Learning to Trust Myself

Part 6: Does This Feel True to Me?

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By this point in my journey, I had become comfortable admitting there were things I didn't know.

What happened next was that I slowly began trusting something I had spent most of my life ignoring.

Myself.

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It didn't happen because of one life-changing experience.

It happened because of many small ones.

I'd think about a song I hadn't heard in years, and then it would start playing.

Someone I hadn't thought about in a long time would suddenly come to mind, and then I'd unexpectedly run into them.

I'd find myself guessing what was about to happen next in a movie or television show.

At first, I dismissed those moments.

Then I laughed them off.

I figured maybe I had simply watched enough movies to recognize patterns.

Each experience on its own felt insignificant.

But over time they began to accumulate.

Eventually I found myself thinking,

Maybe it's worth not discounting these experiences.

Maybe it's worth giving them a little more weight.

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The more I noticed them the more I realized something else.

Sometimes a thought would simply appear.

Maybe I should take another route.

When I listened, I'd later discover there had been an accident or heavy traffic ahead.

Experiences like that weren't dramatic.

They didn't make me feel special.

They simply made me pay attention.

They helped me recognize my intuition instead of automatically dismissing it.

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After getting varying points of view and sitting with the feeling I had in my body, "Does this feel true to me?" became my guiding question.

Where do I feel this in my body?

What is that trying to show me?

I realized truth depends on a variety of factors—my beliefs, my values, my experiences, my goals.

So instead of only looking outside myself for answers, I began asking what felt true to me.

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Looking back now I think I had learned to distrust myself.

I had ignored and quieted my intuition in order to maintain connections I thought I needed, to protect certain ways I had come to view myself and what I was capable of, and for other more complex psychological reasons I was only beginning to understand.

Learning to trust myself didn't happen because of one profound experience.

It happened because I slowly stopped dismissing the smaller ones.

One experience became two.

Two became ten.

Eventually there were simply too many to keep explaining away.

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The version of me I had been wasn't living in all her glory.

She wasn't accepting all of herself.

Not just the parts she saw as flaws.

But the parts that made her different too.

The curiosity.

The questions.

The interests she worried other people would dismiss as strange or fantasy.

Years ago I probably would have dismissed conversations about ghosts, the unseen realms, fairies, unicorns, or Naga before I had even taken the time to ask why so many cultures have stories about them.

Today I don't feel the need to immediately accept or reject those ideas.

I'm simply willing to be curious.

Living in all my glory means allowing myself to openly embrace the parts of me that have always been there.

The parts that wonder.

The parts that ask questions.

The parts that are curious about things other people may never understand.

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Learning to trust myself changed more than the way I related to my own experiences.

It changed the way I related to myself.

And that ended up changing the way I related to everyone else.

That's the story I'll share in the next blog.

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Author's Note

One thing I learned is that trusting myself wasn't where the journey began.

It began with learning to love and respect myself enough to stop dismissing my own experiences.

Looking back, I don't think self-trust can exist without that foundation.

What I found even more interesting was how that foundation changed not only the relationship I had with myself but the relationship I had with everyone around me.

I'll explore that more in the final blog of this series.

With love,

— Hadija (Higher Heart Warrior Channel)

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