What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Free Article
The Innocence of Trust
Little children trust open-heartedly. They trust themselves, they trust strangers, they trust their families and friends — they trust life.
Slowly, gradually, the innocence of trust is chipped away. Your family teaches you not to trust strangers. A simple mistake is ridiculed by a teacher or a peer, and you stop trusting yourself. Someone does something that hurts you, and you stop trusting others.
Life starts feeling scary instead of welcoming. You’ve lost the innocence of trust.
Adults yearn to trust. Yet adults seldom trust anyone — not themselves, not their co-workers or boss, not even their family and friends.
Healing the wound of mistrust is an ongoing process that can’t be solved in a single newsletter article. However, here are some things to consider as you observe the ways in which trust — and lack of trust — affects your life.
Trust, survival, and fear
As a child, when your trust was betrayed it felt both painful and frightening. That’s because as a child, your survival depended on the reliability of others.
As an adult, you have options and strengths you didn’t have as a child. Your survival isn’t so dependent on the good will of the people around you. Yet the fear that arises when someone appears to be untrustworthy is linked to your most basic instincts. And it’s easy to stay stuck in those old habits of fearful thought, feeling, and behavior.
When one client stopped and looked at her fears about money, she found herself laughing. “I’m hardly going to land on the street,” she said to me. “Tapping into my savings, or even into my retirement account, may not be my preference — but it’s a far cry from the bag lady images my mind has been creating!”
Turn towards yourself
Feeling betrayed is a powerfully unpleasant experience for most people. My clients tell me that their initial reaction is to shut down, turning away from the person who let them down and from their own feelings about what happened.
However, when you turn towards what you feel and allow yourself to experience it, you offer yourself support in ways you may never have known before.
In turning towards yourself and your feelings, you may also notice a discrepancy between those feelings and the actual event that apparently caused them.
If your feelings are out of proportion with what occurred, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Instead, it’s your opportunity to look deeper at what’s truly happening. Can you uncover the beliefs and thoughts, perhaps about past events, that are at the root of what you’re feeling now? And do those beliefs and thoughts actually apply to your current situation?
No doormat required
Trust doesn’t mean you lie down and allow everyone to walk on you. It doesn’t mean you yield responsibility to anyone who’s clearly unable to assume it. And it doesn’t mean you trust anyone to be anything other than exactly who they are.
Trust begins with yourself. Start trusting yourself. Stop using yourself as a doormat.
One client recently realized that her search outside herself for support and validation meant living in a constant state of insecurity and fear. As she said to me, needing validation from someone else — even someone she loves and trusts implicitly — means she can’t ever stand in her own power.
Discovering her trust in herself — who she really is, and what’s really true for her — has been a long and sometimes difficult journey. Yet she’d be the first to say that it’s brought her into a deeper, more rewarding experience of what it means to be in real relationship with others — and with herself.
Now when someone offers support and validation, she can accept it as the gift it is. She’s not desperate for it, so she can receive with gratitude instead of anxiety.
Healing the wound of mistrust is a gradual process. It takes time and commitment to realize your own trustworthiness, and to step into the power of your own autonomy.
It’s time well spent, and a commitment worth making. Because in the end, it’s your personal freedom that’s at stake.
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), from Faust
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