Day 230: Permission And Self - Worth

Day 229: Guilty until Proven Innocent & The Mathematics of Self-Trust

The other day I was in a discussion when the topic came up of how to work with points that are pointed out by someone else.

In my own process, when someone would point something out that they saw in my words and behaviour – I’d sometimes get this ‘surge’ movement inside of myself coming up where I felt compelled to disagree and set the record straight.

This surging experience I interpreted as being a movement of self-trust, that ‘I know what I’m experiencing’ and that ‘I know where I stand’.

After some trial and error and discussions – I realised that this movement was not at all ‘self-trust’ – but an energetic experience of unquestionable self-righteousness. I also learnt that self-trust – is not an experience. It’s not an experience or feeling of ‘blind faith’ of ‘just knowing’. Self-trust wasn’t so much a ‘decision’ either (like – “I am going to trust myself from now on!). Self-trust is more of a verb – it requires certain actions for you to take.

You wouldn’t just blindly loan out money to a stranger. You’d want to know them, and have a sense of their track record.

The same goes with Self-Trust – it’s not enough to simply ‘experience’ and ‘believe’ that you’re trustworthy – you need to be able to show yourself a track record.
And that track record is your self-investigation, you testing points out, seeing what the feedback is, and specifying your application accordingly.

With being really good at deceiving and sabotaging ourselves, what I started to use whenever someone pointed something out to me -- is to use the principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’.
I’ll assume that I was in a reaction, a movement, or some form of misalignment – check myself, check what I was looking at, what I was doing before, anything that may have led to developing an experience in the current moment and anything that led to having created my current stance.
Maybe I find something that was not aligned – maybe I don’t. If I do, I can work on it to specify myself, and if I don’t – I can use the information I tracked down within myself to discuss the point further with the person, and so learn to specify my communication (which means that in a way, something was still misaligned!)

It can be handy to have a tagline or a specific Living Word you bring up in those moments – as it’s easy to get lost in an experience and ramble over all the reasons and justifications of ‘why I said what I said’, ‘why I saw what I saw’. To for a moment just shove all the talking aside – remember the decision I made in walking this process, to be humble, to remember the dedication and persistence it takes to work through every little cranny of the mind – to not take anything for granted.

It only takes one moment of being unaware, one moment of letting something slip by, taking something for granted – and before you know it you’re on a slippery slope in altering your entire perception about reality. It kind of reminds me of working though math equations in high school. Where if you make one mistake, in one little variable that you didn’t quite move correctly – the whole path the equation takes and end result is COMPLETELY different to what you end up seeing on the blackboard as the version the teacher worked out correctly. Where it just takes that one little teeny weeny mistake to create a HUGE disparity between what you worked out and what it is in reality.

Same with the mind. If you’re not aware of every breath in every moment, keeping track of your every movement, correcting the mistakes as you catch them right then and there, unless you got yourself covered every step of the way – how can you be trusted? How can you be sure that how you’re looking and seeing things isn’t like a math equation that quietly went astray without you noticing?