Where trust in relationships is concerned, enduring fear is among our inner most strengths. Trusting someone gives us a mindset that we might get hurt either emotionally or physically, or when you can’t trust anyone it’s because part of you thinks you need to always feel in control of what happens.
Living this way, with your ego in charge, can be draining. When you can’t trust anyone you’re always suspicious and this holds you back from following your dreams. It makes you fear the future.
In a previous set of articles I talked about the woman from Croatia, named Nakita, who was writing letters to me while I was in prison for a foolish securities violation.
She was persistent in urging me to join in on an upcoming worldwide mindfulness meditation, where I’d participate from my prison cell.
All day on December 22, 2010, on the evening of the supposed worldwide mindfulness meditation for inner peace, my ego was still haunting me through the cracks in my ego-based split-mind.
Numerous questions were coming and going within me, especially as to how many people might actually be participating.
Would it be only me?
Was this in reality some sort of a prank?
Or would it only be Nakita and myself as the lone meditators?
Or, was I just having problems trusting someone.
In those moments I felt deeply uncertain.
I must say, however, that being under constant oppression and surveillance by authority as a prisoner is an understandable condition to create uncertainty and for trusting someone.
Prison is a breeding ground for unsettled thoughts of paranoia and worry; one can see it in the anxious way inmates carry themselves at times. This why often you can’t trust anyone.
One often wonders what will come at them next, never knowing what to expect.
I remembered in my practice as a financial advisor how for mental strength I’d often join in telephone conferences with many other advisors around the world. While there may have been a hundred or so participating, only some would talk while others just listened. But I’d recall that all participants had to check in through a central operator upon joining the call.
Of course this type of arrangement for the coming night’s worldwide mindfulness meditation for peace was not the case.
I would never know who, how many, or if any at all ever participated.
As my ego was telling me you can’t trust anyone, it found more and more gaps to slip into in my concrete thinking, and its messages grew rampant about trusting someone, anyone, for that matter.
Trustworthy person
After all, a letter had shown up for me here in prison from an unknown woman who had tragically lost her husband, and I was supposed to see her as a trustworthy person and become overjoyed about a worldwide mindfulness meditation for peace effort she’d informed me of?
Was I losing my senses due to being locked up for a few years now? I’d heard that insanity creeps up on prisoners slowly.
Or was it her? Was Nakita mentally unbalanced and had simply searched me out for some type of scam?
Maybe she had some sort of fetish for prisoners that eased her pain over the loss of her husband—if that was even a true story. I wondered how many other prisoners she had contacted around the world before she hit on me.
Was she playing some sort of numbers game until she found the perfect prisoner to prey upon? Was she searching for a replacement for her dead husband? And on and on . . . this is where my ego was taking me for my own protection.
A Course in Miracles states, “Wrong perception is the wish that things be as they are not.”
Fear the future
It was only a few hours before the session’s scheduled time of 9:30 PM Eastern time, and I was not in good shape.
How could I possibly place my heart totally into this with all the doubt festering inside me?
This would be like Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus trying to focus on sinking a twelve-foot sliding, left-to-right putt just after drinking a fifth of bourbon.
Was I nuts?
Suddenly a calm and quiet wave of peace passed through me, and my mind shifted over to the positive thoughts of Nakita’s kind, sincere, humble, and encouraging letters, which had certainly indicated to me her involvement in all of this was truthful.
And her knowledge of the beginning fifty principles that are the foundation of A Course in Miracles was extremely convincing, and this allowed me to see her as a trustworthy person.
After all learning to trust someone after deep pain has struck can seem to be impossible. But you can heal those ego-based feelings.
A Course in Miracles teaches us that, “Wholeness heals because it is of the mind.”
If you right-mindedly make a decision to be open-minded, you will learn that your vision of the world takes on new meaning, and in so many self-healing ways leading you toward trust in relationships and all-around success in life.
To trust in relationships,
James Nussbaumer
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