Trust
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
— johann wolfgang von goethe
As significant as it is to connect within, without trust, there’s no impact. Live your life with faith in your own wild wisdom, certain that you know what is right for you, committed to and confident in your worth, and hopeful that you will forge the most abundant path according to your highest good. Trust is invaluable in aligning you with your Soul. In this chapter, I’ll pour out my stories, my biggest lessons, and all I’ve learned about trusting in me.
Cultivating Trust in My Knowing
It was a stunning Saturday afternoon in May 2017, less than a week after my fortieth birthday. I was standing on the side of an active Californian volcano, ankle-deep in snow, eyes closed, soaking up the overwhelmingly delicious and unmistakably healing rush of energy flowing through me as I stood in the center of a powerful energy vortex.
I’d spent the morning walking through the sacred sites of Mount Shasta, and although I was a long way from where I lived, I felt right at home. Now here I was, in one of the most potent places on earth. After I’d been in the vortex for a little while, my guide, Ashalyn, asked me if I was done. I opened my eyes, smiled, and said yes.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “There’s a being of light about ten feet behind you.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
She gave me a look I’d already seen many times that day. Even though we had only met that morning, I’d spent enough time with Ashalyn to know what her eyes were saying. I knew from her silence—and raised eyebrow—that I still didn’t trust myself. I was still giving my power away. I was still scared of tuning in, sharing my answers, and risking being wrong. I was standing on the edge of a goddamn volcano with all the forces of Mother Nature coursing through my body and I was still unsure of myself.
I closed my eyes and opened my palms to receive wisdom from Spirit. With fresh determination and grit, I tuned in to the being behind me.
“Grandma!” I shouted.
Ashalyn smiled.
Immediately I felt the love of my Mama’s Mama. A beautiful woman I’d barely known as a child but had felt her guidance in spirit for many years, ever since my Mama’s youngest sister sent me Grandma’s gold ring.
“My darling girl, I’m so proud of you for everything, for being who you are, for following your heart to Mount Shasta, and for being brave,” Grandma told me. “Now will you please stop giving yourself a hard time for everything; perfectionism is hurting you.”
I smiled a big wide smile of understanding and acknowledgment. I nodded, grateful and giddy. And then I cried. I bawled for a solid fifteen minutes; I cried so hard, so ugly, and so loud. My whole body shook. My knees gave way. When Ashalyn checked in on me, I couldn’t stop the saltwater stream to speak. I went on crying until I was done.
When I was finished, when the healing was through, I explained to Ashalyn that the day I took home Grandma’s resized ring from the jeweler, she came to me in the form of the song “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” by Savage Garden, on the radio. I pulled the car over to the side of the road, covered in goose bumps, and for the first time ever, I just knew a song was sent to me from the other side.
The lyrics speak of mountains, oceans, and lying on the earth under falling stars. Over the years, I’d felt Grandma’s strong and healing presence when I was floating in the ocean on holidays, bathing in the sea, and now here she was right next to me while I stood on one of the world’s most breathtaking mountains. The perfection of the moment blew me sideways. (Since then, I’ve felt her close to me on a trip to the country where I made a medicine drum. One night the stars were so vivid and thick, it appeared they were falling down on me. She was totally there, too. Nice one, Grandma.)
If those tears had any emotional substance to them, if there was something that I was shedding in the salty lakes that pooled and froze at my feet, it was doubt. Because ever since that moment, I have trusted myself like never before. I’m not perfect, but I have honored my intuition daily. Of that, I am wildly proud.
I trust in me. I trust in my spirit. I trust that my path will be clear when I need to know the next step. I trust that I have a gilded purpose. I trust that I will know when to speak my truth. I trust that I am taken care of and I am safe. I trust that love will guide me home.
That’s a lot of trust to cultivate, but when doubt has been cleared, there’s finally space for trust to enter. If doubt does show up uninvited, it doesn’t last long around here.
Mount Shasta, Ashalyn, and my gorgeous Grandma changed me forever. Now I believe in me.
Limitless Beings Ride Their Own Wave
Limitless beings, such as yourself, are incapable of thriving within limits. Yet, here we are; oversaturated, overinsulted, overpreached, overinformed, overshamed, overinstructed, overexposed, overcriticized, and overwhelmed by the rights and wrongs, the dos and do nots, the rules of living in a restrictive box … when we’re the same shape and form as the ocean.
We’re fluid and wild, boundless and vital. We’re not meant to be contained. Trusting ourselves is an impossible task if we have no say in the direction of our lives. Trust can only be cultivated from taking a step in faith and knowing that we cannot fail, that our truth is the most important mentor as we walk our path.
You don’t need to buy into anyone else’s fears or ideas. Not your parent’s. Not your teacher’s. Not your doctor’s. Not your guru’s. Not your partner’s. Not your boss’s. Not the media’s. The only person to trust completely is you, sweet Soul. You are not responsible for what has happened to you, but you are responsible for how you act, react, think, speak, and feel. Know your values. Let them be fluid. Sync them with your heart.
Go ahead, wild ocean, and soak up the advice of ten thousand gurus and guides, books and movies, lovers and seekers, mentors and teachers—but at the end of the day, you need to trust that you alone have the final say in your life, and that your final say is perfect and worthy and good.
Your intuition will show you what advice, guidance, and wisdom is meant for you at this time. Your instinct will tell you when to walk away. Your insight will light up your path with the possibility of new ideas. Trust in your vastness. Be an ocean of love for the world.
Trust Involves Patience and Courage
My Soul sister Hanna has learned a lot about trust in her life, particularly when it comes to living intuitively. She told me a story recently about finding her place in the world that brought a huge smile to my face. Hanna grew up in Poland and moved to England for six years when she was a young adult. In England, she was settled and mostly happy. She had an amazing career, a long-term relationship, and a wonderful circle of friends.
But there was always an inner, uncomfortable niggle, like she wasn’t properly at home yet. Her Soul never felt as expansive or fulfilled as she had hoped. Something was missing, but she had no idea what it looked like.
One day, she was guided into a very deep meditation with a mentor to discover her place in the world. She saw images of a beautiful, warm, and sunny country with gorgeous nature and animals. With a pounding and expansive heart, she knew … this was home. When the session was over, she had no clue what to do, but a few days later, serendipity stepped in. Images of Australia came up “randomly” on her computer, images that had the same resonance as the place in her meditation. Her heart knew; her intuition was calling her home. She had felt the truth and she couldn’t turn her back on it.
“It wasn’t easy,” she told me, “but every day I woke up with that feeling in my heart. There was no day or night when I didn’t feel the urge to go to this country to see it. The journey was very difficult because my parents didn’t support me, most of my friends couldn’t understand why I was doing this, I had to finish my relationship because my boyfriend didn’t want to come with me, and my career had to be dealt with.”
It took two years to make the move, but she’s never had a single regret. “I put my foot on this land and I knew straight away in my heart that I’m in the right place. I instantly experienced a deep feeling of peace, happiness, and fulfillment I had never known before—and it is with me every single day. This is my home. Every day is a blessing. It’s the best decision of my life. The hardest, too, but the most rewarding. I’m so grateful for my intuition, courage, and faith. The more I live in my truth, the easier life flows and the more amazing people I meet. People help me a lot on my journey, and often it feels like I am meeting angels.”
Hanna has been shining her light in Australia now for seven years. She’s met her Soul mate, whom she is now married to, works with native animals, lives near the beach, and radiates her inner sunshine for miles around.
Charging your heart with hope instead of self-doubt makes the journey of self-awareness a sparkling one. But for many, it’s not easy. Perhaps someone you loved repeatedly doubted you. Perhaps you were not completely trusted by a parent, guardian, teacher, or partner; they may have controlled, disregarded, or even ignored your desires. When the people we love and admire show us they don’t trust us, we often fall into line with their beliefs and take them on as our own. It’s less painful this way. We mistakenly think this is the safest route. Over time, our self-trust weakens, we’re not sure if we’re “right” or trustworthy enough to speak our truth, and we look to others for advice that we could easily give ourselves, if only we could depend on the contents of our hearts.
I felt the heavy, vacuous feeling of obsessive self-doubt for many years. For me, the worst part was the suspicion, confusion, and inadequacy within, even when it was clear that other people around me thought I was courageous and living my truth. I have met amazing friends, been promoted many times at work, traveled solo in countless countries, been lucky in love, birthed two brilliant beings, and run my own successful business, but still there has been a lot of self-doubt, like I didn’t deserve my life and I didn’t trust myself to not mess it all up. Thank goodness it is greatly diminished these days.
Self-doubt is exhausting. Always unsure of yourself, your feet never really hit the ground with confidence, you never fully relax, and you’ve always got something to prove so no one discovers how “wrong” you really are.
I find self-doubt to be the product of an overactive ego that has been handed a loudspeaker. The ego, instinct, and trust all have a close relationship. When your instinct isn’t grounded in security, when your gut is hurting, you may begin to feel vulnerable, and that’s when the ego tries to step all over your fire. Nourish your gut, heal your ancestral lineage, bless your family, meditate, find a chakra healer—do whatever your gut is asking you to do for healing. When you can see beneath this false sense of unworthiness and uncover what has brought this unease into being, you will experience a powerful level of healing that will strengthen your instinct and give rise to a stronger foundation of confidence within.
You were born worthy, and you are the one with the answers. Fall gently into trust. There’s no force needed to trust yourself; force will only get in the way. Simply allow trust to be part of how you live, and you will experience a deep worthiness, hope, and self-confidence within you.
Calling In Personal Power
Self-trust is a crucial part of cultivating personal power. Trusting excessively in others is giving your power away, while trusting yourself is keeping your power within, like a fire that burns strong.
Chronically looking to other people for advice, validation, permission, and acceptance is constantly giving your power away. When you’re always focused externally, slowly you lose the capacity to think, act, or create for yourself because you’ve forgotten who you really are and what you truly desire. The ego loves this way of living; it loves having external identities to rely on. It doesn’t want you to think for yourself because that’s way too risky.
This way of living may drive you to value possessions because you’re not tuned inward, so you’re continuously looking for meaning outside yourself. Meaning can never be found externally, because that’s not where it lives. If left unchecked, these kinds of cravings will only get more intense. You’ll need more things to attempt to satisfy this bottomless desire or addictions may arise in order to numb the pain of your unheard truth.
What your Soul genuinely craves is an unshakeable connection within. When you tune in to your intuitive heart, you begin to live life from an empowered and internal focus. You get curious about the ideas of others whom you admire, but in the end, you go your own way. You make your own rules. You design your own spirituality. You eat food that feels right to you. You connect with people who feel good to you. You speak your truth when you need to. You create meaning in the small moments of mindful magic. You take time to find out who you want to become, and you devote and prioritize your time accordingly. This is how you do you. And this is how you develop a strong sense of trust in yourself, by aligning with your intuitive vehicle and noticing how far it takes you along the slipstream of life.
The more internally focused you become, the more you lose those shallow external identities that your ego has been hooked into. You become genuinely free as you come back home to your Soul. You learn that the risks you took in simply and honestly being yourself weren’t as scary as your ego tricked you into thinking they would be.
Sacred being, love and trust yourself exactly as you are: a Soul, created by Great Spirit, made of light and love; a body, a wondrous work of art, with all its curves and beauty, that you chose before you were born; a mind, as clever as any other, with gifts and talents and the ability to achieve anything you desire; and a spirit, a never-ending energy that pulsates within and around your being, touching all you connect with.
To be clear, this isn’t about not trusting anyone else. This is about trusting you first.
• Ritual •
Affirmations for Self-Empowerment
To cultivate more trust in your heart, try these affirmations. I recommend writing your own if the inspiration comes to you and placing them somewhere obvious and meaningful. If one of them feels really powerful when you say it out loud, it’s a message for you to open up to the energy of the words as deeply as possible. Don’t rush these; say them out loud and let the energy of the words linger. Tune in to the feeling of each of them to amplify their activation within you.
• I have the wisdom of many lives and the ancient ones in my Soul.
• I trust that I know what is true, helpful, and nourishing for me.
• I consciously create the adventure of my dreams every day.
• I adore myself and regularly take time to listen to my wants and needs.
• I am my own wise guru. I bow at my own altar. I wholeheartedly respect my wishes.
• I am here on this planet for an important reason. I allow my purpose to unfold daily.
• I am worthy of abundance, peace, money, freedom, love, and living life on my own terms.
• I cherish my pure connection to the cosmos every day.
Friends Are the
Guardians of Our Hearts
There’s no safer place in the world than a group of friends who love, respect, accept, and honor your uniqueness, authenticity, and truth. People who embrace the evolution, experience, and expression of you.
Finding my Soul sisters and brothers has been an adventure in trust. The more I know and respect myself, the more likely I am to attract those who respect me as I am. The more I trust others and allow them to depend on me, the more sumptuous and vibrant the experience of friendship becomes.
I’ve created many friendships in the past from a place of shallow self-worth and trust. I’ve been draining, intimidating, anxious, fake, needy, or too pleasing. The people whom I connected with on this level didn’t respect me because I didn’t respect myself. These friendships were rarely genuine or real because they weren’t based on my truth. Only a few friends who saw through the façade to the real me stuck close and stayed awhile.
That’s how it is with friendships. Start with an open and honest heart and choose those who feel good, and you’ll receive back whatever you give. Listen to your gut when it tells you to stay away. You don’t need to fix people. You don’t need to be everyone’s friend. Just move toward those who are meant for you.
We all change, we all grow, we all have different wants and needs. Trust a handful of aligned friends. Without trust, your relationships won’t deepen or expand to their full potential. Allow space for arguments. Expect times of silence and separation. Some will turn their back on you; bless them. Others will gossip about you; forgive them. Stay strong in your light and don’t take it personally.
Find the true friends with whom you can have mindful conversations, delicious adventures, wild holidays, long hugs, longer lunches, and sacred times. Connect hand to heart. Never fear the uncertainty; it’ll keep you anxious, lonely, and disconnected.
Friends will hold space for you to be unashamedly real. To be honest about everything. Find solace in communities who are navigating this journey of a lifetime in their own way, who have their own beliefs that may differ completely from your own, and who wish to share their wisdom from their own honest and unique perspective. If you can trust that you’re okay to be wholly you, then you’ll create space for others to be safely and completely themselves.
By being around others who are in touch with themselves, you’ll also become more in tune with yourself. By connecting with brothers and sisters who love to laugh, you’ll rediscover your own rapturous laughter. It doesn’t have to be profound truth-talking all the time. Sitting silently, shoulder to shoulder through a movie is calm connection. Talking about life over a good pizza is joyous connection. Bushwalking together is natural connection. Making music together is harmonious connection. Browsing your local markets together is adventurous connection. Meet with others in a way where you can really enjoy being together.
There may be periods in your life when you won’t have a close friend, or a tight community, or a regular dinner date. Friends come and go. And that’s okay. There’s a cycle and a season for everything and everyone. Take time to celebrate those who are in your life at this moment, those who lift you higher, those who honor your trust and trust you right back. These people are the guardians of your heart.
My friend Erin is a beautiful, empathic introvert who often finds it difficult to make new friends. She does, however, have a circle of women around her whom she has intuitively connected with along her journey, and for each of them, she is so grateful.
One friend in particular was a huge surprise from the universe. Shortly before falling pregnant with her first child, Erin was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she saw a post from a woman she didn’t know, asking if anyone in Erin’s local area would be interested in joining a group fitness training session. This kind of post had never, ever piqued Erin’s interest, but a little voice inside her prompted her to just say yes.
It turned out this woman wasn’t your average personal trainer; she set intentions before classes and meditated at the end. She helped Erin through her pregnancy and prepared her physically for labor. She taught self-love and intuition and how to trust your body as much as your inner voice.
Erin is stoked that she trusted her heart’s nudge. Even though it led her out of her comfort zone, it took her into a more expansive zone. Because she learned to trust in her knowing in a whole new and empowered way, she found another guardian for her heart, one who inspires her to be intuitively healthy every day.
Presence and Gratitude
My morning meditations are wild and sovereign. Quiet mornings are a powerful time for me to receive messages, love, support, and Soul-quenching nourishment. If I skip this precious time of connecting with Spirit and the rising sun, I’ll usually attempt to rush headfirst into the day with blurry eyes and ungrounded roots.
When I open to my inner counsel as a daily priority to check in, accept, and trust that I have the love and the answers, the therapy and the desires, all perfectly within my inner universe, then I create a deeper communion with myself. I learn to trust my heart before I ask anyone else.
To become more self-aware and trust what that awareness leads to, take up more space and nourish your presence. Question everything. Tune in to your thoughts, your body, your emotions, your energy, and the environment all around you. This is a gentle, moment-to-moment process that allows guidance to unfold from within. And when you add gratitude, it truly comes alive.
Self-awareness blooms simply, softly, and gently. With trust, it stays nourished. With presence and gratitude, it flourishes. With patience, you’ll reap beautifully what you wholeheartedly sow.
In time, you’ll trust your spirit, dreams, friendships, visions, unknown, magic, and the whole wild dance of consciously awakening.
• Practice •
Try these questions to deepen your devotion and confidence in yourself. I encourage you to keep a positive focus and not dwell on the negative aspects. Your ego may wish to use this exercise as a way of bringing down your energy (as it doesn’t feel safe around high energy), but if you stay focused on curiosity, self-love, and compassion, the answers will flow through you.
In what ways do you feel like you’re being limited in your expression? Who is limiting you and why have you been allowing it? Or have you been limiting yourself with old programs in your unconscious mind? What can you do to set free your most unapologetic and full expression?
Where in your life are you weighed down with doubt? What about yourself are you doubting? How can you let this doubt go?
How does it feel to trust yourself? How does it feel for you to trust in the universe? How is your heart guiding you to trust in life with open arms?
Can you see all the ways in which you’ve trusted yourself over the last week? Write them down. Acknowledge these moments. Often it takes a moment of acknowledgment to appreciate all you’ve done and all you’re capable of doing.
Surrendering Doubt
and Embracing Confidence
Whenever I notice myself thinking or saying, “I don’t know,” I pause for a moment, take a deep breath, surrender the doubt, and try again. Because I do know. Perhaps I need time to find the answer. Maybe I need a moment to myself to go a little deeper. I might need a cup of tea, a few oracle cards, twenty minutes with my journal, a walk in nature, or a long, lush bath. But I will find the answer.
I am so grateful for the level of trust I have in my heart and knowing, body and energy, Spirit Guides and angels, lineage and past lives, and all the ways in which I’m able to find the answer … no matter the question.
I’m also happy to ask for help—should it be an extra-tricky question with a twist—from my husband, family, friends, healers, psychics, psychologists, or whoever I think might be able to help. But I always give my intuition a chance to dig deep and answer first. Because even if I don’t have the optimal answer within, I’ll at least sense the direction to pursue.
I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to be wrong, which is why I used to have such an ingrained habit of saying, “I don’t know.” It felt safer than guessing and getting the wrong answer. I thought it was an honest admission of my level of understanding, but really it was a lukewarm answer from an insecure perfectionist. I’m not short on information, magic, opinions, research, connections, or ideas, so I no longer shy away from sharing them with others (without being the oversharing know-it-all of my twenties). The truth is, I doubted my Soul’s knowing, which was slowly being choked into submission by doubt, fear, and unworthiness.
Trusting myself had everything to do with feeling worthy. If I didn’t feel worthy of being a mum, wife, friend, writer, healer, mentor, and speaker, then I would be ineffective in my capacity in those areas. When I got clear that I was worthy of all those ways of being—because I’m simply and profoundly alive—trust paved the way for me to own them to the best of my ability.
Trust is a delicate strength. It requires attention—gentle, eternal, loyal attention. And reverence. Trust your inner wisdom and give it some major airtime. Trust in the perception of your Soul.
• Ritual •
Muscle testing has been around for a long time. It’s the backbone to kinesiology, and it’s been scientifically shown to work accurately and with ease. I’ve been taught by a spiritual mentor to use it as a powerful tool to help me when I need answers directly from my divinely connected energy.
I want to share this with you because it has been extraordinarily helpful on my path. I regularly use this particular technique, but I always tune in to my knowing first. I trust my inner guidance, but sometimes I need a little backup.
Here are four tips before you start:
1. Be present. Try not to do this while on the run, driving, dehydrated, upset, overwhelmed, intoxicated, or otherwise disengaged or distracted.
2. Be focused. Tune in to the person, subject, or situation with clarity, or ask your Highest Self or a Spirit Guide. Focus with your mind on exactly what you want to know and who you’re asking. Be clinical; try to remove your preferences and personal inclinations. When in doubt, ask that consciousness guide your answers.
3. Be specific. A vague question will give you a vague answer. Be as detailed as possible.
4. Be reverent. The universe doesn’t favor those who show off their spiritual “tricks” with the wrong intention. This is a sacred method to access guidance and trust.
Here are three steps to muscle test with ease:
1. Take your left thumb and connect it to your left middle finger to create a circle. Do the same with your right hand. Open one circle slightly to loop these two circles together, then close them together. You want your connection to be firm but not too strong.
2. Now that you’ve created your chain, ask your body to show you a “yes,” then try pulling your hands apart where the fingers meet. Then ask your body to show you a “no,” and try again. A “yes” should feel strong, like you can’t break the chain. A “no” tends to be weaker, like you can’t hold the chain. This is because muscles are weaker in a negative response. You may have the opposite responses—accept and trust them however they are for you. If this isn’t crystal clear, have a drink of water, take a deep breath, focus a little more, and try again.
3. Now that you have easy access to your body’s wisdom, you can try this in whatever setting you wish. Clear your mind, focus on your question, and trust the answer.
I use this technique a few times a week, but I don’t rely on it as my main source of wisdom. I go with my heart and only use this as a tool to clarify an answer or if my surroundings are too distracting, noisy, or confusing for me to tune in.
Personally, I’ll use this technique if I need to tune in to the particular energy of a restaurant when choosing a healthy place for dinner, a hotel that suits my holistic needs, a book that fulfills my desires, a course that will guide me to a greater knowing in what I desire to learn, a remedy for a particular symptom or illness, a healer for my highest good, or a practitioner that aligns with my needs. I’ll use muscle testing when I need to get out of my mind’s chatter and make the highest possible decision.
Trust in all that you are, all that you know, and all that you are given. When you feel the nudges and whispers, feelings and synchronicities, truth and direction … trust in your heart.