Trust is a huge issue for most of us, and some of us have an easier time of it than others, according to our life experiences and the attitudes we nurture. Many of us test things over and over, and any other way seems too-great a great risk. We trust our mistrust because we think it keeps us safe. We think it creates predictable and controllable structure.

This strategy doesn’t actually keep us safe at all… it just makes our world small enough that the mind can continue to try to control it — and “protects” us instead from more and more of our aliveness.

To unfold spiritually, or just to live life with integrity, we have to embrace uncertainty — and we have to trust love more than we trust our fear. As long as we are enmeshed in the identities of the past, we may hang onto our reasons for not trusting — or we may trust provisionally until trust is broken; it doesn’t matter, because we will still be impaled on the horns of the polarities of trust/not-trusting. Like being on a see-saw, there is no forward progress, only up-and-down movement.

There is just no resolution of this at that level, regardless of the affirmations pasted to our bathroom mirror, how often we are validated by others or by a psychological or spiritual teaching. As long as we are working at this level, we remain in the decades-long “getting better” and not really claiming our divine inheritance.

There is that of us in our depth which is pure and joyful by its very nature, completely untouched by the traumas and insults of the past. It is covered-over by our identity with the past, and by its continual recycling in the present by our attempts to protect ourselves from further pain.

The only resolution to its issues is a seeing-through the trance, the density, of our accustomed identity, a reconnecting to that of our being which is already-and-has-always-been whole, from which we are somehow separated by life experience. The real spiritual teaching is that which brings us to the portal of that shift. Anything else may be interesting to the mind and inspiring to the emotions, but if it does not uproot our felt-sense of “myself,” real transformation is not possible.

This seeing-through is not something we can will to happen. It is an act of Grace, and Grace is by nature gratuitous. However, we can increase the likelihood of Grace striking by being diligent with our spiritual practice, by hanging with people who already have this trust, by practicing forgiveness and compassion (for ourselves at least as much as for others), and by being willing to enter into the ambiguity and lack of control that a real shift in spiritual progress always entails.