Trust

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
― Ernest Hemingway

Honour your own feelings and intuition without discounting them or writing them off because some authority or some group of people think or say differently. Practice taking responsibility for being yourself and learn to listen to, and to trust your own sense of self.

• Developing a basic trust in yourself, your body and your feelings.

• Trusting in your own authority and intuition, even if you make some

  ‘mistakes’ along the way.

• Meditation is about understanding yourself, your body and your mind. You are the expert, or have the potential to be, in who you are and what you feel. Trust your experience not what someone tells you should feel.

• Taking responsibility for yourself and your own wellbeing.

When I am teaching meditation, people often describe their experiences to me, asking whether their experience is ‘normal’. How am I to know? We are all the experts of our own experience if we allow ourselves to trust in our own experience.

This also relates to our trust in mindfulness practice itself. Some of us refuse to try anything without evidence. Fortunately there are now lots of studies about the positive effects of mindfulness. Although these studies are interesting, for me they have never been particularly important. What matters to me is the impact that mindfulness has on my own life. Initially, that required something of a leap of faith. I needed to just try it out and see if it ‘worked’. Nowadays I trust that it will continue to have a positive impact.