Regaining Trust

You know the times that you thought you were listening to guidance, and you even dared to act on it…and then it didn’t turn out anywhere near how you thought it would? Instead of having a wonderfully surprising and joyous revelation or experience bestowed upon you, instead you got hurt. You got angry. You felt misguided. And all the trust you had been carefully placing drop by drop into your trust bucket got kicked over and abruptly spilled out, leaving only a few measly drops.

Now what?

You’re thinking, “If guidance is always supposed to be compassionate, why would it have had me experience this? Or maybe that wasn’t even guidance at all–but if it wasn’t, I don’t know what is! If I can’t trust my own guidance, what or who can I trust?”

You’re stuck. You feel alone. You don’t know where to turn to find the right answer!

The first thing to remember is that guidance isn’t about the right answer. It’s not about making your life feel more comfortable and blessed—though it very often will. Guidance is about coming to a more complete knowing and embodiment of your essential self, your divine self, or whatever you want to call the part of you that is and always has been whole, healed and loved and that has a purpose in this world.

So that means that guidance is sometimes about revealing some of the negative thought patterns or layers of defense that you habitually wear as a way of offering you the opportunity to remove them. And though to your essential self this is the most compassionate and healing thing that could happen, to your egoic self this is not comfortable. It can even be downright excruciating or heartbreaking.

This actually happened to me this past week. An opportunity had presented itself earlier in the week that I wasn’t sure about. I checked my guidance about it, but I couldn’t get a clear read on it—I could tell that my own doubt, fear and expectations were affecting my ability to confirm my guidance. As the time to make the decision came closer, I decided to go with what I thought was guidance—and it had an outcome that I would have never wanted! I ended up feeling the sickening discomfort of some old familiar fears and patterns that I thought I had outgrown.

Though part of me thought I must have been wrong, that it had been the voice of fear rather than the voice of guidance I had acted on, I knew that it had been guidance. And after years of consciously engaging with my guidance I knew this wasn’t a cruel trick. I recognized this as a gift from Spirit to my essential self who desperately wants to be out in the world and witnessed.

The truth is, guidance is always compassionate and does have your best and highest good in its interest, and sometimes that’s not easy for your egoic self to swallow. But remember, you always get what you’re ready for and you never get what you don’t need when it comes to growth and learning. And I don’t mean that in a blaming, “you brought this upon yourself” kind of way, I mean it in the most loving and supportive, “hey didn’t you say you were ready to move past this, sweetie” kind of way.

But the tendency, having acted on guidance that brings you to pain, is to get angry, kick the damn trust bucket over yourself, and get away from the pain as quick as possible. And yet you know that every relationship, including the most loving ones, involve some pain and suffering that ultimately leads to a greater capacity to love if you can keep your heart open. As my wise friend Bob says, “all love involves suffering, so learn to suffer well so that you can love well.” And our relationship with Spirit is no different.

So if this happens to you, or if this has happened to you in the past and your trust bucket is still regrettably light in its lack of fullness, see if you can muster the courage to let yourself feel what got triggered for you that made you lose your trust.
For me this week it was that my inner perfectionist got a jab, and my inner pleaser got a punch to the gut, and the not-confident part of me came in and stole my voice and hunched my body over in a way that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. Ugh.

I gave myself time to really feel all those things and what ended up happening, as it always does, is that in feeling those things they loosened their control over me and another thin layer of the way that they conceal who I really am fell away. Of course they’re not all the way gone over night, but I am conscious that I am letting them go.

Know that you don’t have to figure out what the lesson was or understand why guidance told you something that caused you suffering, all you have to do is feel what you honestly feel—really feel it—and in feeling it realize that those really are patterns and thoughts that you’re ready to no longer let rule you. And that Spirit is here to compassionately, lovingly and sometimes fiercely support you in that.

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