How Do I Trust?

In part one of this series, I shared with you about my perception of what true love is, and the four components of true love. In this blog, I’d like to tell you more about the foundation of the true love pyramid: trust and safety.

In my experience, trust is something that I establish with another person, and I can really only trust another person if I trust myself. For me, this ability to trust that I can take care of myself feels like safety. Safety is something that I create for myself through grounding, working my spiritual practice, releasing negative emotions, and being in my truth.

There are many ways that I can ground myself, but my favorites are exercise, proper nutrition and sleep. Sleep in particular is really important to me. Without it I feel off-balance, and I find that my decisions and judgment aren’t as good as they could be. When I was a new mother with a baby I got my first taste of how much a lack of sleep could throw me off balance. It was really hard to concentrate on anything, or to make a decision. Not only was my head fuzzy, but my body was always on the edge of exhaustion, sapping my physical strength and my immune system. When I was that tired, I felt really unsafe, and my fear leached into my relationship with my husband, creating a lot of demands on him that were a little bit unreasonable. When we hired a nanny and I started napping more and then taking one night a week to sleep in, life got easier, and the tension in my relationship eased.

My spiritual practice and continuing connection to Spirit also helps to keep me feeling safe. Knowing that Spirit is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to guide me helps me to relax and realize that if I follow the guidance of Spirit,  if I really cultivate the art of listening, that I’m safe. Just today, for example, I was driving back into San Diego from a weekend away, and I was feeling impatient because most of the traffic was going a lot slower than I wanted it to, and I was worried about getting to work on time. As I was feeling that impatience, a voice in my head said, "This car in front of you is a guardian angel keeping you safe. Relax and slow down. All is well.". Not too long after that, traffic on the freeway suddenly stopped. When I passed the scene of the trouble that had slowed the traffic I saw a very nasty accident with many cars involved and people on stretchers by the side of the road. I clearly understood that if I hadn’t been held up by this one particular car on my drive down, that one of those people on the stretcher could easily have been me. I notice that the more I do my daily practice, the more that Spirit guides me in that way, and puts those quiet thoughts in my head.

When we come to relationship and begin to build trust, it’s important to bring in this same connection to Spirit, to really listen to what feels right to you. In the past I always started relationships with sexual attraction and connection, connecting at the second chakra, rather than getting to know the person first to see if I felt safe with them. I would notice behavior that didn’t feel safe to me, and just keep on having a relationship. For example, in the past my pattern was to choose men who were unavailable to me emotionally, either due to drug or alcohol use, or to some other form of emotional wound. I was like a hunter-seeker missile, I could identify these targets at a distance, and I would zoom in to make that old familiar connection. Then I would wonder why I kept having the same disappointing experience over and over again. As I healed from this pattern, it became really clear that I needed to retune my tracking system so that it would no longer target those men, but at first it was hard to be sure that the reprogramming had worked. So I faked it a little by taking more time to know my potential partners before getting sexual with them.

I learned instead to look at the behavior my partners were showing. Did they respect my boundaries and stay in integrity with me? I remember the first time I was ever in a relationship where a man respected my boundaries, because another pattern of mine was to choose men who would push at me until I caved in and did what they wanted, whether it was having sex with them or going to some event I didn’t want to attend, or doing some household chore that I didn’t like. In one relationship I was in, my partner repeatedly interrupted my meditation time even though the door was closed and I had specifically asked him not to interrupt me. So when I had a new experience of saying no to a man that I’d been in relationship with for a while, and hearing him say "ok" without any real upset about it, I was shocked. I hadn’t really known such a thing was possible. Later I learned that not only was it possible, it was healthy.

Once I am feeling a big yes to a potential partner’s behavior, and seeing that I also am able to stay in healthy behavior with them, I start to feel trust. For me that trust has to evolve over time, like the unfolding of a rosebud into a full and glorious scented flower. Once you arrive at that place of trust, and the foundation is built, you can move forward to explore the question of your feelings for each other, and the possibility that those can grow into unconditional love.

Kypris, Dakini and Shamanic Tantra Teacher holds a master’s degree in Biology, as well as a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, and is an initiated HeartWisdom Tantric Priestess. She is the author of “Journey to Sexual Wholeness, The Six Gateways to Tantric Sexuality”.

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