you known that didn’t make sense? What have you known, even if you didn’t want to know it? What has proven true?
What makes you think you can’t trust that knowing now? (This isn’t rhetorical—there are billions of reasons.)
What is your body telling you right now? Quick, before your mind jumps in telling you you’re insane. Quick, before your heart gets sad (or overexcited) about it. What do you know? Where do you feel it?
No matter how little sense it makes, let it speak. Say it out loud, or get it on the page. Share it here if you are moved to. We welcome it.
