Trust Fun, Baby

Trust Fun, Baby

Today’s Creative Question is, “Why do I trust?” This is a fundamental thing for us humans, a huge part of our potential happiness. Curiously, as I followed a definition train through the dictionary, the sense of the word seemed to get vaguer and vaguer.

What it kind of boiled down to is this. Trust is putting our well being in the hands of another.

Wow.

We learn a lot about trust at the very beginning of our lives. If we have good teachers, trustworthy teachers, we learn lessons that will support us our whole lives. If we have untrustworthy people whom we are reliant upon, we will learn lessons that will leave us feeling betrayed over and over. Dang.

My line has been, “Trust is giving you a pointy stick, showing you where you can hurt me the most, and hoping you won’t poke me.”

The good news is that we can learn to trust, we can learn to recognize untrustworthies, and avoid them, at least not letting them be in charge of our care. And the better we get at it, the more trustworthy people we have around us. How cool is that.

More good news is that the more we trust, the more we can relax. The more we relax, the more we can let our lives unfold, releasing our feeble attempts to control stuff, outcomes, and others.

The more we relax, the calmer our bodies get. That means that we can soothe a lot of inflammation, which causes a lot what we tend to think of as aging problems. It has more to do with inflammation than age, and the more we settle into peace, the less we have to be fired up about.

Isn’t that interesting? Inflammation is one way our bodies tell us that we are taking stuff waaay too seriously. And while that’s not to say we should laugh everything off, we probably all could laugh a whole lot more.

I used to experience a lot of inflammation in my body, spirit, emotions, and mind. I didn’t want to live like that, feeling hot under the collar, being in pain, both physical and emotional all the time, my mind in turmoil with the monkey mind chattering negative crap at me all the time. Yuck!

The more I trust, the more I let go, the more I rely on you to be good to me, the easier my life gets. I am assuming that there are as many ways to let go as there are people. Here’s what I do:

Identify what I’m stressing out about. It’s not always what I think it is. I use questions, of course. What am I stressed out about? That’s the first one I answer. Why am I stressed out about that?  That’s the second. I will ask that one over again, drilling down until I get to the crux. Often, finding the crux will be a huge relief, as though the stress was just keeping me away from it. Often, it’s something I can do something about right now. If not, I am at least aware, and can come up with a Creative Question to change the energy of the crux.

Why do I choose to trust?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 03262013