Positive Energy Guide

Forgiving ourselves opens the heart, softens us to love, relaxes our bodies, allows us to ease into greater wisdom, tolerance, and emotional maturity.

What do we need to forgive ourselves FOR?

When I arrived at the retreat (described earlier in this post series) I would not have placed the need to forgive myself at the top of my Inner Work to-do list. My self-talk is almost consistently constructive. As the retreat process unfolded I began to sense directly how critical I tend to be of myself. Unlike my earlier years, this criticism no longer comes up in the form of self-recriminations, beating myself up with words, or self-punishment.

New archeological layers pop up when we are ready for the next-deeper step in the spiral dance of healing. My new layer disclosed itself through observing: Subtle hitches in breath, twinges of tension, whether or not I chose eye contact, who I dared hug, which people I tended to avoid, my excuses for avoiding them. I noticed that I expect myself to be unequivocally loving to all people at all times—and absolutely authentic at the same time.

When I judge, withdraw, flinch from feeling someone’s imbalanced energy or psychic debris, or decline contact when someone wants my attention I feel somehow remiss or insufficient. This was not close to the first time I noticed these patterns. It was one of the first times I SAT with it–literally as well as figuratively–with full feeling and no diversions. For days. The silence and Zen sitting interspersed with heart-opening practices was powerful.

Some of this discussion gets tough as we dive into issues central to forgiveness. Please bear with me. Even if you do not feel it applies to you, it may help you understand loved ones.

Our Inner Wounds
Forgiveness takes on a whole new depth and dimension when we can apply it directly to our inner wounds.If we turn away from our wounds we cannot bring in the balm of forgiveness to the places inside where we most need it. Why is it that so many of us seem to need forgiveness for having been hurt?

• we generally have some responsibility in the choices that led to being hurt
• we may not have done everything in our power to heal our wounds
• wounds cause us to act in ways we would rather not act
• we may feel shame about being unable to change these behaviors

The ability to NOTICE your wounds and how they impact your behavior takes courage, insight, and love.

When we fully accept them wounds are like old friends. Why friends? Our wounds show us where and how we need to heal. They invite us to be fully intimate and accepting toward ourselves, like only a dearest friend can do. Wounds have their own eloquent language. They speak of soul purpose. It is by following them into our core and melting them with love that we gain the precious prize of self knowledge, awakening.

Olive Branch at Retreat

Wounds almost always have to do with separation: Separation from self (abandoning ourselves or dissociating), separation from Self (remaining in ignorance), separation from family through estrangement, separation from loved ones owing to our issues, separation from special people we lack the courage to love, separation from community, separation from the Divine.

Most of us find it easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves.

In Part 9 we explore why it can be so hard to forgive ourselves.

Where did YOUR inner wounds originate?
What do you gain from through them?

I have met a number of persons able to produce genuine positive emotion at will. Advanced guides understand that we do not arrive at a state of wholeness or Oneness by suppressing or glossing over difficult emotions. Authentic positive feeling rests on being able to experience the entire range of emotions—without becoming identified with them.

What does it mean to experience emotions without becoming identified? This means that when we feel a feeling we do not say 
“this is how I am” or “this is who I am.” We just experience it and let it flow by, like one does with thoughts during meditation or Zen sitting. We continue to be human. We just get better at moving through and out of difficult emotions because we’re not making a big deal of them. We have given up resisting them. Getting to forgiveness, joy and compassion is about being able to ALLOW and RECEIVE them, not to manufacture. Forgiving ourselves is a great second-starting point. The first place to begin is with the ability to be vulnerable.

Positive Vulnerability and Forgiveness
In the realm of intimacy with Self, others, and spirit, vulnerability means access. Without vulnerability we have no access. This is especially true for anything we may learn directly by experiencing energy or receiving intuitive input. Vulnerability allows energy to penetrate us. All that lies ‘Within’ and ‘Beyond’ require access to us in order for us to have access to them. This applies equally to feeling the energy of a loved one, receiving guidance of any sort, allowing compassion in, allowing one’s self to be forgiven, and experiencing the flow of forgiveness within and through our bodies. Being open and vulnerable to the involved energies provides access.

If this does not bring up the question of boundaries—it should. As a person with profound capacity to feel and “read” energy, I speak a lot about boundaries. Boundaries of different sorts counterbalance the intense vulnerability of being sensitive to energy. Boundaries allow for balance and even for sanity when it comes to knowing what is a part of you and what is not. At some levels of experience everything IS a part of us. At others, we need to be able to identify exactly what belongs to us and what does not. Energy awareness and boundaries go hand in hand.

We connect with the world larger than personal identity and vaster than our limited beliefs by opening to experiences that are beyond what we know ourselves to be. This opening involves vulnerability.

In the everyday world we usually use the word vulnerability to describe a state of being unprotected and unsafe. The trick to intimacy with the world beyond our skins–and our defenses–is to learn how to feel safe enough inside ourselves that we can be vulnerable to life in a positive way. I’m talking about letting in love. I’m talking about being open to learning things that do not fit with our old set of beliefs. I’m talking about allowing compassion to overtake us, getting tears in our eyes when we hear something beautiful, and being deeply moved by gestures of kindness. Positive vulnerability is a real asset.

Defense closes us off to intimacy. We need not choose between being a brick wall or a living target. Sensing and honoring our needs for boundaries can assist both overly-open and overly-closed individuals. Those who tend to close others out can practice trusting their ability to close as needed—and hazard greater openness. Those who tend to be super-open need to make sure their choices involve compassion for themselves, not just for others. Knowing ourselves well enough and getting adept with boundaries support a sense of inner safety. These skills—accelerated by addressing our emotional wounds—make healthy openness possible. Emotional armor is deadening.

So how do we begin to peal off that armor? The rest of this post series is designed to make doing so more comfortable.

Self-forgiveness is key.

How and when have YOU experienced Positive Vulnerability?
How did you feel?

Direct experience is a powerful teacher. Powerful teachers promote direct experience. This post describes an intense, direct experience of forgiveness, under the guidance of two powerful teachers.

As the ten-day retreat (see previous posts) began I was closed down after months of difficult experience without the cleansing release of tears. At that point God, love, and all such superlative positives felt abstract. A pragmatist, I enter states during which I am not inclined to “believe” anything based on rearranging the ideas in my head rather than direct experience. I talked to one of the senior retreat guides. He asked simply, “What DO you believe in?”

This is my Shadow, on mist!

I said, “I have experienced before that by doing various practices with sound, intention and energy we can resonate with energies that evoke specific experiences that move us and open our hearts. I believe in that.”

“That works,” he acknowledged. And it does.

Let me share an exercise he led as a further example:

After several days doing spiritual practices that sensitize the heart I was certainly not the only person keenly feeling his or her sandpapery ego. Fortunately the retreat guides were intentionally tracking the emotional states that began to emerge in retreat participants. Their book title—Physicians of the Heart—speaks aptly to applying the right practice at the right moment to open and heal the heart. We had been using sounds that resonate in the heart center to evoke specific qualities of love or compassion. Now the retreat focus became forgiveness.

During another Dance of Universal Peace, the group circled up into two concentric circles. With eye contact and music, masterfully improvised, we were to focus on and transmit four stages of forgiveness, then advance to the next partner. The capacity of the leader to fully feel and transmit the sensations, energies and emotions of the four states supercharged the exercise. Here are the
four stages of forgiveness we worked with—as closely as I can recall:

1. Running our hands along their energy fields we visualized massaging the balm of forgiveness into the wounds of each dance partner, speaking a name of God that carries the resonance of this quality of forgiveness. We were to “Take forgiveness in to the deepest unforgivable place,” including the mistakes we repeat over and over again.
2. We placed our own fingertips together, then lovingly directed them toward the heart center of the other person, intending to enter the deepest wounds to the heart. We used another Name to “Allow this quality of forgiveness to penetrate all the way to the origin of those wounds.”
3. With one hand on our hearts, we opened our other hands out toward the world, as if erasing the footprints of the event from desert sands, inviting the ability to turn away from the wound without denying it.
4. We blew into our dance partner’s heart center, gently and with great respect, as if blowing away the last fleck of dust, “As if the wound or event had never existed, even in memory.”

This may sound a bit silly all on its own. Given the correct timing and the powerful, focused energies during the retreat process, it was incredibly intense. Most of the eighty or so participants were streaming tears. Each brought utmost sincerity and their most capable compassion to the party. Some were powerful healers.

I noticed how much easier it was for me to stand in and give out that compassion to others than to allow myself to totally receive it for myself. Fortunately I ended up paired not only with several effective and energy-alive partners, but with the current group leader. My moments paired with him during this practice were actually some of the most moving in my life. I was absolutely raw, absolutely vulnerable, and totally focused on allowing him to impact me permanently. While being as uncomfortable as a finger resting on an eyeball, this experience was profound and amazing. I have never felt such a profound emanation of compassion so directly—and as a healer with decades of different types of spiritual exposure, I’ve felt a lot of it!

What is the most powerful experience of forgiveness YOU have had?
How did it change your life?

Tiny incidents can cry for forgiveness as powerfully as the monumental issues we touched on in the last few posts. Trivial-seeming events make up our lives from moment to moment. When we need forgiveness we are not fully present to life.

In Post #3 of this series I mentioned two types of issues that I considered “claims against myself that called for further development of the spiritual heart”. The last two posts discussed the monumental sort. Now we start on the “trivial-seeming” set. These issues surfaced during the spiritual retreat as I became highly sensitized to any expressions of having an ego. Ego, in this context, simply means thinking or acting in ways that separate us from others.

The retreat practices intensely sensitized my heart such that becoming somewhat annoyed with someone, being impatient, accidentally cutting line for the water dispenser, speaking at the wrong moment, and so forth caused almost physical pain in my heart center.

Whatever it is that initiates the feeling, tension can gather like sticks of wood toward a beaver dam. A busy mind may chew on an incident or event. Once we judge ourselves for some act, however trivial, evidence begins to mount, damming heart flow. Then others are treated to our closed-off self instead of the loving self that cares so much inside. Now the care itself shows up as a claim against one’s self instead of an expression of love toward other. It is not unusual for irritable people to have kind hearts inside, and to suffer from their own frustration attempting to be kind. Then the effort to be kind feeds self-blame. The dam gets bigger. Self-forgiveness frees up the flow.

No matter how trivial the trigger, it is NOT trivial when insignificant actions create distance from others. Distress mounts when we can feel not only our own separation, but blame ourselves for the discomfort of others. It is virtually impossible at times to know whether we have caused it, or whether someone’s discomfort has nothing to do with us.

With the heart fully open and sensitized this type of discomfort becomes pain. Shutting down the heart to avoid pain only leads to a greater gulf of separation. In addition to self-forgiveness the closed heart shuts out joy, beauty, tenderness, sympathy, compassion, gratefulness and the sense of unity for which we so long. We can never beat or shame or judge ourselves into sublime emotion. Blaming ourselves for expressions of separation makes us do it more. Loveliness springs from the initially-fragile awakening of deep feeling. Self-forgiveness is key to awakening love.

Saint Rabia said to God, “Forgive me for asking you to forgive me.” The FEELING behind this is that in direct and sublime intimacy–with the divine or any Beloved—the internal act of feeling that we must be doing some small thing wrong and wanting to be forgiven in itself creates a small measure of separation. We have assumed a separateness and distanced ourselves by not fully receiving the available love. Note that this is true in the presence of profound and mutual love. Feeling bad about something the other person has already fully embraced without a thought causes distance. Apology is called for when we shatter the closeness between us. Thinking about ourselves by trying to be perfect can distract from real love.

How and when do YOU make yourself unnecessarily separate from others?
What do you feel inside when you do it?

It is not by shutting out what we consider negative that we Awaken and become truly loving, but by learning to embrace ALL. There IS NOTHING more positive. We begin within.

(Following from Part 3) The forgiveness issues that came up for me in the retreat were not about feeling wronged or significant personal relationships. The monumental type of issue had to do with what might be called genetic memory, ancestral memory, or cellular memory. This is the faculty by which a horse, raised in an area with no snakes, instinctively recognizes snakes. This type of issue could also be called ‘past life.’ Terms and belief systems are unimportant to my point. My experience involved a dark and terrible sense that I had committed “unforgivable acts”, somewhere in the murky past—beyond my physical existence.

Carl Jung, who initiated Depth Psychology, discussed at length “the collective consciousness.”He was talking about the group mind or One mind shared by all. Intensive spiritual work involving unity with others touches in to this level of experience, if we can allow it. This is the reality that allows us to link with or perceive others across space and time. At the level of experience where we are all directly linked, and always have been, we have ALL committed acts we must stretch to forgive. We also sense these acts in others.

The following incident speaks to the urge to find forgiveness at a profound and transpersonal (bigger than personal) level:

After seeing a movie together I was in a car with my mother and two other people. Somehow the conversation turned to bombs. I mentioned that children often have great fear of losing parents and homes due to bombs. I flashed on a fantasy I had as a child. In my fantasy—which I shared—I imagined having a huge underground bomb shelter. Into that shelter I brought a hand-picked selection of people who were totally honest, loving, and contributed to others. I wanted to create a fantasy world in which we could emerge and enjoy feeling safe without worrying about being harmed, cheated, or abused.

My Mother said, “I bet you fantasized being the person who dropped the bombs.”

Her comment was like dropping a bomb. Shocked and alienated I went silent for the rest of the evening. I was talking about wanting to feel safe as a child and I felt she was telling me I was a monster inside.

After the ten-day retreat I had enough internal support to get up the guts to ask her about what she had said. I said, “I’d like to give you the opportunity to take back something you said before.” I felt pretty shaky and vulnerable telling her what the topic was. Her response surprised me.

She told me that what she intended to say was: “Have you ever imagined being the person who dropped the bombs?”

Given her history of working as a clinical psychologist in a Veterans Hospital mental ward, she had certainly worked with men who had to come to terms with doing just that. Lots of people have been in similar positions, in service and under orders.

I was initially startled, then found her question to be profoundly spiritual—and positive. She had tears in her eyes. She was exploring what it meant to be fully and completely human in some of the most horrific human experience yet seeking to reclaim full feeling. Whether or not one believes in war (she does not) is irrelevant. I am talking about the type of love it takes to fully accept one’s self or another person in spite of acts that abhor us.

We’re talking about hard-core positive love here, not gloss-over-and-and-avoid-the-dark-side surface dressing. Full-spectrum forgiveness takes that kind of clout.

Remember we are forgiving the person—the soul who found itself in dire circumstances—not the acts they commit. We are forgiving the soul that is somehow pure beneath all the confusion, weakness, feeling trapped, having the heart closed down after too much pain, getting twisted. We are not saying that the acts are okay. We may aim to remember the source and the wellspring where purity-of-being is hidden at the person’s very core, however buried and polluted they became after one miss-step led to the next. Unity with others requires finding a way to manage the whole range of human behavior.

Are you willing to discover the humanity underneath unthinkable acts?

How do YOU handle it when you cannot accept what has happened?

The Energy of Forgiveness
People do exist who can intentionally generate or draw to themselves authentic energies that produces specific positive emotions. This energy comes along with specific states of awareness that we can learn to tune in to by focusing, like a radio may be tuned to the frequencies that are “out there,” and bring them into the room. Sound, for example, is one tool used to “tune” the body to different frequencies. Being able to produce specific states and energy experiences is a science. The ability to broadcast these frequencies in ways that allow others to feel and resonate with them is an advanced art.

Developing proficiency with energy requires sensitivity, direct observation, and experience. There is nothing vague about it—this art simply deals with experiences most of us are not tracking. For instance, our consciousness and emotions change with our breath patterns. Those who study the exact techniques can influence their inner state and physiology through breath practices and intention.

Several of the experiences I would like to share took place among people with a staggering capacity to broadcast the energies and sensations of authentic emotions, including forgiveness.

Dancing With Forgiveness:
Profound experiences of forgiveness and gratitude took place during a ten-day retreat, alternating Zen sitting with heart-opening energy exercises. Leaders directly connected with the origins of the Dances of Universal Peace led these dances, along with additional methods for evoking transcendent emotions. Several of these leaders were able to intentionally transmit energy experience to others.

The following exercise took our forgiveness work to another level: One leader guided the group in a Buddhist meditation in the form of a dance during which we were eyeball-to-eyeball with a partner repeating a phrase, and then advanced to the next partner. We began by sincerely wishing the person in front of us happiness and the conditions of happiness, and release from sorrow and conditions of sorrow, bowing before moving on to a series of partners. Each repetition deepened sincerity and feeling.

During the second round we were to do the same thing, imagining the person in front of us to take the place of a stranger out in the world, someone at the store or a Beloved we had yet to meet. Music, movements, and concentrated intention intensified our emotions. The third round we focused on all the people we found mildly annoying. In the fourth round we opened our hearts to all those who had actually caused us harm.

The final round the leader deftly guided us to turn our focus toward forgiving ourselves. Just about everyone was streaming tears at this point as we supported one another to delve courageously into the fragile and sacred spaces in our souls, to release any causes of bitterness or deadened feeling.

The dance leader said, “How many times must the heart break to learn compassion for all Beings?”

The pain of the open heart ceases to be frightening and begins to take on more and more pleasurable aspects as we come to peace with our wounds and learn how to move through the world with tenderness.

During the course of deep practice in the retreat two sorts of issues related to forgiveness began to filter into my awareness, one monumental, the other seemingly trivial. Both types were claims against myself. These issues called for further development of the spiritual heart, for to be able to embrace them is the path to internal freedom. It’s that old Chinese-finger-trap theory. You know–those woven cylinders that tighten around your forefingers if you pull away, and loosen up if you push them together.

I’ll head into deeper waters in my next post.

What has touched YOUR heart and awakened forgiveness?
How do YOU experience the energy of forgiveness?

Emotional Forgiveness:
Forgiveness–as a heartfelt feeling–brings release and relief. By releasing grudges, bitterness, harsh judgments, resentment, self-pity, rage, anger and hatred we are more fully alive, and present in the moment. Maintaining these emotions blocks and drains energy. Energy can flow freely and renew us as we truly forgive. This experience is one of having more open space in our lives. Having fully forgiven, it does not matter whether we remember or forget—the topic no longer arouses us.

At its root, forgiveness is a function of FEELING. Most of us like very much the IDEA of forgiving. The real-time ACT of releasing negative emotions requires finding these difficult emotions inside—actually feeling them. You can’t give it away if you don’t own it. We’ll get into the nitty-gritty as this post series continues.

Forgiveness and compassion are like two hands that wash one another. Forgiveness invites the flow of compassion. Compassion opens space for forgiveness. Both rely on the free flow of feeling.

Emotional forgiveness does not require scouting around in your memories to dig up lingering grudges. Accessing and attending fully to experience in the present can pull up past issues, like following an echo back up the canyons to someone’s shouting mouth. Digging deeply into moment-to-moment experience exhumes the past-within- the-present. Discovering issues here-and-now increases our motivation for resolving them; we are present to the ways issues actively interfere with the free flow of feeling in current relationships.

The need to forgive does not necessarily show up in the guise of grudges or resentment. Here are a few clues that indicate a background stuck emotion:

• Emotional coldness
• Subtle disengagement from the present moment
• Inability to be wholehearted
• Vague irritability
• Boredom
• Hyper-rational states or “being in your head”
• Lack of emotional engagement
• Projection of one’s own feelings onto other people

Transcendental Forgiveness
Transcendental forgiveness means forgiveness that helps us to go beyond ego and personality. It involves a transpersonal element. In other words it takes place in the realm of greater-than-self, and involves connection. Transcendental forgiveness relies on our ability to allow agencies beyond our personality to influence or assist us.

These other agencies may simply be the kindness and wisdom of the people around us. Whether we believe in God, angels, guides, masters, Nature, Spirit, or simply the principle of grace is not at issue here. What IS crucial is to attain a frame of mind and heart during which we are willing and open to connect with others. This state allows positive and expansive energies to participate in our personal experience. We have opened ourselves to intentional influence.

Transcendental forgiveness is a state of grace. Like real love, it is not available on command. While we cannot control it, we CAN take both internal and external actions that serve to open us up to greater-than-personal experience, inviting the expansive feelings we encounter to roost within.

There are a number of different ways to invite ourselves to experience forgiveness. The easiest way to do this is to be around someone who generates the actual energy of forgiveness and to attune to that person, like tuning an instrument using a tuning fork.

I will share some direct experiences with the Energy of Forgiveness in Part 3.

Which modes of Forgiveness do You most relate to? What do you notice when you think about the other modes?

Please also read the “comments” and share your own. We will have some meaningful and important discussions in this series.

Forgiveness is a prized promoter of ease, grace and healing. We appreciate the state of forgiveness as a strong positive. What does it take to get to genuine, full-on experience of forgiveness? This post series explores forgiveness in depth.

Sometimes it seems like there is a chasm between those of us comfortable with forgiving and those who find forgiveness almost an abstraction. For me, forgiveness is a challenging topic to write about. What challenges me most in these posts is that I care to stimulate useful insights for people at different stages in your work. Rather than preach to the choir, I will to go into the nitty-gritty with this topic. Actually forgiving can require us to work deep.

If we are to make a real difference that impacts day-to-day experience, we need to move past preconceptions. Forgiveness is one of those words like “love,” which mean vastly different things to different people. One person may mean releasing a claim to seek revenge. Another may be contemplating divine grace. Our interpretation of forgiveness—what we conceive it to be—shapes our experience.

Let us first consider everyday-type experience and then explore the kinds of experience that promote transformation. We learn and grow personally from ALL types of forgiveness.

Transformation occurs when our Inner Work uproots who we have so-far believed ourselves to be.

Forgiveness occurs in several different modes of experience. The way we relate to forgiveness depends which mode we are operating in:

• Social
• Mental
• Emotional
• Transcendental

Social Forgiveness
Social forgiveness can be achieved with minimal introspection. You decide to release a claim upon another for a particular unpleasant, unkind, or hurtful action, situation, statement or gesture. You agree not to retaliate or to condemn them, and to move on in a peaceable or usual manner.

Social forgiveness can be purely selfish—or not. Some “forgive” as social lubricant, from fear of conflict, rejection, or abandonment. Giving up being mad about something because a loved one will not like it or acting ‘nice’ while the victim pot simmers in your depths is not real forgiveness. “Forgiveness” that is denial in disguise, or making nice to get what you want, does not promote personal integration or robust intimacy. Real forgiveness comes from inner strength.

“Forgive and forget” as a strategy works better for some personality types than others. If you tend to hold grudges, releasing the memory of prior events may be an asset. But if you tend to allow others to hurt you again and again, forgetting may reinforce weakness. You can forgive the action or event—and simultaneously study people’s nature and tendencies. Thus you can accept people’s limitations and even love them while maintaining boundaries that work for you. (We explored the how-tos in the Trust series.)

Mental Forgiveness
Mental forgiveness can remain barren and intellectual. Forgiving in theory–can at its best lead to deep understanding. Deep understanding naturally brings about forgiveness as we become able to identify with and relate to the person we aim to forgive. Understanding unfolds as we recognize the fractures and forces that drive someone to non-ideal actions. Understanding goes even farther when and if we are willing and able to identify similar fractures and forces within ourselves, whether or not we act them out.

Sincere thinking, visualizing, imagining, and wishing may establish direction as we contemplate what has occurred. Thought can birth intention. Mental forgiveness alone may change your attitude, expand possibilities for interaction, and make room inside for different experiences. If mental forgiveness makes a blueprint for change, feeling drives the bulldozer. The more deeply we dig into our own hearts the more powerfully we can forgive, for we begin to recognize others in ourselves and ourselves in others.

Inayat Khan who brought Sufism to the West said, “The depth of mind is heart, and the surface of heart is mind.” (Sufism is a spiritual approach that honors all religions like beads on a string. The string represents Truth, which runs evenly through them all.)

We’ll head into Emotional and Transcendental Forgiveness in Part 2.

Please share YOUR insights about forgiveness in Comments, below.

Unexpressed feelings need to be defined and shared to establish durable and productive structures in relationships. ~Jeff Jawer

Practicing Trust is the third post of a series that supports understanding what it takes and howto develop trust in relationships. This post suggests behaviors that build trust, and lists key characteristics of trustworthy people.

Behaviors that build the ability to trust:

Learn to trust what is actual, not what you hope may be there. What we need to trust is OUR RESPONSE TO life, not that life will be a certain way.

Become reliable in caring for yourself. This greatly aids forming solid relationships. We trust ourselves when we are not willing to sell out our values or perception to try and get love or care from people we cannot trust.

Limit the WAYS you involve yourself with people to the extent that you trust them–or to your ability to manage your risks. If you can afford to be hurt or are not easily hurt you have more room to extend trust.
Stay alert to signals and sensations that tell you whether or not to trust. Keep your intuition at peace by listening to it and responding.

Sustain good communication. Clear up misunderstandings. Avoiding discomfort causes “emotional drift.” Emotional distance opens the door to situations that can compromise trust. Defining and sharing feelings builds intimacy and trust.

Maintain realistic expectations based on mutual agreements.

Practice discussing difficult topics “in a container of love.”

Make trust a priority–not as a demand but as something lovely and valuable that you craft over time.
Allow trust to grow naturally, without forcing it. Once you have it, take great care to repair damaged trust through communication.

Clearly define for yourself the particulars of your basic need for trust. This will be different depending on the type of relationship. For me basic trust in intimacy requires that the person is committed to truthfulness, does not cause pain intentionally, communicates their needs constructively, and can return to a caring frame of mind fairly quickly after an upset. Knowing what you are looking for makes it easier to trust yourself in relationships because you have a basis for evaluation.

Release relationships in which basic trust is not possible.

Remember that trust is a learned skill. Be compassionate with yourself in the process.

Enjoy trusting. Savor and accumulate this form of wealth.

Key Characteristics of Trustworthy People:

• Authentic
• Actions and words match
• Able to say “no” respectfully and “yes” dependably
• Keep agreements or renegotiate if necessary
• Able to admit it when they do not know something
• Able to be both flexible and reliable
• Show genuine feeling for you if they need to let you down
• Willing to make compromises but never compromise core principles or personal integrity
• Consistent ethics, positive values, or principles inform their behavior
• Willing and able to tell you things you do not like to hear–kindly
• Able to disagree without needing to argue, or to have friendly arguments that lead to increased understanding
• Let you know how they feel, where they stand, and how you stand with them
• Able to recognize, accept, and enjoy the differences between you

After considering others, be sure to turn the same list around on yourself.

Can you be up-front about what you do and do not trust in yourself and your friends? How and when do you intentionally build trust through communication?

“Trust one man with your money and another man with your wife.”
(Old Persian saying)

When you think about whether or not to trust, ask yourself, “Trust TO WHAT?” To return aborrowed book? To keep a confidence? These things are hard for some people and easy for others. To never hurt you, read your mind, and put your needs and interests ahead of their own? This is unrealistic.

Example: I have a friend who is unreliable about time. I trust her to keep me waiting and to inconvenience me. For this reason I do not set myself up by making time-dependent plans with her. We may take separate cars or meet at her place instead of mine. I make back-up plans. She is exceptional, creative and funny. I trust her sense of humor, her heart, and her loyalty.

An important distinction about trust is supported by this Far Side cartoon: Mr. Chicken is on the couch reading the newspaper. His wife has just rushed up to the door, breathless. She has a leash in her hand. The front door has just been slammed behind a large, panting dog. Mrs. Chicken says, “You raise a dog from a pup and what do you get!? A chicken killer!”

This cartoon is practically a parable. Healthy, adult trust takes into account the nature of the other. In wisdom we trust someone to act according to his or her character, history, and context.

Wanting to be liked can set you up for misplaced trust, especially if you have a friendly but vulnerable nature like Mrs. Chicken. Those who abuse trust are keenly attracted to a trusting heart. It’s their food.

If you want someone to hunger for you, go ahead and lay out absolute trust like bait. Don’t be surprised if the person you attract goes all werewolf on you down the line! Here is the antidote to holding out food that attracts people who will hurt you: Get clear about the difference between needy, compulsive hunger and genuine love. This will greatly increase your ability to trust yourself.

Trust takes time and experience. It is rarely possible to develop trust when someone is on“honeymoon behavior” to win your approval or get you to be with them. A big gap between on-display and everyday behaviors is a red flag. Real tasks that require complex decisions and have actual outcomes are essential for establishing trust. We do not get to know one another deeply by enjoying entertainment together.

Enjoy a gradual and extended courtship while you discover the deeper nature of friends and loved ones. Take notice of potential issues, but focus on what you CAN trust.

My life is graced with several rare gems who I can trust wholeheartedly. These wonderful people make good mirrors. They provide honest and loving feedback and help me to stay true to myself.

In Part 4 we explore HOW to develop trust in relationships and key characteristics of trustworthy people.

Who do YOU trust? How did you develop this trust?