When people trust without learning whether the person or situation is trust worthy, we call them naïve or overly trusting and we see it as a negative. Trust must be earned through action. Our brains know this implicitly and yet expect that things will work exactly the opposite when it comes to our bodies. Our minds expect our body to trust, not only naïvely, but in the face of mountainous evidence to the contrary. Year after year, season after season we ask our bodies to carry on with no reward, no end in sight, promising that some day it will get what it has earned. The concept of getting what it deserves is something even our brain refuses to promise as that would cause outright revolt and revolution.
It’s as if we are the worst CEO of a semi-solvent company. At the beginning of every year we hold a company meeting to tell the employees what the plan is for the coming year, what the expectations are, what this means for them in work load, what the perks are, and the profit-sharing, etc. The employees all know that it’s a lie. They know that within 2 weeks everything will go back to normal and any negative outcomes will be blamed on them so their enthusiasm is minimal. There is laziness, outright embezzlement and general theft, buck passing, gossip and drama, infighting and romance all while the minimum amount of work necessary gets done. Meanwhile the CEO can’t understand why nothing ever gets done, profits aren’t up, and everything is mired down somewhere in middle management!
Trust is earned and it starts inside us. To be trustworthy we need to stop writing checks we can’t cash, making plans and not following through on them, promising things we don’t have the ability to grant. Instead we need to start with good relationship skills. We need to listen. Listen to what our body actually wants and not judge. What it wants might not be what’s on our list of “good for us” but it’s exactly what we need. We need to listen to our body’s advice concerning what we should be doing and how. It knows and we don’t. We’ve spent so long telling it what to do that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we can trust it to do what’s necessary correctly the first time. To be healthy we must start healing the relationships within ourselves. Trust is earned. If we start listening to what our bodies have to say, there’s no telling how much we thought was lost can return with interest.
