What is it that basically holds any group together if not trust – be it a family, a working group, community or all of society? Without trust we never quite feel at ease with ourselves or each other, and because of this we lose much energy in protecting our own interests instead of giving our best to the group, to our friends or the work we do together. There is always this subtle feeling that lethal conflict is just a hairs breadth away. Because of this we are also always afraid of being abandoned and left alone. This is not surprising because all of us have grown up and are living in a world filled with suspicion and mistrust, living behind locked doors, always interacting with each other with varying degrees of fear and hostility in our hearts. And yet, to love and be able to trust each other, to relax with each other, to let our hair down with each other, is surely what we really all want at the bottom of our hearts, whether or not we acknowledge or show it!
How to bring more trust into our lives and to genuinely relax in each other’s company, always and not just over a drink or two. That is the question. I have found that trust (or for that matter love or generosity) paradoxically comes through our awareness of the lack of it, starting of course, with ourselves. By watching our feelings and reactions to others, our own insecurity we not only start to understand our inner functioning but also pave the way for change.
When we take the trouble to look at it, we see that mistrust both, emerges from and reinforces our separateness from each other in the world. The more we justify it the more it grows and invades our relationships, finally destroying the links between us.
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What is it that we don’t trust each other to do, or fear that the other person will do to us? Perhaps we don’t trust that people really care about us. We are afraid of being exploited or physically hurt. And indeed many of these things happen all the time in the world. There is no running away from the fact of human cruelty and violence.
Human beings actually do come programmed with the capacity to hurt and torture each other. However, they also come programmed with the capacity to love and care for each other and for nature. It helps to see the huge role that conditioning plays in all of this, both cultural and environmental and how it influences the way we think and react. Luckily behaviour patterns we learn, even in childhood or later, though difficult to change at times, are not irreversible. I have personally witnessed the extent to which individuals who have gone astray, can blossom with care and attention – not unlike plants which bloom on being watered, fed the right nutrients and given the right amount of sunlight.
In today’s world the culture of violence seems to have spread far and wide. We may or may not realize this but feelings and attitudes are really quite infectious. The more we behave with aggression and mistrust, the more hostility we introduce into the world and the more aggressively people deal with us too. Conversely, the more we behave with love and openness towards each other, the more we are helping to spread these values and feelings in the world. It is really important to become aware of the choice we have as individuals.
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To go beyond aggression and violence involves something which at first might seem difficult and even senseless to do. It requires us to actually feel all those unpleasant feelings in ourselves which we are mostly trying to suppress. Jealousy, aggression, fear, insecurity. But being able to see and accept these in ourselves makes us a lot less judgmental. Very soon you realize that you can hardly point a finger at another person, when you see that you are capable of indulging in the same kind of behaviour, whatever it is. Without condoning violence and awful behaviour, it helps us to understand human violence and to heal the human psyche which has been so damaged through centuries of wounding each other, all of which comes from identifying too strongly with our egos, our separate selves.
Again it is not that we can force ourselves to drop feelings, or will them out of existence just because we think they are bad. When we diligently observe them and the effect they have on us and our relationships we gradually stop giving in to feelings which cause hostility and separate us from each other. When the inner hostility and anger have been resolved, their place is in time, taken by feelings of peace, of generosity and wanting to give rather than to take away. This automatically makes for more trust and stability between individuals.
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Of course, there is the question of how to behave and what to do in a world currently based on violence and mistrust. It doesn’t do to act as if these things don’t exist and to ignore the real possibility of danger to ourselves and others. Trust in each other does not amount to stupidity or blind trust. The only safeguard here is awareness and perception. The compassion and understanding which unfold through this non-judgmental observation play an important part in healing those who are not as yet completely trustworthy, and in guiding them to a place where they can also become dependable.
Uma