Trust - 2

This is the second track on trust. The investigation is where do we place our trust? Do we put our trust in our bank account? Do we trust our routines? Do we trust our thinking?

Do you trust your body? The body is a trustworthy source of information. Often when we hear something that is disagreeable, the body lets us know. It gets tight.

Mindfulness is very trustworthy. It’s like taking off glasses that are really smudged. When we bring mindfulness to all of our life, we can stop the speed of the spinning. We can trust mindfulness and let that be the foundation of our lives.

Transcript

So this week we have been exploring trust. Specifically the question I left you with on Tuesday was where do we place our trust? Do we put our trust in our bank account? Do we put our trust in our routines? Do we trust our thinking? So on Tuesday I invited you to look at the places in your life where you place your trust that may not serve you. For example, For me trusting my thinking is a misplaced trust. Not all the time of course, But the way in which I operate from this central control tower that ruminates and tries to figure things out basically creating my escape plan. Like all the ways trusting this thinking isn't always wise. Do you trust your body? You know this is a good question to ask yourself. I've come to learn that my body is trustworthy. It's a valuable source of information. Often when I'm hearing something that I disagree with, My body lets me know and it gets really tight. There's almost like an internal putting up my fists or putting up my dukes, You know, Ready, A ready position to respond to what I'm hearing. And what I do in those moments and what we talked about yesterday in practice was I stop when my body goes into that position. It's not the time to respond. If you have a hard time tuning into your body, It is often really beneficial to start with just your feet. Like really feel your feet. Even right now, Just wiggle your toes, Feel your feet on the ground. If you're sitting on a chair, You can trust your feet. That's where the trust is because your feet are right here. It's the same with sitting, You know, Trusting your seat. When we sit down on the chair, The cushion that you're sitting on, You can trust at the very least that the the level of trust that you have with your feet the legs of the chair aren't going to fall out underneath you. You can trust the contact. It'll hold you. And maybe then you can start to trust being here and settling this settling on yourself. You know, It takes a while to settle, Especially in our day and age. And if you can't settle right away, Well, You can at least trust that it's possible to. We're doing that here in this practice. An analogy that can help with understanding this practice better is the idea of jumping. You know, If you want to jump, Kind of leap someplace, And you try to jump from standing still, It might not work so well. Usually, A person crouches down first. So you crouch down to leap up. You want to go in the opposite direction first so that you get some momentum and some energy to leap up into the air. And you might not believe you can jump, But you have to trust that if you crouch, You're going to be able to get a better trajectory of jumping. So seeing and understanding that many of us are going through our days spinning on our tiptoes. So keeping with this analogy of the feet, You know, You're spinning on your tiptoes of the mind, Spinning with our thoughts, Our fantasies, Our concerns, Our worries, Our challenges. We're spinning inside this spiral that is our life. Just spinning, Spinning. And I don't want to diminish the importance of how, Like, The strength of how big that can be for us, That spinning with the spiral of our life. But it's not necessarily the place where we want to put our trust. To trust instead being here, Really here in this experience for a few minutes in our life. You know, When we, When we come into meditation, We are learning to trust just the practice of sitting and being still and making contact with our out-of-control minds. So it's very helpful in the guided meditation today, How I brought us down into the body, Trusting the breathing, Trusting the rhythm of that. It actually provides us, Well, It's a preparation really for later, Later in our day. Well, It's a preparation really for later, Later in our day, Later in our life ahead. It helps us be more embodied and connected to just right here. We're more able to meet the challenges of our life much better than when we're spinning on our tiptoes. We begin to discover in the stillness, In the staying, Something that's really trustworthy within us. And we start to, I think the reflection becomes more like when we can trust this sitting and staying in the body, Then the task of practice is to begin seeing, Well, What is it that we can trust? What is it that we trust that is not so useful, That is not so helpful? Coming back to place our trust on our feet, On the ground here, Our body sensation. Now mindfulness, This practice that we're doing is very trustworthy. It's like taking off mindfulness is like taking off glasses that are really smudged. When we take them off, We're bringing like a clarity to all of our life and we can see and stop the spinning or at least see the spinning. Because it doesn't necessarily, Mindfulness doesn't necessarily slow us down, But it does bring us here into the only moment that we have and we can trust mindfulness and let that be the foundation of our lives. And that's what we're doing together. We're opening to that, Allowing for trust in the practice. To grow. And as we trust that, Our life, It reorientates a little bit. Almost like a new life, A life where the depth of the Dharma, The depth of the truth within us, The depth of our humanity, The depth of our goodness has a chance to surface and to grow. It's a phenomenal thing to discover this trust in this practice. And it's really understood through our own experience. I can talk about it until I'm blue in the face, But it's in your own experience. That, Ah, Just sitting and trusting this, Entering the body for 30 minutes a day or five minutes a day, Just going there. We start to experience our life in a new way. But where there's also a willingness, A willingness to experience things that are difficult. Our mind can be like going into a bad neighborhood and things that are wonderful, Allowing them to touch our heart. The practice of meditation is a way to allow our mind to touch our heart. You know, What occurs in the body is a deep intelligence and what appears in the practice. It appears because it's appropriate to face it right now, To work with it and to grow with it. So sometimes things show up in our practice. When we least expect them, Memories or, Or old grief or some way in which you've caused harm. And it's important to to hold that to bring it closer, Trusting that this is the process that what trusting what unfolds and appears in our life from the inside. And also trusting that whatever happens on the outside, What's happening around us. This too is an opportunity. And it may not seem like it makes logical sense to trust everything around us. But for someone who practices and understands that there is a deep wellspring of intelligence and wisdom and healing from this practice, From this movement of sitting, That this life is just an unfolding process. And when we can open to trusting the unfolding, Then we see in the moment, This process, This unfolding in whatever circumstances are happening in our life and it, And in that moment, We begin to transform how we engage with the world around us. Maybe the world or the people in our lives don't change, But something happens in the way that we meet it, Something different, We interface in a way that can, With practice, Make this situation more harmonious. So trusting this unfolding, This deeper place is something that we discover for ourselves over time. As our practice deepens and develops, We discover and recognize something that we can put our trust in. Thank you for your practice and your active listening. And I'll open it up now for reflections.