Trust, the middle path, and taking the next step

It is a high honor to feature an essay by Marianne Elliot of Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping today.  Marianne’s blog has long been one of my first stops on my daily internet perambulations.  She writes powerfully and beautifully about her life.  She is a human rights advocate, writer, and yoga teacher.  She created the 30 Days of Yoga course.  I’m also fascinated by what she shares of her own writing journey and practice, and I cannot wait to read her upcoming memoir, Zen Under Fire: Learning to Sit Still in Afghanistan.

When I thought about whose thinking and words I wanted to share on the topic of trust, Marianne came quickly to mind.  I’m in the second quadrant of this year, the year of TRUST, and my nascent, wobbly attempts to trust continue to be tested.  Oh, so much testing.  There are so many tremors in the ground I’m standing on.  But it’s people like Marianne who help me recommit to trusting.  I mean that.

Marianne, thank you, thank you, thank you.  For that handful of you who don’t already read Marianne’s blog, I heartily urge you to go there now and enjoy!!!

Trust, the middle path and taking the next step

Lindsey invited me to write here about trust, which is an interesting subject for me at the moment because if there has been a theme running through my life in the past few weeks it has been this: that we all experience fear and self-doubt.

Maybe that seem so obvious to you as to be redundant. Of course we all have fears and doubts. That’s what marks us as human. Right?

And yet, some days I wonder whether the most insidious effect of our own self-doubt is the way it makes us feel we are alone in our fear and feelings of inadequacy.

We believe there is actually something wrong with us, and suspect we may be the only ones who feel this way. Everyone else is out there getting on with life. We see them publishing blog posts without any fear of exposing themselves as a fool or a fraud. We watch them walk into a crowded room smiling and circulate with confidence. We hear them sooth their children with wisdom, sure of the right thing to do or say.

Yet as I talk with more and more people I hear that our inner critics say very similar things.

I talk to yoga teachers struggling with a sense of fraudulence because their own yoga practice is imperfect and inconsistent. I listen to writers whose inner critic urges them to throw their work into the fire before anyone finds out just what terrible writers they really are. And – over and over again – I hear my friends share their fears that they are failing as mothers.

So if there is something wrong with me then it appears to be ‘wrong’ with everyone else as well.

So if we are all in this together, then how are we to we deal with these mean voices? Should we make peace with our inner critic? Or go to battle and hope to vanquish it?

Let’s say I decide to go to war with the inner critic. Fight my monsters, slay my demons.

On second thoughts, let’s say I don’t. Honestly? I get tired just writing those words. I really don’t want to slay anything. Not even my self-doubt monsters.

So let’s say I address my inner critic with some kindness. She is, after all, a part of me. And most of the time she seems to be driven by fear, and by a desire – however misplaced – to protect me.

I have been known to have a gentle word with my inner critic, to tell her that I know she’s just worried that I’ll make a fool of myself and get hurt. On a good day, I’ve been able to reassure her that I’m actually going to be fine even if my writing isn’t perfect. Even if people do talk about me behind my back. I tell her that I’m safer than she realizes, and braver than she knows. And then I go ahead and do what I was planning to do anyway.

But those inner voices can be really mean. And really persistent. So I wonder whether there isn’t a risk that I end up engaged over and over again in the same conversations. And on a bad day, she’s more compelling that my wise self. Or at least she’s louder.

So I’ve been experimenting with a third way. The way of trust.

This is the path of neither befriending nor conquering my inner critic. It is the path of connecting to something bigger than me something that doesn’t exactly silence the inner critic, but renders her irrelevant. It’s a path that shifts the whole focus of the story from me to that of which I am part: the beautiful, mysterious whole of which we are all part and in which we each have our unique role to play.

It’s a path I’m urged to follow by my teacher and shero, Seane Corne who says:

“There is so much work to be done right now and the question is not ‘Who am I to do this work?’ but ‘Who am I not to do this work?’ How dare I let my self-doubts and fears get in the way of the work that needs to be done.”

Seane’s words take me by the heart every time I hear, read or say them. They feel confronting, as though I’m being called out on a bad habit. Could listening to my inner critic become a way to avoid playing my small part in humanity’s journey towards a kinder, healthier, happier and safer planet for us all?

I think it could. And although I’m certainly not going to start beating myself up for having those fears and doubts, I am exploring what it feels like to respond to them by connecting into something greater than myself.

For some of us that ‘higher power’ will be God, or the divine. For others it will be our collective – rather than individual – self, our ‘true nature’ or our essence, which is part of the essence of all things. For many, it might be as simple as connecting through our feet to the great earth below us and through our breath to the life energy that surrounds us wherever we are.

Yoga is the practice that helps me do all those things. It slowly wears away the illusion, cultivated so carefully by our culture in the West, that I am separate from anyone or anything else. It reconnects me to my essential self, to all other beings, to the earth and to the great pulsing life force that is within and all around me.

I love how Christina Baldwin talks about this:

“We are up to something as a species that is profoundly important right now. We need to attend to this. My life is part of a decision that’s going on in the human race. I know the kinds of values and contributions I want to make in that decision. And that’s where I have to stand. So, when I get dragged down, I just say to myself ‘What are you born to be doing at this time?’ And then I get regrounded and that voice just shuts off because I’m not in the same room with it.”

This is the path I am walking in the face of my inevitable fears and self-doubts. I can find the courage to do things that I seem inadequate for because I know that the work is bigger than me and because I know that I’m not doing it alone.

This is what trust looks like to me right now: I am not the whole story. I am only a very small part of the story. And I need only do the work that I was born to be doing right now – with integrity, with compassion, with courage.

Karen Maezen Miller once said: Faith is taking the next step.

Today I trust that it is enough for me to simply keep taking the next step.