Faith in Myself | Breaking up with the Universe
I wanted to put my faith in the universe. I had to learn to find faith in myself first.
faith
/fāTH/
noun
1.
complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
“this restores one’s faith in politicians”
2.
strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
“bereaved people who have shown supreme faith”
Faith to me was trust. Trust in something bigger than me. Bigger than us.
When I started (my very normal, it would turn out) mid-life “awakening” (crisis), I went about it in my usual personal way by reaching for every book I could get my hands on. From self-help to spirituality to new age & occult, I went looking for answers. And I had the “advantage” of the internet and Instagram spirituality. Information was everywhere.
With a lifetime of reading like this behind me, I could draw some patterns from the stories of the Bible and other religions I had studied, and the “laws” of spirituality, the most prevalent in pop culture to be the law of attraction. It seemed to make logical sense to me in ways that traditional religions hadn’t.
Trust and faith became the cornerstone of the things I was doing to try to release some of my desire to control the outcome of everything. Because the crushing pain when I obviously couldn’t control anything was unsustainable.
I found Pema Chödrön to be so clear when talking about the practice of being present and continuously releasing the outcome. Those instructions are well-known as a linchpin spiritual teaching in the Buddhist tradition:
”It’s not life that causes suffering, says Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, it’s our story about life — our interpretation — that causes so much distress. When we practice interrupting the story we’re telling ourselves, we can find a new freedom and flexibility in the face of uncertainty and change.”
But I found there was a paradox in how I was clinging to this “rule”. By trying to “obey” it, I was trying to force the release.
I finally realized, far enough into this journey to have learned and integrated the lessons over and over, that my body knows the answers.
My body knows the answers before my mind can receive them, interpret them and assign a story to them.
And my “problem” was not that I didn’t have faith, but was that I was assigning that trust to the wrong entity first. I was relying on the universe — the esoteric force greater than us that I do believe exists, but exists in a way that our human mind can’t even fathom in its entirety. I was relying on it for all the answers. Even knowing it, whatever it is, is chaotic, neutral at best.
I finally understood I needed to rely on my body, on me, first. I needed to get quiet and listen to the signals my body would send up. To feel into it before my brain got ahold of it and added layer upon layer of interpretations, expectations, conditioning, shame, and ego, things that had kept me alive — and “successful” up to that point.
I needed to learn to trust in myself first, and the universal energy would “flow” easier. Not always easy. The outcome still wasn’t up to me. But if I could trust in my body to tell me the direction of the decisions I was making, I could finally release the outcome in a way that whatever happened wouldn’t make me feel helpless.
Because I would no longer be a bird bobbing on the ocean aimlessly adrift looking for the next “sign” to tell me to turn. Instead, I could be an aviator reading the current, choosing which direction to go based on the present conditions, and I could trust, that because of that choice, even (especially) if things went in ways I couldn’t imagine, that I had done the best I could with what was presented to me at that time.
And I could trust, perhaps, that even if it felt like a failure, a loss, that I would note that in my future decision making — my body would keep the score. I would do better/different/the same in the next decision, the next body response.
In the interim, knowing the body keeps the score, I would continue my practice of rooting out and understanding the trauma stored in my body, and try to parse out why my brain tells the stories it tells.
I couldn’t, wouldn’t trust that the universe would do that work for me. But I could have faith that I would get the lessons from the universe in what was given to me in any present moment. I would see what I needed to see to unlock the next layer of what I needed to work on if I was willing to keep my eyes — and heart — open and do that work.
If I was willing to trust that I was exactly where I needed to be, and that the decisions that had gotten me there were okay, because I had faith in myself and my ability to interpret and survive.
And someday, perhaps even thrive. Arms outstretched spinning around, laughing, to capture all the rays of the sun, not worried about the rain, but trusting in me to weather it all.
Photo by Nicholas Ng on Unsplash
This post was originally published on Medium.
