Trust: What Does it Mean? How Can We Better Trust Ourselves?

Trust, such a common word. But such an important ingredient in a “good” life, a fulfilling life, a full life. But what is trust? What’s going on in ourselves and in our relationship with the world when we feel it?  How do we even know it is what we feel?

 

In the introduction to poet David Whyte’s wonderful book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, author and poet Maria Popova observes that words are not artefacts, not our possessions, not things, not static, but alive and always evolving. They feed on us as we feed on them; as we use them, we are used by them. In his book, she says, Whyte repatriates us in the land of language and thus repatriates us in ourselves.

 

For example, take the word courage. It tempts us to imagine bravely facing opposing forces in a military or physical or maybe even a political battle. And above all, to be seen as doing so. To reap the rewards.

 

But the roots of the word reach back to old Norman French, to coeur, heart. Courage is what we feel and show when we live life, relate to our community, to friends, with heart. To seat our feelings and actions deeply in our body and world. It is a type of love. Courage, Whyte says, is what love looks like when we’re tested by the everyday necessities of being alive and respond with caring, with surprise, with belonging. We realize an awareness of vulnerability is a necessity in taking a step forward. On the inside, it might seem like confusion. Only from the outside, or looking back, does it appear like courage.

 

And it seems to me, trust shares a related etiology. According to the Encarta: World English Dictionary, its roots are in the Old Norse traust, meaning confidence, and treysta or trust. And even further, to an Indo-European base, meaning to be solid, which is the ancestor of the English true, tryst, and tree. An interesting grouping. The word is normally used to mean confidence in and reliance on the good qualities, fairness, truthfulness, honor or ability of someone or something. It assumes responsibility, caring, even hope, or giving credit to somebody or something. It’s part of being daring. And maybe, it includes a bit of the love expressed in courage.

 

It’s such a wonderful thing to say, “I trust you”. At some times and places, trust was signified by a handshake. Pre-COVID (and hopefully, post-COVID), we might hug. We might say, someone is trusting, or worthy of trust. Just recently, I realized so much of my life depends on trusting myself. Even meditation requires trust, in the process, in ourselves.

 

When a thought arises in meditation or elsewhere, or a fear, or insight, we might respond by feeling jumpy or excited; our belly, hands, or leg muscles might clench. We feel life speeding up. And we think we can’t afford to miss this thought, can’t afford not to respond. We must shift our attention to it, shift our life to possess it. A sort of FOMO, or fear of missing out. For example, we might feel that if we don’t write it down or act on the thought right then, we’ll miss out on an opportunity, or we’ll forget and lose it. We won’t reap some reward or avoid some future disaster.

 

Just the moment by itself then becomes not enough for us. Life itself becomes not enough….

 

*To read the whole article, go to The Good Men Project.

The Silence that Speaks the Eloquence of the World: Two Liberating Questions

In every breath we can experience the whole of life, and death. We breathe out, and reach a point where there’s no breath left, almost no oxygen. We must let go, shift focus, and breathe in so we can live. And when inhaling, we reach a point where we’re too full. We must stop and let go. Life depends on these two ways of letting go⎼ to let us open more to life, or to stop what causes hurt and delusion. A sort of yes, no. Living and dying together.

 

When we inhale, there’s a pause, or can be⎼ if we put our attention on it⎼ when everything naturally gets quiet. We might hold our breath to hold the silence, the peacefulness. When we exhale, there’s also a point where we easily pause. We can become very awake and focused on everything that’s right there with us. We breathe ourselves awake.

 

Zen teacher and author Susan Murphy talks about the deeply mortal fear sitting at the back of every breath, unless we take time to notice and examine it. The fear of death, of breathing out for the last time, or feeling we lack something we need or want. It sits there, unseen, in the breath, waiting⎼ a fear that we can’t face life moving on, that nothing is forever⎼ that we can’t face reality and must separate ourselves emotionally from “it.” Or we cling to the delusion that we will always be here, that we can step out of time.

 

But there are several practices that help me feel the strength to examine and even transform that fear. Here are five: creation, exertion, being in nature, compassion, and love.

 

It’s not just any sort of creative act that does this, but one we do with total honesty. When we get very quiet inside, and nothing is in mind but the moment of noticing, then insights emerge seemingly on their own. They speak, not me. Even a brief visit beforehand to this silence, to take a breath with full attention, to meditate opens a natural door to creating.

 

Walking in nature can do something similar. I’m walking in a forest, next to a stream; or I’m on the rural road near my home and hear water running. And I want to get lost in the beauty of the sound. I look at the gulley beside the road, to see where the sound originates, or to better hold onto it, but can’t. It disappears on me when I try to grasp it. Maybe trying to grasp or cling to anything does this. We can grasp a hammer, a shirt, maybe even a Presidency, for a while. But a musical note, a moment, love, peace, even life⎼ no.

 

We spend so much of our time now enraptured or entrapped by the ways corporate and social media distract and manipulate our attention, and break everything into tiny bits of information or enticements. We focus so much on not missing out, on doing more and more, and the internal pace of our lives speeds up. We can habitually feel we’re falling behind. We feel what philosopher and Zen teacher David Loy calls a sense of lack, of inadequacy, in ourselves, in our lives. That if we don’t own the latest I-phone, hear the latest record, believe the latest theory, join a certain group there’s something wrong with us.

 

All this fragments our attention and speeds us to the edge of feeling threatened and anxious. But it might also open us to what was the central question in the life of Buddha, to maybe a central question of modern psychology and human society: what is, what causes, what ends what Buddha labeled Dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, suffering⎼ or mislocating the sense of lack, suffering as being out there, separate from us, so we never get free of it….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

The Dread That Was Sitting Beside Me Was Now Me: We Appear Like Two So We Can Be One

It finally caught me and then my wife. A thing we have dreaded; a thing that has pursued all of us for over 3 years and has touched everyone in one way or another in multiple times and ways. That has caught most of us. That we hoped and might have imagined was over. COVID.

 

In 2022, the CDC did a study of Americans 16 and older and found 77.5% of us had antibodies from infection. Clearly more of us have been affected since 2022, at least two more, and all the people we all know who have been sick in 2023.

 

It was said, over and over, we’re all in this together. And that is the most fearful thing, and the most hopeful. That maybe we will wake from a collective sleep and realize our mutual relationship, or that it’s not even a relationship but a continuum, or web of interrelations.

 

In the most basic way, someone passes the illness to us. We may pass it to someone else. Which gets to another part of this I had nightmares about: getting others sick. My spouse as number one. I couldn’t stand the thought of her sick, especially from me. She tested negative Thursday. But this morning, Friday, a sniffle, a cough, and a positive test. And I was scared all over again, but for her. When we realized I was sick, we had started sleeping in separate rooms, wore masks, etc. But at home, with only one bathroom and kitchen, isolation proved impossible.

 

The symptoms started for me on Tuesday. My wife and I were in New York City, on one of our few vacations since COVID. I was climbing the steps to go into The Museum of Natural History, a museum I knew well in my youth but not in recent years. And I tripped. One foot seemed to fall asleep on me. Then it happened again when we took stairs down from the fourth-floor dinosaur wing. And again, descending from the third floor. I realized something was off. I feared a stroke, but everything else in me was working perfectly⎼ or so it seemed.

 

Then at night, after a wonderful dinner, we returned to our hotel. And my head started feeling too heavy to sit on my shoulders and was spinning from the weight. My throat was absurdly dry and scratchy. My stomach a bit queasy. Most of you know the signs. And now I knew.

 

When I turned out the light, I realized that lying with me in bed was something so big it had become myth sized. Larger than any one human. Darker than night. A myth that felt very modern but in one form or another has been with humans forever, or maybe more so once we moved from grassy plains to enclosed spaces. To big groups instead of small ones. A possibly deadly illness that we could catch and pass on from one person to the next.

 

And I was frightened. Here it was. And I knew not what would happen to me or to us. Suddenly, I was not in my own hands. I realized we were never totally in our own hands.

 

And just as I fell asleep, someone knocked on the door of our room, The noise woke us up, and was repeated again and again. I yelled out in response, “Who is it?” “Me,” they answered. Was this a puzzle posed by the universe? “Who?”

 

I got up and went to the door. I looked through the peephole. A young woman was standing there, apparently alone, but my view was obstructed. I opened the door. Once she saw my face, she knew she was at the wrong door, apologized, and turned away.

 

It took a while, but finally peace and quiet replaced the knocking.

 

The next day, I tested positive….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

A Strange Illness: Reflecting on What Plagues Us and What Links Us to Everything

Since COVID, it’s clearer than ever that illness is a lot stranger than we might think. Illness isn’t just a matter of catching a bug or being a victim of a pandemic or exposure to environmental pests or pollution, or of aging⎼ although pandemics, bugs, aging, and the environment are certainly involved. So much seems to be involved.

 

When I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I caught a bug, or a few bugs of different kinds. And when I became ill and had to leave the village and country where I lived, I found out the people I left behind felt responsible for my illness. Not that they thought they should have taken better care of me. They believed someone in the village had caused me to get sick. For them, the germ of all illness was bad thoughts and intentions spread from one villager to another.

 

And in the U. S. many feel illness is a sign of weakness; that we or the sick person is somehow deficient, not strong enough to fight it. At work, we might denigrate someone who stays home to treat an illness ⎼ or we used to before COVID. Now, we hopefully just wish them to get well.

 

Ill can have several meanings and connotations, most are relative or comparative. To be ill is to be in an abnormal, unfavorable, undesirable state, and that we’re hurting, threatened, suffering, or have some defined condition called a disease.

 

In Buddhism, the word for suffering is Dukkha, although the translation is debated. Zen teacher Steve Hagen, in his wonderful book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, says Dukkha is in opposition to Sukkha, or satisfaction, so instead of suffering we get unsatisfactory. But more accurately, he says, imagine a bicycle wheel out of kilter. Every time the wheel spins around to the “off” spot, there’s a bounce or wobble that’s bothersome, produces pain, and makes us unhappy. Suffering is being out of kilter. Another Zen teacher, David Loy, analyzes suffering as the sense of something  missing, lacking, in ourselves, in life.

 

We can see suffering all around us. In Buddhism, the first of the four noble truths Buddha realized in his enlightenment was Dukkha, recognizing suffering, being out of kilter is just part of life. The other three are that there’s a cause of suffering, a way to let go of or cease suffering, and a path to that cessation. So, is all life tied to illness? Is suffering the same as illness? Or a response to it?

 

Part of me says, “you know what it is to be ill.” But do I? I know when I hurt and something in my body is off.  But when I try to define illness, I can get lost in the complexity. And sometimes I am ill or in pain, but I’m not suffering. The pain sort of reassures me I’m alive.

 

There are conspiracy theories, exaggerations, lies about illness, especially the pandemic⎼ but there’s also science. The mind and body, despite having separate labels are never separate; they are two words for ways to view one reality. When we feel powerless, or depressed emotionally, for example, we’re depressed physically. Likewise, when we do things like mindfulness meditation, we improve immune response, digestion, heart rate, etc. and the breadth of our awareness. We don’t suffer as much, depending not on what’s happening but on our response to it….

 

 

*To read the whole piece, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.