Self Trust (Part 2) - The Four Pillars of Trust, and Life as a Creative Process
Embrace imperfection, and move
Self Trust: Part 2
Welcome to the second chapter on Self Trust. As a reminder, Self Trust is the way through anxiety (not more control! ). Let us continue:
The Four Pillars of Trust:
This idea comes from Iyanla Vanzant. In her work, she breaks down what she refers to as the ‘essential’ arms of trust into: Self, Others, Life and God. She maintains that it is crucial to cultivate a relationship with all four, so that when things get hard, you have options!
My preferred analogy is that the four pillars are like legs of a table. We can have a table with one leg that can stand alone, absolutely, but four legs are sturdier. We can rearrange to balance a perfectly functional (stylish!) table with two or three legs, if needed. But we always need at least one. And the most crucial pillar to start with is Trust in Self. When we have the pillar of Self Trust established, it becomes easier to extend our trust to the other three.
As a reminder, Self Trust means to: have good intuition, make good (not perfect) choices, to believe that your essence is innate and worthy, to believe that you can work things out when they come up. However, trusting in others is also important.
Although many of us are great at ‘white knuckling it’ through life, sometimes we alone cannot look after all that we might need to. In our individualistic society, reaching out to others for help is often deeply uncomfortable, because we fear that vulnerability is weakness or a ‘burden’. Needing others might threaten our own image of ourselves as independent and heroic, or easygoing and needless. However, in times of vulnerability, we must. Humans are tribal creatures by nature, and there might come a time to withdraw from the relational bank you have been making deposits into. This is what close relationships are for! Trusting in selected others is an antidote to isolation, loneliness and disconnection.
However, trusting others can be hard if you have not learned to trust yourself yet. How do you know that you can choose the right people? Reversely, trusting others too- much-too-soon can be a default, if you have not learned to trust yourself yet. Perhaps you rely heavily on the opinions of others, and find it hard to make decisions without their approval and input. Both can be true if Self trust is lacking. So work on Self-Trust first, and then see if it gets easier to trust others.
The third pillar of Trust is trusting in Life Itself. Sometimes, unique situations arise that are beyond the realm of our control. We might have to lean on the belief that “life will take care of me”. We might have to lean in with faith in the many ways in which life has supported us up until this moment. We might have to lean into the moments when things have just ‘worked out’, and all the times when crisis has been averted. Sometimes this is the only way through, until you know more. We might not have always had perfect circumstances, or perfect outcomes, but we are still here. We are still living. Life has given us this. Do all that you can, and then trust the unfolding. Imagine a future in which this difficult problem has been resolved. Imagine yourself in a state of calm. Imagine order arriving to the chaos.
The fourth pillar is trusting in God. ‘God’ is a provocative word in today’s world. People have many many various emotional reactions to it, which is understandable. In this context, ‘God’ simply means ‘a force of good higher than myself’. God can be swapped out for ‘Spirit’ ‘The Universe’ ‘Buddha’ ‘Mother Earth’ or anything you worship. This pillar is more spiritual than religious in nature. (But, if you are religious, it can really serve as a pillar of trust in many many ways). In my personal experience, I came to my belief in God through experiencing God. Not thinking about God. It happened to me in a time when I was doing a lot of meditation. This shift changed my life profoundly, and expanded me in a hundred directions. From that moment on, I’ve chosen to maintain my relationship and wonder about God regularly, because it has made my life richer and given me access to this fourth pillar. It became much harder to focus on all of my shortcomings, anxieties and neurosis when I realised that we are all divine miracles connected to each other through our collective life force. We can choose to lean into our spiritual pillar when nothing seems to make sense, when we are really hurting, when we are deep in shame, or we need to deeply heal.
What pillars do I tend to lean on? What is my ‘table’ made up of?
And lastly, remember this: you didn’t come this far, to not go further!
Life as a Creative Process:
Jung says: “ The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with objects it loves”
This is such an interesting quote, especially the last bit. When we feel safe enough to play, we are trusting that the survival needs will be/are already being met. From here, we are able to free ourselves up to explore creatively. When we fully trust ourselves as divine (and simultaneously imperfect and perfect) we are freer to use our imaginations to create new more expansive scenarios in our minds. We can then work to bring that which we love into reality.
Children engage in this imaginative play quite naturally. Children will create whole worlds, characters, storylines and conflicts. They are the hero in their own minds. As adults, we forget that we have this incredible power to create too. It is true that we can choose to create new scenarios or behaviours in our life, that can lead to new outcomes. We can also choose to create a new emotional state, by choosing to look at the quality of our thoughts and narratives each day. Our life is like this - or it can be, if we work on healing. Ask yourself in the morning: “what do I want to focus on creating today?” As Andrew Huberman says: “you’re either creating, or you’re consuming”. In a day, be a creator. Embody the Hero archetype, and step into your journey.
Dr. Joe Dispenza speaks at length about our emotional states as being nothing but echos of our past. Even just echos of yesterday, and the day before that. He says that we are in turn habitually engaging in the same emotional states everyday, without even realising it. We are very often not reacting emotionally to something that is right in front of us, but from something older. What is the emotional state that you would like to be experiencing instead? Can you practice this more? Is there some work you need to do, to process some old emotions or hurts, in order to move forward?
What is powerful about creativity is that it is forward looking, not backward. “Romance your future, not your past” (one of my favourite takeaway’s from Dr. Joe)
Understandably, big emotional life events capture the attention of the brain. The brain will over-focus on them, in order to protect and prevent them from happening again. Let’s first extend gratitude to our brain, for doing it’s job! However, these survival instincts come from deep within it, from our ‘lizard brain’. The problem with our primal lizardy-brain is that it is not the same part that can distinguish time. This part cannot tell you if something happened today, or ten years ago. So, we can potentially re-live painful events in perpetuity. Elongation of these emotional reactions can impact our mood, our behaviours, and our life over time. Our bodies and nervous systems hold on to stress and trauma, until we consciously work to heal. We might become addicted to emotional states like sadness, anger, bitterness, hatred, grief, fear, or anxiety, mistrust (!). We might also begin to identify with them, and instead of the Hero of our story, we cast ourselves as the Victim. We might numb the pain with addictions. However, what ‘fires together wires together’, and our default programming might become- just this. But remember: you are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings. You are the observer of your thoughts and your feelings. Trust that your Self is still here, and is the one observing. Your Self wants you to be whole and safe.
What can become problematic is when we begin to search for these same emotions everyday. As we wake up in the morning, we may put them on like a favourite pair of jeans, and wear them for the day. Anxiety, sadness, anger, fear. So, it can be useful to ask yourself: “am I reacting to something that is in front of me, or behind me?” “Is there another, safer, emotion or state of being that I can access right now?”. Try not to make this an either/or situation, or to judge yourself or dismiss your needs. Just try to be aware, and give yourself another option. Try to practice ‘firing and wiring” a more empowering or expansive way of being (for example gratitude, or peace). This might require action and discipline. But think of it as creative. How do I want to feel today? What do I need to do today, to make that a reality?
We now know that the brain is malleable. Not just in childhood, but in adulthood too. It will change when we put effort into changing it. But, we first need to know what it is we want to change. Is there an emotional state that you want to change? Are you disempowering yourself in some way, through habitual thoughts, feelings, narratives and behaviours? Can you become the creator of your life, instead of the victim of it? Can you take your power back from the hurtful events you’ve experienced? How?
When you begin to practice loving and trusting yourself fully, see if the creative mind begins to play with life again. Instead of sending our energy towards survival, we can move it to growth and repair. Thriving. Experiment with romancing your future each day, instead of replaying the past, and see what happens.
Homework suggestions: Take an abstract art class, and get messy. Let go of the attachment to the outcome, focus on the process. Find beauty in imperfection.
(Coming up in Part 3: Pain vs. Suffering, Anxiety vs. Intuition) References:
“Trust: Mastering the Four Essential Trusts” - Iyanla Vanzant “Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are doing the Uncommon” - Dr. Joe Dispenza
Stay curious!
Madeleine