Self-Trust: The Verb Of Embodiment
To Listen To Ash Reading This Article, go HERE.
It was smack in the middle of my sixteenth summer, and I was at acting camp.
I was looking at the poem Our Greatest Fear by Marianne Williamson taped perfectly to the glass overlooking the quad of Carnegie Mellon University.
I don’t even know how the poem got there, but I was staring at it, and honest to God this has been a total flashbulb memory moment for me far on into adulthood.
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.”
It was like a knowing shock wave rippled in my belly up to my heart through my gasped throat and into my little theatre artist brain.
I knew it was true. But my heart and eyes couldn’t help but achingly burn with the immediate thought— "But how in the hell do you actually DO that? How do you feel your power beyond measure?”
Little did I know I would spend the next twenty years unconsciously, then consciously discovering the HOW.
This article is a full circle moment gang. My triple threat teenage self finally has her answer— it’s self-trust.
Was that anti-climactic? Yea, I thought so too!
Self-trust is a process, dare I say quite a hard-earned one, but I’ve earned it, and I’m here to spill the sweet beans on what that means in terms of knowing, feeling, and living our power, beyond measure.
Self-trust, first and foremost is a verb. It’s leaning into the things that you know feel good and are good for you, over and over and over again, until you realize you are living in a place of self-created freedom, the natural bi-product.
Sometimes, to break something down, you have to figure out all the things it isn’t. Below is a list I’ve learned the hard way what self-trust is NOT.
- Gaslighting yourself (pretending your needs/feelings/ideas are not relevant, reliable, or an accurate response to how you’re being treated)
Minimizing your basic needs to thrive
Not sticking up for yourself
Not showing up for yourself
Not keeping small and large promises to yourself
Always putting others needs before your own
Not believing in yourself
Giving away your agency, power, decision making or access to God to anyone else
Pretending everything is OK when it isn’t
Thinking something or someone is going to save or guide you to success other than YOU
There’s certainly more to this list, but that covers the basics right there.
The thing is, self-trust is something you already possess, but have just unconsciously disconnected from. Trusting yourself came totally naturally to you as a child. You followed your instincts, your longings, what you wanted to play with, and dropped effortlessly what did not interest you. You asked for what you wanted. Hell, you cried your ass off to get what you wanted, until you got it!
Then slowly, you were conditioned to disconnect from yourself to win approval and acceptance from others. Even if you had the greatest parents, friends, and teachers in the world who validated you and gave you the affirmation to believe in yourself, most every adult needs help in the authentic self-trust department because…
It’s scary to trust that you, and you alone, have got your back and best interest at heart. It’s a dismantling of this conditioned disconnect. You have to go back to a child-like sense of trust.
Trust in listening to your body, your heart, your intuition, your instincts. Which brings me to the first step of authentic self-trust: listening.
You can’t know what you really need or want if you aren’t listening to yourself. Distracting yourself with the million and one things we get distracted by is the massive first step. Tune out the expectations of anyone but yourself, and then compassionately listen to the expectations you have of yourself. Then let those expectations go. Hear me out.
Let them go, so you can actually fully listen to your body, and what yearns to be expressed or experienced in your heart. Letting your expectations of you go, allows for the REAL YOU to show up to play again.
Now you’re in a ripe place to actually step into authentic self-trust, which is the foundational structure of embodiment. What’s embodiment? It’s harmony of thought, word, and ACTION. You become who you say you are in everything you think, say, and, do. This builds self-trust, which to your delight will be affirmed by others, but will not touch the level of satisfaction you feel within yourself.
Embodiment 101 is you have to involve your gorgeous cosmic computer of a body. Your body knows ya’ll. Allow your body to move as it wants, rest as it wants, and experience pleasure as it wants. How often do we give ourselves permission to do this, let alone really LIVE it? If you show up to this kind of listening, and then following through with action, you will start to experience for yourself your true POWER. A true sense of FREEDOM. The miracle is that you realize no one gave it to you, YOU gave it to you.
When you realize you gave it to you, you feel an immense gratitude for yourself, for allowing yourself to be as you want to be, move as you want to move, feel as you want to feel, create as you want to create, despite the conditioning, limited thinking patterns, rigid expectations, and distractions of other humans with all their baggage projecting onto you.
This is living in the land of self-trust and the precious embodiment of your power.
Cheers to you leaning into that dear one, until your power feels like poetry, beyond measure.
Love, Ash
For more free content on self-trust see Ash’s offering: Trustfalling 101: 3 Days To Deeper Self-Trust
