Miracles in the Mundane: How Faith Ignited Self-Trust in My Life
It’s 6:02 am, and my butt is in the chair. It usually takes me until 9 or 10 am to finally find my way here, if at all. So, the fact that it is 6 am, and I’m here makes me feel like I’m #crushinglife. And, to top it off, I’ve already meditated for 10 minutes… for the SECOND day in a row. I know! #supercrushingit. What has me here? I always like asking myself this question because if it’s working, let’s keep doing it.
First, it makes me feel amazing. Yesterday I started my day with meditation, and it lit a flame. I then felt inspired to journal, which led to wanting to write, and then I wanted to go for a run. This feels like a miracle. Lately, I haven’t felt like doing any of these things. I’ve taken a hiatus from self-care (reading, journaling, writing) for about a year. I just haven’t felt like doing any of it. And, I feel like it’s time to begin again.
Yesterday I started the Tamara Levitt 15-day series on the Calm app, “Relationship with Self.” I love doing a series on Calm because I get a checkmark when I’ve finished. I love getting checkmarks! It’s like the sticker on my homework sheet as a kid. Man, what I wouldn’t do for a sticker. I also feel like it takes all the hassle, guesswork, and procrastination out of meditating. It’s already challenging enough to find my way to the meditation pillow, and I can lose a lot of time looking for the best-guided meditation or just getting myself started. It’s a lot like the Netflix suckhole of trying to find a movie to watch… it can take hours. The series is great as something to look forward to, and when you open the app, it takes you right where you need to begin. I’ve now done the first day, self-trust, three times. It’s fascinating that I’ve now listened to this meditation three times and experienced it differently each time. I’ve decided to do this as a 15-week practice, rather than a 15-day exercise. I felt rushed, so I turned the days into weeks. That immediately felt like a huge fresh breath. Weeks versus days feel more honoring to what I want to create for myself. I get to create my awesome life!
On my run yesterday, I was thinking about self-trust. There were so many areas I felt I could explore in writing. Self-trust with the body, food, exercise, relationships, dreams, and this is just getting started. Yes, a week feels so much better than one day per topic. Maybe I will touch on all of these this week, but the one that stood out for me was the way spirit and faith impact trust. Let’s explore this, the relationship between faith and trust.
For me, trust is gained and lost through actions and behavior. It is something that can wax and wane. Faith, on the other hand, is the orientation to life. Einstein’s quote comes to mind, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is though nothing is a miracle. The other is through everything is a miracle.” How are you living in regard to miracles?
For a long period in my life, I subscribed to the idea that nothing in my life was a miracle. I felt alone in the world, and it felt like the world was against me or out to get me. I would say I had no faith. I didn’t have faith in God, spirit, or something greater than myself, or that anything would ever get better. How could a God exist when everything felt so crappy? I was hopeless, and this was a large part of my suicidal ideation. I mean, why go on living if nothing will ever get better? When I reached a point of suicidal crisis, I scared myself. I knew at this point, that I had the capacity to kill myself. So, I asked myself, “Do you want to get busy living or dying?” The answer surprised me. I wanted to live. I knew things needed to be different. I read Jack Canfield’s book, “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.” Page 6 changed my life. Canfield introduced the formula, E + R = O. I’m a bit of a math nerd, so the formula caught my eye, but it also changed everything for me. Event plus response equals outcome. It was clear that I needed the outcomes to change in my life. At the time, I didn’t feel I could control the events, so the factor within my control was the response. If I changed my response, my outcomes would have to be different. I decided to give it a try. What did I have to lose? Kill myself or check this out. Not hard to guess what I chose.
I began to change my response, and my life did begin to shift. The radical change was in my life orientation. The idea that nothing was a miracle and there were no God created results in my life that were not awesome. I didn’t enjoy living; in fact, I couldn’t stand it. I made a choice to try something else. What if everything was a miracle? What if the universe was conspiring in my favor? What if there was a God, and this God loved me just as I am? I had no idea. Nothing led me to believe this was true, but what if I tried it on just to see the results? I was clear I didn’t know the truth of God, life, or anything. But I did know that I get to choose what belief I hold. It seems to me that we don’t know, so we make it all up. Why not win at my fantasy rather than lose all the time? Just to try it out, I decided to believe that I wasn’t alone, that there was a God, and that I was supported in the universe. I still don’t know if this is true, but holding this as my truth has changed my life for the better.
Having faith in the universe, in God, in the Spirit makes my life so much more workable. So, if it works, why not keep it? I’ve kept this way of thinking or believing for 13 years. The outcomes are incredible. For starters, I no longer want to kill myself on a daily basis, and I actually enjoy waking up in the morning. That alone is worth the faith in it. I added faith into my life, and things began to radically shift. What does all this have to do with trust? Specifically, self-trust? When I didn’t have faith that the universe was on my side, that there was loving or miracles possible, it was nearly impossible to trust in anything. I felt I was always disappointed and let down because this was my response to everything. I believed that it wasn’t going to work out, that I wasn’t loved, that nothing was going to get better, and that this was my outcome. It didn’t matter what I tried because, with the response it sucks, the outcome was always sucky.
When I added faith and a loving orientation to life, my response began to open up. I allowed for the possibility of goodness, kindness, and love. When I held faith in the universe, and in God, this created a platform to build trust. I know it starts to get a bit thin here, but when I added faith to my life, I was then able to start building trust in life, God, the universe, and myself. I didn’t trust anything when I didn’t have faith. Maybe it’s you find what you are looking for, and when I was looking for things to be bad, they were. Okay, I’m getting it now. Faith allowed me to see that the “O” in the equation could be different. Faith gave me a reason to try the formula at all and hold that the outcome could be different. Until there was a possibility of the outcome of my life changing, it couldn’t change.
Faith gave me hope that my life could be different and that taking responsibility would actually do something for me.
Eventually, I became a United Methodist Pastor leading a congregation. I share this because of how powerful this belief and faith came for me. I still don’t know the truth of God, but holding this as my truth makes life work so much better. I keep my faith because it works. It makes life enjoyable, fun, and so, so, so much easier. Whatever works for you– God, spirit, universal energy– use the language that resonates here; I will use God. Having faith that first there is a God and that God is all-loving, gives me a foundation to build a relationship with myself. If God loves me, I can see a path to love myself. If God believes in me, I can begin to believe in myself. So much of the self-trust I’ve built has relied on faith. It would be impossible for me to talk about self-trust without faith or some kind of belief that changing your life is possible.
So many times, I’ve said to myself, “This is the best I know to be true today, and I’m open if that should change.” I don’t feel I need to know the truth or see evidence before I hold faith or belief. I tried it out, and for me, it works. I am also open that if a better, more workable truth should arise, I’m open to that as well. Try it out and see what you think. Have fun with it, make it wacky, goofy, funny, and most of all loving. Why not? If we are going to make up what we believe is possible for our lives, why not make it awesome?
