Sunday Contemplation # 42 Trust - The Lifeblood Of Our Connections

The Trio Of Freedom, Love & Trust

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

• This Week’s Quote

• A G’day

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”

Rumi - Persian Mystic & Poet 1207-1273

“Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown.”

Rachel Botsman, Author, inter alia…Who Can You Trust? (2017)

A G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope that this week has been one where you could find some peace.

It’s Autumn here in Australia and we just held (yesterday) our Federal Elections. I felt incredibly fortunate to live in a place where genuine, free and democratic elections take place. Our system is not perfect by any means, but I realised taking it for granted is no longer an approach that is wise.

It made me think a lot about trust. So I wrote this Sunday’s contemplation on this matter that I hold dear.

I offer it to you for your consideration.

I wish you peace and love, and I thank you for spending this time with me.

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Trust - The Lifeblood Of Our Connections

I put two quotes at the top of the page this week. One of them, from Rumi, emphasises the inner spiritual roots of trust. The other from Rachel Botsman* speaks to the critical role of trust in all that we do in the world.

Trust, like all things of value in our lives, has an inner dimension, a stillness, an awareness. This inner experience then finds an expression and movement in the world. It Finds ways to Adapt the inner experience into the actions of our lives.

We must always pay attention to the inner dimension and the outer connection. Our challenge is to balance our attention to both worlds. When we fail to hold that balance, we risk distortion. Trust is the lifeblood of human connectedness. Our lives and our world cannot function without trust. We therefore must pay attention.

We cannot board an airplane without some trust that there are those somewhere that have done the work to keep it in the air. We trust that our subway train will stop at stations. We trust that money has an accepted value and utility and is accepted by shopkeepers. Trust is the bridge between what you know and the unknown. Our confidence, our trust, grows and is confirmed or broken, by our experience.

Of course I could spend a hundred pages outlining those parts of our lives and our world where the bridge of trust has been damaged. Where that has occurred our lives become less connected, more fragile, more difficult. We see it in the media, where we struggle to trust the veracity of what is reported. We wonder who to trust in politics. We wonder if my social media “friends” are trustworthy or fickle? Need I go on?

It is the work of tyrants to destroy our bridges of trust in order to bolster their power. It is the work of the wise to remind us of the fundamental interconnections that are inherent in nature and human life. It is there that trust is given birth. It is each of our work to find the heart of trust and to practice the skills needed to build it day by day.

The Inner Work Of Trust

Trust must begin with the inner work of understanding who we really are. If we miss the mark of our essential nature, we actually don’t know where our capacity for, or indeed, our longing for trust, originates.

We long to trust each other and life, because inherently we are connected. Trust is not, in the first instance, a value or moral principle. It is our nature. We arise, along with all things in the universe, from Consciousness, Awareness, God. We are not separate from that Consciousness, and therefore cannot be separate from each other, or from nature. We need each other. This is an existential truth, not just a nice idea.

Trust is an expression of who we are. Self enquiry is the journey to discover this who…”I am”, and to discover the source of our longing for connection.

Ancient wisdom and our own experience should we examine it, is that the nature of The One from which we arise, is freedom, peace, and love. Another way of describing love is the experience that occurs when the sense of separation is diminished or disappears. We are by nature inseparable, connected, interconnected, interdependent. When we realise that deeply, love appears…followed soon by beauty.

Rumi’s words speak to his absolute trust (confidence) in the kindness, compassion, love, and truth inherent in Life (God). For Rumi, the bridge between the known and unknown is filled with the trust that all will be well…“start to walk on the way, and the way appears”.

You and I may not be dancing on the waters of assurance with Rumi just yet, but, the inner work to discover our essential nature is the way to uncover those roots of trust.

The capacity we have to maintain and nurture trust in the world is connected to the values and principled fabric underpinning our lives, our interactions, our institutions and how we connect. That moral fabric needs to be weaved with the thread created by the essence of who we are.

Therefore the inner work of Trust is to learn to trust ourselves, to know and experience the essence of who we are.

But that inner work also asks us to find those who can support us in the challenge of building the skills and the resilience to be trustworthy and capable of trust in the world. Parker J. Palmer calls those people a Clearness Committee. The honest and vulnerable confidants who really know us and support us.

There is a reason that so many mystics stayed in caves or monasteries! To use the terminology of the ancient ones….it’s bloody hard to translate the awareness of who we really are and adapt it to living in a world that is yet some distance from Rumi’s vision.

We need to develop the skills of trust and trustworthiness. It takes practice, it takes work and support, and it takes a recognition that we cannot thrive, individually or as a species without it.

This takes us to the next steps.

The Outer Work Of Trust - Building The Skills Of Trust

I want to focus here on the skills we each need to nurture to build trust in our relationships with others. In another time and place we can talk about institutional trust, brand trust, corporate trust and what Rachel Botsman calls distributed trust.

Here I want to speak about the individual skills we need to learn to develop our own trustworthiness, and our capacity to be discerning in granting trust to others. We practice these skills, or fail at them, with other humans, like friends, teams at work and in our communities.

Trust is something given to another. It can only happen freely, and all the power to trust or not to trust is in the hands of the one giving or not giving trust. You cannot extract trust from another, it can only be freely given. You might extract loyalty, obedience, hard work, focus and a thousand other response from others using fear, force, manipulation or deception. But trust can only be freely given.

Some may give trust unwisely, but that discernment is developed in the same school the skills of trustworthiness are learned.

Here are what I think are key qualities and skills we need to learn to be worthy of trust. This clarity comes from Rachel Botsman, with a couple of small adjustments by me.

To trust you, people will need to experience these qualities:

Credibility - Are you competent in the role you play?

Reliability - Do you “show up” and are you predictable and consistent in how you act?

Benevolence - Do you care about me?

Integrity - Is your behaviour consistent with your words and expressed values?

Vulnerability - Is this a front or is this the real you showing up and being honest with me?

This skillset is not easy.

In my experience, each one of these skills requires resilience, commitment, practice, and a capacity for failure and forgiveness.

Conscious Trust Thinking

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are always, always, always looking for trustworthy connections. We are by nature and essence, connected. We long for the quality of the connections we make to be aligned with our essential nature.

It is important for us to do the inner and outer work of trust, so that we can be more conscious of how we operate in the world.

Our failure to do this inner and outer work is at the root of much of the dysfunction we see in our world.

One example is in business. Billions of dollars are spent in the pursuit of technical competence and expertise in business. Most hires are primarily focused on external or technical competence, with some offering an often perfunctory nod to “soft skills”. This, to quote my American friends, is ass backwards, and reflects our blindness to our essential nature. It is the quality of human connections, including trust that is the most significant driver of business success or failure. And yet we often fail to make this central driver the target of conscious development or business dollars.

This poor prioritisation will become more glaring as we enter the era of Ai. As Ai takes on a greater and greater role in providing technical competence and expertise on every level, we will ignore the centrality of trust and human connectedness at our peril.

A Final Thought For Today

Although I said in this piece that the skills I focused on were those we need to learn individually in relation to our connection to other humans, they are more significant than that. This is true simply because it is we humans who design the communities, businesses, societies, institutions, economies and political structures of our time. The credibility, reliability, benevolence, integrity, and yes, even the vulnerability of those businesses, communities, societies, institutions and political frameworks we create, are central to our relationship with them. The inner and outer work of trust are more important now than every, because we are charged with the responsibility to make all these structures more trustworthy, not as an afterthought, but as the central guiding principle of their formation or change.

We have watched trust in many of the institutions we once trusted, crumble before our eyes, because they did not and do not measure up to these qualities needed to affirm their trustworthiness.

The notion of distributed trust…that we are looking to build new networks of trust outside of those institutions once trusted, is just a reflection of how central to our lives trust is. We cannot live without trust. In the absence of trust in one place, we will seek to build it elsewhere.

Our challenge is to do the inner and outer work of trust so that we build discerning, effective and safe new trust networks. A discussion for another time.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

* If you are interested in the issues of trust, I highly recommend you read, listen to or watch the work of Rachel Botsman. She is is here on Substack too. Now I like to think that it was her time in Australia that made her so great, but it is possible there are other reasons. 🙂

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called In The Arms Of Trust.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

Holding to the theme of this week, I feel particularly grateful to those of my friends and family that I can trust enough, and they trust me enough, so that I can just be myself…no bells and whistles, no masks and cover ups…just me.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

New Trust Networks.

Many of the people or institutions we placed trust in, in the past, are no longer holding our trust.

Where to you go to build trust or affirm trust?

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.