Trusting

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach

I have been thinking about trust a lot lately and it’s a wild one to wrestle with much less even try to write a few sentences about. However, I feel it’s something that has guided me through my six decades and is inching me even closer to my seventh decade just a few years away now.

To trust is to risk vulnerability first with oneself and then with others. I use animals, most especially dogs and horses to understand this element and how life sustaining it is. The first thing I do upon approaching an animal is to emit a sense of safety, care and trust. This means that I need to feel safe and trusting within myself first so that I don’t do something that will put us both at risk. It’s unspoken, yet it’s intuitive and a body language that is developed over time. Animals and children are my most accurate barometer of how I’m doing. They are my truth tellers and often mirror back exactly what I am emitting whether I am aware of it or not.

I sensed this each year as I welcomed my new charges into my class as an elementary school teacher. They looked to me for a sense of safety and trust. I always hoped they would blossom under my care and truly BE themselves. One of the ways in which this happened was to take the lid off the silly can as often as we could. Now, sometimes what jumped out tried my patience greatly, and most often what was underneath it for me was needing to feel a sense of control within our class. It was a tension I was aware of and something I tried to be honest about so that we could work together rather than against one another. Again, did I always succeed, absolutely not, yet I never stopped trying nor did my students.

Trusting requires a knowing that we can lean into and rest into this internal knowledge that what is coming in for us can be trusted and that we don’t have to search outside of ourselves for this inner compass.

It can feel challenging to not give up, retreat and become small within ourselves when life becomes challenging as not to allow anything or anyone else in to cause discomfort and hurt. It’s actually a safety mechanism doing its job trying to prevent us from danger. Yet, the paradox is in creating a ring of fire to keep out also hinders that which desires to enter within that may be filled with light, love and healing. This becomes the ongoing paradox and tension between trusting and disbelief. Remaining curious about which world we find ourselves within may hold valuable information to delve into?

As a world, society, individual, we have a myriad of very valid reasons to not trust, yet again and again it always comes back that it’s learning first how to trust oneself that is the beginning. I believe with a full heart that this is how we came into our lives as trusting souls until we were taught otherwise. With this lens of trusting, more people and situations become trustworthy until they are not.