Episode 29 - How do I trust life with Kathleen O'Brien

Introduction to the episode.

This episode came from a question at group meditation: “How do I trust life? How can I surrender and have faith when things just don’t see to be going ‘my way’ or as I had hoped they would go?”

Kathleen explores a different take on trust, shifting our perspective from a life based in faith, trust, and belief, to a new paradigm of knowing. She shares how life is in-fact a very knowable experience, rather than something occurring externally. Initially we may not have this relationship with life so we need to employ faith, trust, and belief. These can be functions of the mind that help us move forward. We can begin by telling ourselves, “It’s OK, I've got this, even though this feels big or scary, I’m going to put all of my fear aside and trust that it will be ok. I’m going to take the leap of faith.” But the next step we want to take is building a direct and unfiltered relationship with life. We want to know from within.

Remember when you first started meditating? Maybe you heard about Vedic meditation through a friend, partner, or colleague. You trusted them to go along and you look a leap of faith. Despite some resistance you did it - even though you didn't quite yet know how beneficial it would be. Months or years later, through a direct experience of meditating twice a day, you now know what meditation is and that it is undoubtedly good for you. You no longer have to trust the process or life, you've done the research to know the what happens when you meditate (or don't meditate!) You have cultivated this relationship to your practice. This is one micro example of trusting vs knowing, and we can cultivate this kind of relationship with every aspect of life.

Every time you meditate you are letting go into the unified field of pure consciousness, the knower of all things. If you want to have knowledge of the known aspect of life e.g. how things are evolving, then you need to be in the state of the knower. This is what meditation ultimately delivers us - unbounded self-awareness, as we become the knower of reality. Through this a natural and spontaneous shift takes place from a life lived in trust to a life lived in knowing.