The Safety of Distrust
La Seguridad de la Desconfianza
A student explores why trust feels so difficult, and the teacher challenges whether distrust is something that happens to us or something we choose, revealing how it functions as a strategy rooted in the past.
The Safety of Distrust
A student explores why trust feels so difficult, and the teacher challenges whether distrust is something that happens to us or something we choose, revealing how it functions as a strategy rooted in the past.
During the meditation, what spoke out for me was how much you repeated the word "trust." We've spoken many times about my tendency toward a "no" to life, a rejection of life. And now I feel like I have little trust. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about trust.
I could be very direct with you about that, and I'm curious. How direct do you want me to be? If you were to say, on a spectrum from "very direct" to "ease into it gently," where would you land?
How about just ease into the directness? I do appreciate directness, though.
Trust as safety, not truth
So what do you mean when you say there's little trust? What is trust for you? What do you trust or not trust? Describe it as if you're talking to a four-year-old, as if I'm from another universe and don't have the word "trust" in my language.
I guess it has to do with my ability to believe, or follow through, or trust that everything will work out. That what's happening is what needs to be happening. Trust in myself, trust in people.
What does "work out" mean? You said two things there. One is about working out in the future, and one is about things being okay now.
That everything is moving in the direction that it needs to.
And how do you know what direction it needs to go?
I don't know.
And how can you distrust if you don't know? You'd have to know in order to distrust.
It just feels like...
No, don't skip the question. How do you know?
I don't know.
Are you sure you don't know? Because if you don't know, how could you have a trust judgment at all? Trust is, in a sense, a call. It's a decision. You trust or you don't trust. If you don't trust, you have a prediction. But if you don't know where things should go, how can you predict?
I feel more safe in the distrust.
There we go. That's what I call inner integrity. This is very common, and more common in science-minded people. You're a scientist, and it's beautiful to see the absolute inner integrity: you see it, you call it. That's really valuable.
You just feel safe in the distrust. That's such a powerful thing to see. Now you can look even more closely: why is it safer to distrust? Because trust is no longer about truth. It's no longer about reality. It's about safety. And safety is loaded with the past, loaded with conditions of what brought pain, what brought suffering. What you're sharing is really vulnerable and very honest. It makes sense.
The way to unravel it
I find it hard to... I've trusted in life.
The way to unravel this is honesty and integrity. Integrity here simply means seeing what is happening within you and letting yourself describe it as it is, without avoidance, resistance, or denial. You're on your way. This is how it unravels.
It's not going to be a one-off insight. But what matters is the discovery that for you, trust is about safety, and safety can only be based on the past. It's what you have learned brings pain or keeps you away from pain, in very specific ways.
As you discover more about those ways, trust can shift. Think of trust as an organ, like the heart. How does this organ operate? What does it trust, and what does it distrust? Right now, it may be operating primarily to diminish pain, to avoid fear. But it can move toward embracing life. That shift has to do with a deeper seeing of what is real, because what you're trying to avoid with the distrust is, right now, a strategy to avoid something that cannot actually harm you. There's an illusion there. What matters is that you're able to see for yourself, internally, how distrust is operating for you.
When you say there's little trust, there's a lot of active distrust. And because that distrust is based in the past, and based in a natural misunderstanding of what you are, you're going to be protecting what doesn't need protection. But once this is seen, trust can be freed, opened up, aligned with reality.
Trust as a living instrument
I have this kind of trust, and it's not about absolutely full trust of everything, everywhere, all the time. My experience is that I'm in constant free fall with life. There's an absolute trust that is, in a sense, with everything. But at the same time, with certain situations, there's a constantly balancing, learning process that is never perfect.
For example, if I'm a little tired and stressed, I'm not going to trust that I won't break something if I'm clumsy late at night in the kitchen. I'm not going to believe I'll operate in the best way and not cut myself. But that kind of trust is much more refined, more accurately attuned to the truth and reality of the moment. In the same way, with certain people, if I have a sense from experience or intuition, I may not fully trust that person in a very specific situation or dynamic. I can actively distrust and move away, or choose not to interact.
Trust and distrust are always operating like an instrument. But what can happen is that, due to past experience, we decide to be all protection, all avoidance, much more than is aligned with truth and reality.
Here's a metaphor. You might have seen videos of a stray dog that has been abandoned, starving, hurt, living on the street. Then some people find the dog and care for it. But if you watch the dog's reaction, for quite a long time it is in absolute rage, trying to bite the hands of the very people who are lovingly coming to help. You can see the mechanism of distrust the dog learned as a strategy for safety, because it has been mistreated so much by humans. Its response is: you're coming close to me, you're likely going to hurt me. The dog has lost the ability to detect that this person is actually loving and gentle. But it takes time, and then trust softens. There are these beautiful videos where you see dogs and cats move from a place of fear and pain into something delicious and soft and open, and healing as well. That's a deep process of trust. But it's not blind trust. It's trust attuned to reality.
Distrust as a choice
So when I first asked you how direct you wanted me to be, and you said "I have little trust," one can experience that as "I'm stuck here having little trust, and this is what's happening to me." But actually, it is one hundred percent a choice. You are choosing not to trust. You are choosing to operate in a form of greater distrust with yourself and others. That's the more direct way of looking at it. But then you can ask: why are you choosing that? How has it served you? Because it has been of service to you.
I guess it's overserved in my life. That distrust is what I use often.
You mean the distrust has overserved its purpose, to protect yourself?
Yes, to protect myself, I guess.
It really is about the exploration. What are you missing out on? And what is true? Because what you're protecting doesn't need protection.
I feel like I do need to protect my peace.
False peace
What you're calling peace is a false peace. It's a certain calmness in a withdrawn place. The path toward freedom goes through that which, to you, feels like the absence of peace: whatever storminess of mental and emotional experience you would go through by moving into what you're afraid of. And then you realize you're okay.
I feel like I have so much of it in my life. It's not serving me. There just seems to be so much storminess and chaos.
But that's not because of the things that happen to you. The storm and chaos come from the beliefs and interpretations you have around what happens.
I'm kind of confused right now.
You are, because I'm intentionally challenging your beliefs. It's a bit of a winding road, so confusion is actually a good sign. I'm challenging your belief system around what you think is right, what you should trust, what you should distrust, your sense of knowing how things should be, where they should go, what is serving you and what's not.
I'm still operating in the knowing, or what I think I know.
The difference between preference and knowing
You still think you know what all of these things are. That's different from having a sense and a preference. I have a preference for how I want things to go, and that's what I follow. In a sense, at every second I'm doing what I want to do the most. Sometimes I'm doing something that isn't fun, but it's what I want to be doing because of various reasons. So I follow my preferences. But is it the right thing? Is it moving in the direction everything needs to go? I have no clue. And in fact, I don't really care.
At the level where preferences and choices happen, it's not my business. What I prefer and what will happen, whether what happens is the right thing or not, that's not my business. But I am in movement with what I feel and experience to be the most loving, beautiful direction and creativity that is possible, in a constant free flow, constant learning, constant shifting co-creation. Is it going where it should? I have no clue. At another level, I know it is, that it can't not be. But it's also because it doesn't matter where it goes. Wherever it goes, it's going to be beautiful creation.
Even if it's painful. I had a few really painful months, and it was beautiful and incredible, but it was excruciating. Would I choose not to have experienced that? Not for a second. Would I have chosen not to experience it beforehand, if I had been given the choice knowing what would happen? Oh, for sure. That was not what I was preparing to experience. I would have said, "No, not that. Not in my list of preferred outcomes." But in the moment, I was in absolute, total, surrendered intimacy with everything that was happening. And it was excruciating.
I guess I bring a lot of past experiences to the present.
That's exactly what I was getting at. All of your trust and distrust, the way you choose what to trust in, is based on the past. It's based on protecting something that doesn't need protection, and avoiding things there's no need to avoid. What can happen is you learn that the fear and the pain you go through in life, that we all go through, is totally fine. And it is, in fact, absolutely beautiful.
I have a hard time swallowing that.
Describing the same painting
I'm telling you my experience, and I speak from a place of trying to communicate something as close as I can to what, to me, is universal. It's an understanding which, again, I have no guarantees or certainty of. But to me it is a universal understanding, a taste, a seeing of what seems to be the universal nature of experience, of being, of human beingness.
It helps to feel somewhat confident in that when you hear or read others who have known this, seen this, experienced this, and you recognize you're talking about the same thing. Before, I heard and read people who described a painting I could not see, and I imagined something that was not the thing. Then suddenly I could see the painting, and I thought, "This is not what they were talking about. This is nothing like what they were talking about." But then I went back to the books and recordings, and it was like, "Oh, it's exactly what they were talking about. I was just imagining something completely different." Going back to the descriptions, I could also see why it was so hard to put words to it.
So when I describe something and you say it's hard to believe, I understand. But I'm describing something that is not only my experience. I feel confident it's not madness, because there are others who describe the same thing in different ways. We're all talking about the same painting, metaphorically.
Is the pain and suffering and fear all tied to the story of who I am?
It's tied to the belief in the story. I have stories about what I am, who I am. I can write many books about it: beautiful stories, scary stories. But the belief that that's what I really am, that's a different thing.
The prison of "I can't function without this"
It just seems so hard to operate without that identity.
That's an idea. That's the perfect closing of the door of the prison of the mind: "I can't function without this." It's not true. It can seem like that, it can feel like that, sure. I've said what you just said a million times, thought it, felt it. It's not true. You don't even need to think to go through your day and do things well. One percent of the thoughts you have are useful.
It's like riding a bicycle. At first, you have to figure out where to put your foot, your hand, how to balance. But once you're riding, do you have to think about any of that? No. Most adults have learned how to function, but we still obsess about every single movement. That's unnecessary.
But so much of our life and our relationships are built around this identity. How do we separate or move away from that?
It's like the metaphor of the bird in the cage. The bird thinks: how am I going to fly out there without the safety of the cage? How am I going to stand on a branch if it's not this one I know, this stick I've always stood on? Well, you will. You'll be able to. You don't need the perspective from within the cage to function, to be, to exist. The sense that it's not possible is a belief, just a belief, that keeps you attached.
You can try these things. Go for a walk and really don't decide where you're going. Watch the decision process. Notice that you can calculate where to go and make decisions ahead of time, or not. Just walk, and then you realize you can go for a perfectly fine walk without any decisions or planning. You'll turn left, you'll turn right, and it will be spontaneous. Did you need to plan and think? No. In fact, it's probably a much more pleasant walk. The same goes for most of your day.
Thank you. I guess I just need reassurance.
I understand. Part of the reassurance is telling you: it's not true. And part of the reassurance is telling you it's your choice. You are choosing to distrust. Why? Do you want that to be different? It's your choice. It's up to you.
I will guarantee there will be pain, because there's life. But there will be pain whether you trust or distrust. Distrust is not going to save you from pain. In fact, it will have you more contracted, suffering more around the pain that is there, and creating more pain because there is life you're missing out on. The healthy suffering that arises is a sign: "I'm trapping myself in a cage, and I want to fly." Suffering is knocking on the door, saying, "Yes, you are. There's a way."
Yeah. Thank you.
You're welcome. It's very lovely to be here with you all. Take care, and have a lovely day.