"Trust: An Attitude of Mindfulness" this Sunday with Jane Rauenhorst

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

From Jane: I have been exploring the "9 Attitudes of Mindfulness" as offered by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  The fourth attitude is Trust. Below are excerpts from an article by Phillip Moffitt entitled "Trust Issues" (which can be accessed in full here). In the article Phillip dives deeper into the meaning of trust by exploring transactional and innate trust.  I found this exploration very helpful.  I look forward to exploring how these concepts intersect with how trust is experienced for members of our community this Sunday. I hope you can join us. Registration and Zoom information available here.

Excerpts from "Trust Issues" by Phillip Moffitt

Trust usually refers to what might be termed “transactional trust,” in which you are counting on a future result to occur. It is largely performance based, and involves an agreed-upon exchange, and is measured by outcome. In engaging in transactional trust, you are participating in the building of community, which only works if there is a general feeling of trust. Transactional trust is based on mutual self-interest and involves acting according to common agreement. Life would be literally impossible without such trust, and it must come from the people in the community,

Even when understood in its profoundest sense as character and community building, transactional trust itself does not lead to liberation. It does not bring ultimate clarity of mind and peacefulness of heart, although it is a necessary foundation for an inner sense of freedom. True transformation is only found in committing yourself to what may be termed “innate trust.”

Innate trust is based on the understanding that if you live mindfully moment-to-moment and have the intention to act according to your values, even in difficult or confusing situations, your life will unfold in the most harmonious manner possible. Innate trust is not based on the future performance of another. It is not measured in clock time. You surrender measuring your life by future outcomes, concentrating instead on how well you are able to be present in this moment.

Implicit in innate trust is the understanding that external conditions are in the end not a reliable source of happiness or meaning because they are always changing. Innate trusts accepts the hard facts of life that things are always changing in this manner, the future is uncertain, and wants and fears are endless.

With innate trust you have the strength to stay with the experiences of your life whether or not you have a strong feeling of transactional trust. If in fact (transactional trust is broken and) you were cheated, it does not ruin your day; rather, it is just a moment of unpleasantness you have to deal with. You have confidence in the “beingness” of your existence, even when the “doingness” of your existence is not going well.

This sense of being is the real basis for freedom in life. It is not that transactional trust is to be abandoned; you continue to function in this manner. But as your inner life matures, what matters more and more is how you are being with whatever life brings you.

Innate trust is a crucial ingredient in feeling related to others, be it a lover, friends, or family members. It is innate trust that allows you to love unselfishly. It is not that you trust your loved ones never to hurt you, for hurt and disappointment are part of the human experience. Rather, you trust their core goodness. In fact, you celebrate it by extending your trust. This trust is not based on a transactional outcome. You simply trust that however the relationship unfolds, your vulnerability to the other is a worthy act. The occasional disappointment is the cost of having a healthy sense of trust. When you meet someone who extends innate trust to you, you feel deep unconditional acceptance. You in turn can learn to do this for others. Keep in mind that this does not mean you’re supposed to abandon common sense or in any way become a victim of another’s abuses.

When you first start to examine your relationship to transactional and innate trust, you may question, “What is there about life that can be trusted?” I submit that the nature of life itself is reliable and can be trusted. For instance, you can be certain humans will be true to the nature of their species, which is unpredictable, ever changing, both generous and self-centered. You may like the positive aspects of human beings and hate the negative, but they exist together in all of us. Accepting that all people are like this relieves the pressure of looking for perfection in others or measuring your own. This provides relief from the pressure of getting your life just right or feeling like a failure when bad things happen.

I also submit that you can trust relying on your intentions to orient you in life, even in those moments when you are feeling confused. Intentions have to do with how you want to be in the journey of life; goals have to do with what you would like to accomplish. Goals are great for organizing how you spend your time, but they are not nearly as reliable a source for innate trust as your intentions are. Your intention is how you live in your own heart and mind right now. Goals are conceptual, a hypothetical future.

Imagine you are walking to the top of a mountain: You can affect how you take the next step, but you cannot affect the mountaintop. Not understanding the difference between intentions and goals is one of the key problems in maturing your relationship to trust. It may seem like a simple distinction, but in the course of your daily life you may well be repeatedly confusing the two and having many trust issues as a result.

Falling Prey to False Trust

There is another kind of trust, which is often a major hindrance to developing innate trust. It is what I call “false” or “demand” trust. You already know false trust through your life experiences. I trust you to meet my needs. I trust you not to change. I trust you to be some other way than you are. You may laugh as you read these statements, but they are not funny for either person in a relationship. Demand trust is a form of aggression. When this emotional state is predominant in a personality, it can come from excessive fear or neediness, or it can be the trickery of a manipulative personality.

Demand trust is trying to force what can only be freely given. Ironically, it is actually distrust disguised as trust. The yogi described her boss as a person whose insecurities were so strong that he pulled others into the whirlpool of his fears. He constantly second-guessed his staff while telling them how much confidence he had in them.

What makes demand trust so damaging is that it can undermine the possibility of innate trust. If you can recognize false trust for what it is when you first encounter it, then it is not so debilitating, and you can either remove yourself from the situation or insist on a transactional discussion.

If you become paralyzed with the inability to trust yourself, either you may be falling prey to your own demand trust to be perfect or else you have not developed the strength of innate trust that enables you to tolerate being present when your own fears and insecurities are strong. If others feel as though they cannot trust you, you might ask yourself if it is because you make false promises out of fear, which indicates a lack of innate trust. Or are you untrustworthy because of insufficient inner discipline, which signifies a problem with transactional trust, as does the lack of commitment to honor your agreements. The third possibility is that you repeatedly succumb to demand trust such that you make agreements to be other than who you are. To find peace in life, both transactional and innate trust must be reconciled in your behavior.

While it is easy to know the pain of being subjected to demand trust, it is not so easy to recognize when you have unconsciously become the perpetrator and used trust as a weapon because of your own vulnerability. This is something most of us do on occasion. During my conversation with the yogi about her trust issue, she came to see that she was being almost deliberately naive in regard to her lover who had disappointed her in a manner that was totally consistent with his personality.

She hadn’t trusted herself to stay present in the moment; therefore, she had missed all the signs indicating who he was. It was her lack of innate trust that had led her astray. Likewise with her boss–she was not trusting herself to be okay in those moments when he was manifesting his fears. Part of her unease with him stemmed from a hidden demand that his character be other than it is, which is like insisting that a mosquito not bite or a fly not buzz.

Each of these insights was a delight to the yogi. She began to taste freedom from the circumstances of her life and became very interested in cultivating innate trust, making it her meditation and practice for the year. The clarity she achieved did not come all at once but over a period of months in which she actively observed and reflected on what was true about herself.

Her hard work is an example of how intention unfolds in daily life. You identify the values with which you want to experience life, then when a challenging situation arises, you apply those values through the practice of intention. In doing so, you are trusting life, trusting yourself, and trusting in trust.

Imagine that life at its core is a web formed of trust that we each rely upon for support and that each of us creates new strands of trust for the web throughout the day. When we fail to do so, the web that supports us weakens. Viewed this way, transactional trust itself becomes a spiritual practice, one of character building through intention and discipline, which refines our very being while joining us with others. However, the web of trust is delicate and easily torn. When this happens in a business or personal relationship, a community or a country, transactional trust is replaced by adversarial advantage seeking–the-dog-eat-dog, only-the-fittest-survive mind-set. When trust falls into shadow, there is little generosity, and the only restraint is that which is imposed by law.

The poet T.S. Eliot captured the essence of innate trust in these lines from Four Quartets: “Love is most nearly itself when here and now ceases to matter.” He is not talking about indifference to the here and now but rather the willingness to be with life without attachment to outcome. It is important to understand that this does not mean caring less. You can afford to care more, to be vulnerable, and to meet difficulty in life directly because it is your ability to care, to love, and to manifest your values that matters to you, not the outcome. You want to show up for what matters in your life and do your best to bring happiness. These intentions are the underpinnings of your life, what you place your trust in. You acknowledge outcomes to be ultimately beyond your control and at times they seem even beyond your comprehension.

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