While looking for something else, I came across this sentence from Michael:
“This hesitancy to trust … is also, of course, as you well know, a hesitancy to trust oneself, to trust that in fact what you feel about yourself is trustworthy.” (1)
When I read it I nearly swooned. At that moment I felt that hesitancy to trust myself and trembled.
It wasn’t something special. It wasn’t anything particularly personal.
It was simply a case of a general “hesitancy to trust” anything. It was feeling the “hesitancy to trust” that had me nearly swoon. My gosh, he’s right.
I know where it comes from. I felt myself so deeply disappointed by the number of times a trip we had planned was cancelled by Mom and Dad’s quarreling that I swore never to trust anyone again. That thought exactly fits the way I feel and so I feel release (the truth will set you free).
I keep returning to this passage from Guillaume Pretty about Hitler:
“I’d say that Hitler was a man trying to gamble and that, at the start, the fact that he neglects the whole dimension of strategic tactics, the type of ground logistical problems, all of these oversights don’t catch up with Hitler the war lord.
“And then, one day, all of these conditions for war, which should allow a war leader to grow, catch up with him, and from then on, all his bets systematically fail.” (2)
I keep getting its meaning more deeply. Hitler had the German populace behind him. He’d sold his ideology of German superiority to the country and based his invasion of Russia on it. He had only to kick in the door and the whole building would come tumbling down, he said.
This was the bet he made that ignored reality on the ground. Hitler’s bets began to fail when the Soviets successfully resisted the Nazis. And from that moment on, unwillingness to admit his fatal flaw (letting ideology dictate his military strategy and tactics) led to his eventual downfall.
In my case, I’m hesitant to trust. Instead I gamble that other person will “win me over.” If they do that, I say they care about me and I trust them. If they don’t, I say the opposite.
This hesitancy to trust can become a fatal flaw. My response is (A) to process it (3) and (B) to just stop. When the thought arises, let it go and stop any forward motion. That’s all that needs to be done.
I’m seeing this clearly at this moment although five minutes ago I wouldn’t have been aware of any of it.
I’m hesitant to trust and I create a strategy and tactics based on that foundation, all designed to, by however devious a means, get what I want.
Now that I’ve identified a “hesitancy to trust,” I see that I can recognize it as it arises and choose not to go along with it. This too shall pass and it does. This is the benefit of the awareness path: increasing clarity of mind, decreasing obstacles to love by just being with a feeling or mood until it disappears.
Later….
Whether it was a result of writing this article or not, a few days later I actually had the experience of moving from not trusting a person to trusting them. It happened in an instant. The experience was truly liberating.
Footnotes
(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Nov. 15, 2017.
(2) Guillaume Pretty, “1942: The Year The Germans Lost The War | Hitler’s Lost Battles,” Timeline, at [youtube.com/watch?v=BuBIpe0f91w], in “Finding Blame is like Making War on a Person,”
(3) Upset clearing process