The Importance of Deep Trust

How can one find a sense of steadiness and balance in a world that feels like quicksand, with cultural, political, and ecological sinkholes threatening to pull a person under?

Whether nurses, physicians, or therapists, healthcare providers report that their patients seem a lot more distressed than they did five or ten years ago. People from all professions talk about burnout amongst their colleagues rising at a concerning rate.

Personally, in the last month alone, I filled out disability forms for three young colleagues — one working in a hospital emergency room, one treating students at a university, and one in the human resources department of a large corporation. The looming question becomes, how can one remain of service to fellow humans without getting pulled under?

A large part of the answer lies in maintaining a strong spirit, no matter what the outside world presents.

To accomplish this daunting but essential task, many are already developing various strategies. These may include peer support, psychotherapy, yoga, mindfulness, rest, and relaxation. I want to introduce a foundational practice, and that is trust.

I first came across the importance of trust in the teachings of my late mentor, Dan Brown. Initially, I was perplexed, resistant even. The idea of trust seemed sentimental and insubstantial. It sounded like something that would turn up in a religious tract. How, I wondered, could trust be sturdy enough to help in daily life?

Yet I remained curious. Dan had been a professor at Harvard Medical School for almost 40 years. Besides being an acclaimed psychologist, considered an expert in the theory and practice of working with attachment disorders, he was also highly regarded as a teacher in the Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen and Mahamudra; two Tibetan approaches to the experience of awake awareness.

I grew intrigued. What might attachment disorders and the experience of awake awareness both have to do with trust? And might trust have to do with our resilience and our ability to stay happily and meaningfully engaged in life during trying times?

For the past several years, I have been contemplating this — how the interaction between trust, childhood attachment, and awake awareness can support our ability to be with suffering — and I have come to understand the necessity of attending to trust as a basic attitude.

I invite you to take a moment to reach into your psyche. Think for a moment about your relationship to trust over the past five years. As you do this, notice the felt sense in your body. Is it unease or worry? The more one is able to recognize in one’s body what a lack of trust feels like (in others and in life itself), the more one can notice a longing for a sense of belonging, for an experience of interconnectedness, and for a faith that these experiences matter.

Think now about these qualities I just mentioned — belonging, interconnectedness, and faith. They tend to make a person feel relaxed and calm and reveal a deep quality of trust.

When there is an emerging sense of trust, a person can develop a solid sense of self, confidence, of effectiveness. One can begin to see oneself as an individual who can impact the world. Without trust, what one may experience instead is excessive doubt about specific situations and an overall sense of fear and anxiety about the world.

A person’s ability to trust can be developed through various pathways, and I want to point out two.

The most well-known pathway is the experience of secure early childhood attachment. But this, one cannot control. But there remains another route, which is possibly sturdier. Learning to nurture one’s trust by cultivating the vast and peaceful experience of resting in awake awareness.

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Awake awareness has been described as the “groundless ground,” the foundation out of which all phenomena arise and dissolve into again and again. It’s a big idea, but it can be explored in manageable pieces.

Developed in Tibet more than a thousand years ago and used by advanced meditators, the practice of awake awareness has recently become more widely accessible through the teachings of Dan Brown and others. It differs from more widely known practices, often referred to as mindfulness, involving a key shift in the state of awareness.

The practitioner learns to release from thought and the sense of being an individual who meditates to becoming part of a more subtle level of awareness that is not separate from self and that is everywhere. One way of describing the process is to use the image of an ocean. Instead of identifying with thoughts that come and go, much like waves on the surface of an ocean, or cultivating a calmer mind by sinking below the waves, we open the experience of the mind to become the ocean itself.

This subtle level of awareness, known as awake awareness, is boundless. It is lucid, calm, still, and has the quality of love.

When people learn to drop into the field of awake awareness consistently or even just periodically, their relationship to this field allows them to develop basic trust in themselves and life, even when they did not have a fortunate childhood.

When talking about trust, we can distinguish between two types: little trust and big trust.

Little trust is grounded in a person’s life experience when one had a secure upbringing, where a person’s family is the emotional foundation. But even then, the experience of a highly traumatic event later in life can undermine that trust. One can only imagine what that means for many affected by war, poverty, refugee status, and social and political disruption, including racism and bigotry. This does not even include loss, maltreatment, and family separation.

Big trust is grounded in the all-suffusing experience of awake awareness, the sacred dimension of life. Gaining the ability to experience big trust regularly allows a person to have confidence in their innate wisdom and caring and confidence that life will unfold in the right way, even when that unfolding does not go as they had hoped.

The path to big trust is paved by faith in the practice itself, faith that, if one keeps practicing with sincerity and commitment, doors will eventually open on an individual and collective level. Therefore, developing Big Trust is crucial for developing a foundation on which one builds one’s life, no matter what childhood was like.

I did not have a safe early childhood nestled in a loving family. My life turned around 42 years ago when I began meditating in a Sri Lankan monastery. During the past four decades, it has been crucial for me to gradually allow Big Trust to become part of the fabric of my life. During the past four decades, I have practiced letting myself be touched by the numinous quality of awake awareness through meditation.

Besides being grounded in life with my family, my home experience has widened to include the timeless, formless, nonconceptual field of awareness. Resting in awake awareness during meditation practice reminds me of the “Big Trust” that life will somehow wisely arise in an interconnected and unfolding way. During those times, I can experience the stream of breath and awareness flowing through me like a gentle river.

Psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, Richard Schwartz (psychologist and founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS)), and Loch Kelly (meditation teacher and social worker) call this quality of all-suffusing awake awareness of the Self with a big “S.”

Following many Tibetan teachers, Dan Brown named this quality awake awareness, which can be accessed with the help of pointing out instructions. Whatever one calls this quality, I propose that a clear and user-friendly way to access this experience of awake awareness is needed. Longer meditation practices help pattern the habit of recognizing awake awareness deep into the psyche.

Micro-awakenings or glimpse practices introduce a new habit of familiarizing oneself with moments of awake awareness throughout the days and prompts allow a person to remember to stay awake and practice micro-awakenings in a busy and chaotic world.

This transformative experience helps us develop into healthy, confident, and caring people and grow big trust in life. Making this experience part of who we are, allows us to live as poised, generous, and loving members of our interconnected world.

I recently visited the Buddhist scholar and activist Joanna Macy, now 93 years old, and I was struck by how she seemed to radiate from the inside out. As we talked and I told her about this article, she shared with me that trust has become more and more foundational for her as she has grown older. Joanna is acutely aware of the pain in our world, perhaps now more than ever, and yet, she told me, her sense of trust has grown over time. “I feel a sense of joy in being alive in this world in this time,” she said, adding that trust in herself and life allows her to trust others. She ended our conversation with, “Trust is so important to create a safe world.”

Coming back to my metaphor of life feeling at times like quicksand, with potholes threatening to pull us under, I propose that there is a way to be at ease in our personal lives, cultivate resilience, and remain steady in our service to others. Easily accessible ways make awake awareness part of one’s fabric of being, gaining the ability to meet the world with big trust. This will be relevant whether one focuses on individual development, work, or surviving and thriving in times of crisis, war, or extreme loss.

My strong sense is that the time has come when the forces of spirituality, psychology, and caring engagement have come together to help a person be with, accept, and heal the innumerable sufferings in our world.