When I was in my early twenties, I was worried, generally, about everything. For a time, this worry coalesced into a very specific concern that someday soon, gravity would stop working, and then where would we be? I said this to my older brother once at a cafe. He—mathematical, logical, never tempted by hyperbole—lifted my pack of cigarettes off the table and let it fall. “Gravity,” he said, deadpan. “Still with us.”
Were there concrete things I should have been worried about? That pack of cigarettes I smoked each day, for instance? For sure. Was the gravity thing kind of an absurd comedy bit I was doing back then? In many ways, yes. But when I look back across the decades at that earlier version of me, I see someone who was struggling to trust the reality of her own experience—struggling, in fact, to know how or what or who to trust at all.
I had been shot out of the cannon of a 1970s suburban childhood and was caroming wildly through my early adulthood, suddenly left to my own devices, with no idea what was best for me. No wonder I became fixated on gravity. Fixated too on my thoughts, my narratives, and the incontrovertible rightness of them. It was a tight and rigid orientation, and so when I failed—as I often did, as I often do—my failures got knitted into the larger narrative about me, my life, my habits, my prospects. Looking back, I’m not surprised that the idea of trusting myself was foreign to me. There wasn’t a single voice in any of my communities—religious, academic, social—that believed someone like me—young, female, poor, an artist—was worthy of trust.
Instead of myself, I put my trust in tarot cards. In the idea that hard work and perfectionism would lead to some kind of reward. In the universe, though I’m not sure I’d thought through what that even meant. I put my trust in relationships that were bad for me, employers who took advantage of my ability to work beyond my limits, and the notion that there was little that couldn’t be fixed by an alcoholic beverage or a greasy diner breakfast. My head was forever in the clouds, my feet rarely touched the ground.
Faced with the yawning and terrifying uncertainty of life and death, I did what any under-achieving, perfection-addicted person might do—I developed a full-fledged dependency on rigid planning, contingencies, work-backs, and work-arounds.
I lived with, and no doubt caused others, pain and confusion.
When I was almost 30, and he was just 32, my brother—calm, loving, perceiver of gravity—died of a rare and rapacious stomach cancer. That put my feet on the ground in a different way. It blew apart everything I knew to that point, including an overarching belief that things would be okay because they had to be okay. This, it turned out, was simply not true. Now I was further unmoored, with no idea what to trust.
Faced with the yawning and terrifying uncertainty of life and death, I did what any under-achieving, perfection-addicted person might do—I developed a full-fledged dependency on rigid planning, contingencies, work-backs, and work-arounds. And not only did I require adherence to the plan from myself, I also required it from all who loved me. I was, in short, fun to be around. This was less, I see now, about trusting myself, and more a fed-up, frustrated feeling that I was the only person who could really see what was going on—how dangerous, frightening, painful, and confusing it is to be alive—and if I didn’t attend to and master the chaos of life with a strict plan, who else would?
What We (Think We) Know
Kimberly Brown can relate to this. She’s a meditation teacher in upstate New York, and the author of three books, including Steady, Calm, and Brave: 25 Buddhist Practices of Resilience and Wisdom in a Crisis.
“I was abandoned at birth,” Brown tells me. “And people who have had that experience, their view of life is oriented around this original hard thing. And from that and many other circumstances, I had almost no trust in the world, in life, in other people, and not in myself, either. That’s a terrible way to operate. It means you’re constantly on guard.”
Brown, too, is a maker of plans and strategies. A person who wants to control everything. She remembers a meditation teacher—someone she describes as “amazingly outlandish, and he would shout at us. And one of the things he would shout would be: Trust yourself! And I don’t mean trust your thoughts!”
Our brains are bias-making machines—and what we think is intuition is likely just thought in disguise.
So—what to trust, if not my thoughts? I think of my friend Sarah, who loves the magic of coincidence, and who speaks often and passionately of trusting her gut—her intuition, basically (I’m much too uptight to trust my gut, personally). But no, it turns out, that teacher also didn’t mean trust your intuition. “For the vast majority of us, intuition is just more conditioned behavior,” says Brown. “And intuition might lead us astray because we haven’t really explored it.”
Indeed, our brains are bias-making machines—and what we think is intuition is likely just thought in disguise. “Our brains survive using generative models,” says Dr. Judson Brewer. Dr. Brewer is a neuroscientist and best-selling author of Unwinding Anxiety, who studies the effects of mindfulness as a tool for habit change. “We have a worldview, and we’re going to bias information that comes in based on how we see the world.” Brewer says this means our brains are likely to interpret some “neutral stimulus” in a way that aligns with our worldview, which, he notes, “can make it harder for us to see things that are literally right in front of our faces.” This is not, Brewer says, some conscious reluctance on our part to see what’s really going on, it’s just our brains have evolved to bias our interpretation of the world based on how we already see the world. “Usually it’s a feature,” he says, “but sometimes it can be a failure.”
So how, amid our brain wiring, our fast culture designed to distract us, our own unhealthy habits, and our anxious fear that gravity might quit, are we to ever trust anything, let alone ourselves?
Empty Stories
“It is possible to develop this sense, I would call it wisdom,” Brown says, “and in developing that, what you’re trusting when you say I trust myself, is, well, I don’t have to arrange all the circumstances, because whatever comes up, I know I can handle it. Now, some things are still going to be painful, but I can trust I’ll even deal with that pain in a different way.”
Sounds easy, sign me up.
Not so fast, Brown says. “The number one question I get from people who want to learn to meditate or practice meditation is: I feel like this and I want to feel like that, how can you make that happen for me? Or This is arising, I don’t like it, there’s something wrong with me, let’s get rid of it. Do you have a hack for it?”
I’m starting to get the sense the answer is going to be no.
“Paradoxically,” Brown says, “whether it’s through a meditation tradition or a psychologist, there isn’t a way to do that”—to hack our feelings or our experience of reality. “It’s not possible to stop whatever it is from happening because there were a whole bunch of causes and conditions that arose for it to arise.”
But wait, there’s good news: “And so in that way, I don’t own it,” Brown says. That discomfort, those complicated emotions, those circumstances, whatever is arising in our lives that we are hoping to elide with mindfulness: “It doesn’t have meaning, in truth,” says Brown.
“It does take time to become intimate with your body and your mind and become friendly with it. But when you can let yourself become familiar, then you can also start to trust: Oh, I do have good sense. I have patience. I will meet that moment. I will not be destroyed.” — Kimberly Brown
This is the kind of wisdom Brown is talking about, that can emerge out of mindfulness meditation practice. “You start to become much more aware of everything that’s happening, without all the stories about it.” And, Brown says, self-trust arises out of self-knowledge. “It does take time to become intimate with your body and your mind and become friendly with it. But when you can let yourself become familiar, then you can also start to trust: Oh, I do have good sense. I have patience. I will meet that moment. I will not be destroyed.”
For Dr. Christopher Willard, the path to true self-trust was winding. “When I was younger, I thought I trusted myself, but I made a lot of really bad decisions. I struggled with addiction and drugs and alcohol and not making the best decisions for myself and for other people, but thinking that I was.” Willard, a clinical psychologist and the author of 20 books about mindfulness for kids and adults alike, getting sober and into recovery and therapy and mindfulness was a step on the path, but even then, the path to self-trust never did run smooth. “It was hard to know what to trust. In some quarters of my recovery, some of the angels on my shoulder or counselors on my shoulder were sort of like, you should never trust yourself. You should really only trust a higher power, other people, or a program of some kind.”
But Willard, who has now been sober for decades, was interested in doing the work to arrive at what he calls his inner best self—a more sustainable approach to sobriety for him. “If I keep doing this thing, keep making this decision to not drink or do drugs, to be nice to people, to be honest, or to choose this career path and not that career path, and it keeps working out, then I learn how to trust myself.”
This approach is scientifically supported, it turns out. Dr. Brewer refers to this as evidence-based trust, which, he says “only comes when we have evidence for something. And the only way we develop evidence-based trust is from our own direct experience. The more we do something over and over, the more reliable our results, because we have a larger data set.”
Awakening Curiosity
There’s a step though, from evidence-based trust to self-trust, and that’s paying attention to our direct experience, with curiosity. “If we’ve done something a lot and we haven’t paid attention in the past, then we have to do it over and over and really pay attention for our brain to believe that the result is true,” Brewer says.
He gives the example of a patient who wanted to quit smoking, and who had “smoked close to 300,000 cigarettes over the course of his 40-year smoking career.” But the man hadn’t paid attention to what a cigarette tasted and smelled like, for most of those smokes (relatable!). “He’d just done it habitually forever,” Dr. Brewer says. “And he actually came back to me and he said, ‘How did I not notice this?’” This is the beginning of self-trust rooted in evidence. “The more curious we can be, and not go in with a judgment or assumption that it’s going to be a certain way, the more we can see very clearly the way it actually is.” And in this way, over time, the more we tune into our direct experience of life, the more we develop our capacity to lessen the power of our perceptual bias—to see our worldview, and to see past our worldview, and respond from a wider, wiser view of what’s happening.
It is, of course, easier said than done, unhooking from judgment or assumption. But then, that too is practice. The simplest mindfulness meditation practices of noticing your feet on the floor, the air on your skin, light entering your eyes, sound entering your ears—these are elements of direct experience. All of that is actually happening. Whereas the thoughts we layer over top? Not so much. No matter how persuasive we find them.
“Right?” says Willard. “Eighty thousand thoughts a day. Who knows how they counted that, but most of them suck. Most of them are really unhelpful. Most of them are wrong, but it’s really hard to know which ones.”
Kimberly Brown echoes this. “You’re in a moment of real stress and so you’re watching everything, including your own mind, and a thought comes up that says I am going to jump off a bridge, and it becomes so powerful. But right before that thought was the thought I’m going to have spaghetti for dinner. And that didn’t get as much power.” And while the thought of jumping off a bridge contains more drama—and more potential consequence—than the thought of spaghetti for dinner, both are just thoughts. Substantially speaking, they are the same—voices that may or may not be true, voices that may or may not deserve attention or action.
“I think what mindfulness promises,” Willard says, “is some discernment of what’s society’s voice, what’s a not-so-helpful voice, what’s caregivers’ voices, what’s a more destructive internal voice for seeking pleasure or escape versus a wiser inner voice that maybe I should listen to. And that takes some stillness, that takes some silence, that takes some sitting and contemplation.”
And it takes some compassion, says Brown. “The first practice is to really just have an attitude of gentleness toward yourself, a knowledge that this will change—whatever stress you’re feeling, it’s not always going to be there. That’s a guarantee.”
Once we’re greeting ourselves with compassion and gentleness, we can start to show up for ourselves with curiosity. One of Brewer’s most used strategies, when a patient wants help breaking a habit, is to ask, “Well, why don’t you do it more?” Why don’t you smoke more, why don’t you overeat more, why don’t you procrastinate on that assignment more?
“They’ve already answered the question,” Brewer says. “It ends poorly. If we pay attention to something that we do habitually, and we see that it is not rewarding, we’re going to get what’s called a negative prediction error. Our brain has predicted that it will be rewarding, and it sees that it’s not, and we’ve just learned something: Oh, this is not as good as I expected. And that’s where change happens.”
And that change—that moment of curiosity that leads to noticing, that moment of noticing that leads to subverting our brain’s expectation and replacing it with our actual direct experience (last time I overate at Thanksgiving, my body felt awful), that’s the space in which wisdom arises. Wisdom, also known as self-trust. Based on our own experiential evidence, relevant to our own lives, available to us every time we pause to practice mindfulness.
Contingency Plan
We come to mindfulness, often, because we are looking for change in our situation or in ourselves, Chris Willard points out. And as we practice, we begin to see and feel the effects of that practice. “When it continues to work, that turns into faith,” he says. “I have faith now that if I sit on my meditation cushion in the morning, I will probably have a better day. I have faith that if I go to the gym in the morning, I will feel better in the afternoon. My mood will be better, my anxiety will be less. Faith can seem like not a very scientific, secular word, but I think it is in a sense, because it means trust. We can see it happening, and then we have more trust in the process, and we have more trust in ourselves.”
It isn’t, then, about trying to control outcomes. It isn’t about making a contingency plan. It’s about being the contingency plan.
Once we can see the reality of our moment—my body feels terrible when I overeat, my mind feels good when I spend 15 minutes meditating, this is a thought not a fact, this is the effect my actions and words have on myself and others, I can’t control all the causes and conditions that are acting on me or the world—then we can create space for ourselves and for others to operate with more choice. More choice means more opportunities to respond rather than react, with wisdom rather than worry.
It isn’t, then, about trying to control outcomes. It isn’t about making a contingency plan. It’s about being the contingency plan.
“Yes,” Kimberly Brown says. “You are the contingency plan. You can trust that whatever life throws at you, you’re going to meet it with your wisdom, with your kindness, with your compassion. Much of life is not in our control—know what’s possible, and the rest, let it go. Trust that you can be here. You’re developing confidence, as you practice mindfulness, that you have the qualities necessary to do this.”
Body-based practices, she adds, bring the energy out of our heads, where our stories live, and into the very real realm of physical sensation. “And that’s a place to trust, in many ways,” she says. “Your body is your oldest friend. And so you can start to relax into it, to take refuge here in these comings and goings of all the sensations, and when you get caught up in your thoughts, coming back to feeling your feet.”
Coming back to feeling your feet. On the floor. Held in place by gravity. Still with us, after all these years.
