IN SELF WE TRUST
Why developing self-trust is a prerequisite for personal and collective liberation
An essay by Dani Cirignano - published April 2025
There’s a question I ask clients that no matter who they are, or why they’ve hired me, yields—truly, without fail—a similar response: They lean back in their chair. A big inhale and exhale washes through them. There’s an upswell of emotion, exhibited through body language: I might witness a misty-eyed glance upward or out a nearby window; a shift in tone of voice; or a physical softening, as if just considering their answer released something they didn’t even know had been coiled up taut within.
So: What’s the question? What do I ask that induces the type of reaction that, I’ve come to understand, is longing made visible?
Here it is:
“What would it be like to trust your life?”
Most people spend the majority of their precious time, energy, and resources controlling, managing, or tolerating their lives. The reason why even considering the above question sparks such a visceral, immediate reaction is because it reveals the vast distance between their desire for how they want life to feel, and the reality of how their current lives actually feel.
Developing self-trust is the bridge between desire and reality.
More than just a mental concept or gimmicky buzzword, self-trust is a full-body knowing that everything you need to navigate life's beautiful and turbulent waters is already within you.
→ This essay will demonstrate how developing self-trust is the path not only of personal responsibility, but of individual and collective power.
→ I’ll share the phases of the self-trust journey—a unique-to-you discovery process that will guide you toward expanded agency, freedom, impact—as well as how to increase your ability to consciously and intentionally meet the moment, no matter what is happening in or around you.
SELF-TRUST: AN INVITATION AND A PROMISE
→ The skills you hone, the wounds you heal, and the information you uncover on the path of self-trust translate to an ability to relax into the multidimensionality of your human experience. As you ease the grip of perfectionism and control, you make space to rediscover who you authentically are underneath no-longer-supportive habits and patterns. From here, a fresh map is revealed, pointing you in the direction of what right actions are uniquely yours to take with your finite time on the planet, which leads to choices and behaviors that are an individualized expression of your core, essential self.
→ Self-trust is a reclamation of personal power and authority. It's how you counteract the influences of a $1.5 trillion wellness industry that claims to have solutions to life's problems, when really it's just slick marketing that capitalizes on the worst aspects of "self-help": Individualizing systemic issues, stripping wisdom of context, fetishizing optimization, promising false certainty, bypassing complexity, and positioning "inner work" as a way to better tolerate broken systems rather than transform them.
→ Ultimately, an ongoing practice of self-trust opens up transformative potential beyond you as an individual. When you divest from tolerating the conventional status quo, you become available to participate in both the elevation of consciousness and the co-creation of a collective future that leaves the outdated paradigms behind. This is especially vital now, as we navigate a new normal of global change and uncertainty.
→ Self-trust is creating a safe home within yourself where you can trust your own desire. If desire is life’s own yearning for more of itself, then learning to trust your desire is learning to trust life, not as a force that would break you down, but that urges you forward, to become, to show up, to do the work that you are here to do.
That only you can do.
BEFORE WE CONTINUE, a disclaimer:
What you are about to read is not a simple guide or quick fix.
As you let go of the banks of the familiar river and surrender into unknown waters, you’ll be uncomfortable, challenged, and face periods of stuckness, frustration, and plateau.
Consider this essay an invitation into a grand experiment—one that promises a new way of being that is adaptive, co-creative, and visionary.
But don’t take it from me. Get into the water and see for yourself.
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
— Thomas Merton
Phase #1: Making Space for Trust
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
In theory, you know you’re responsible for your life—indeed, you’ve spent plenty of time, energy, focus, and resources on self-improvement. In reality, if you’re anything like the hundreds of people who have passed through my coaching practice, you tend to experience the promises of self-development—things like increased aliveness, joy, ease, connection, and a sense of genuine meaning, purpose, and service out in the world—as inconsistent at best; at worst, the idea of feeling any of those things is nothing more than an embarrassing fantasy at a time when the world feels increasingly unstable and chaotic.
You probably already have at least some sense of what’s getting in the way of making progress, but despite knowing, you’re still stuck. You don’t understand why all the awareness you have about why you are the way you are hasn’t translated into meaningful action in the direction you desire.
And though you yearn for the promises of self-development listed above, and fantasize about designing a life where those qualities are more consistently and naturally infused into your general experience of everyday life, you know that if you don’t learn how to move from thought to action, you’ll stay caught in the same exhausting whirlpool and miss out on the lessons of the river.
It's this knowing—and specifically, developing a relationship with this knowing—that is the first, most foundational stage in developing self-trust.
Most of us in the western world—through no fault of our own—have been conditioned to seek answers to Big Life Questions from outside of ourselves. We are programmed to cede our authority to experts, science, teachers, mentors, bosses, colleagues, gurus, peers, partners, politicians. With the internet at our fingertips, we’ve become proficient at research, constantly pumping ourselves full of information. We crowdsource the opinions of trusted friends, family members, and colleagues. We stay endlessly on top of the news. We bop through courses, trainings, workshops, retreats; we collect degrees and certifications; we hire therapists, coaches, energy healers, personal trainers, psychics, astrologers. And despite so much evidence to the contrary, most of us still believe that a unifying political figure surely is on their way to unite all that divides us and forge a saner path forward.
There’s nothing objectively wrong with any of these things. The trouble occurs when you don’t crosscheck the external input with your higher self.
The trouble occurs when you look everywhere but right here for the answers you seek.
What if I told you…
You have a built-in navigation system for filtering through internal and external influences that, when left unquestioned and unexamined, can perpetuate the very issues from which you seek liberation.
That filter is your own inner guidance.
Making space for trust is how you create the conditions for your inner guidance to emerge.
A word on context
No matter how motivated or well-intentioned you are, there are contexts that color your perception of reality and what’s possible in reality. Your habituated mental and bodily responses to these contexts are exquisitely adept at convincing you of the importance of maintaining homeostasis and steering clear of risk.
First, there’s the impact of an internal context that is a reflection of your history and lived experience. These are your individual patterns, social conditioning, internalized programming, and limiting beliefs—inner forces that can keep you stuck fighting whitewater instead of learning how to swim.
Then, you have the influences of external context: You exist in a patriarchal capitalist society that glorifies productivity, efficiency, homogeneity, and growth at all costs; you are bombarded by a relentless onslaught of external stimuli, thanks to that remarkable device you’re probably reading this on; and, you just so happen to be alive at a time of great change and uncertainty, witnessing the breaking apart of social constructs that no longer guarantee the stability and safety you were trained to expect.
All of this to say: You understand why it would be disingenuous of me to write an entire essay about the perks and promises of developing self-trust without explicitly calling out the unprecedented elements wresting your attention and energy away from the very steps required for you to become more free.
When your capacity for inner quiet is crowded out by the influences of these contexts, you remain disconnected from your inner guidance. This disconnection keeps you paying attention to everything except for what’s right here, which is to say, from anything that could actually affect actual change.
The idea of stillness and quiet is plenty alluring, but the reality of it can be excruciating: Life is already stressful; sitting quietly with the uproariousness within is, understandably, probably the last way you want to spend your time.
And yet: If you don’t learn to shift how you operate inside these contexts, they’ll keep running your life.
It can be confronting to accept that these are the waters you're swimming in. But acceptance is required if you want to rewire the familiar habits and strategies that, without your mindful intervention, would convince you that reality should be different than it is. When facing challenges, most people get caught up in thinking “this shouldn't be happening.” Instead of addressing the actual issue—which is already difficult enough—they create additional suffering by fighting against reality itself.
By embedding yourself in *actual* reality, versus what you *think* reality should be, you can channel your energy and efforts toward learning to operate inside these contexts in fresh, adaptive, and innovative ways.
This process is initiated when you connect to your higher self.
Let’s talk definitions:
Call it what you like—higher self, inner guidance, gut feeling, intuition, the teacher within, your inner GPS—what you call this aspect of yourself is less important than being able to connect to the idea, and eventually a felt sense, of your own innate wisdom.
→ This is the part that wakes you up in the middle of the night, the voice of anxiety that is a signal that something either isn’t right, or has swung too far out of balance.
→ This is the part that is free from the family-of-origin stuff, from the social and cultural conditioning stuff, from the judgments of your inner critic.
→ This is the part you sense when you close your eyes and visualize the absolute best version of yourself—strong, fortified, up to something meaningful, caring and being cared for by people you love, energized by a sense of purpose, and able to access joy on a regular basis.
→ This is the part that turns away from the comfort zone of a culture whose rules promise to keep you safe, but in reality are keeping you stuck—and toward a path of bravery into the wild and glorious unknown.
→ This is the part of you that recognizes itself as it reads this essay 👁
Creating a relationship with this aspect of yourself opens the portal to self-trust, because it reveals who you are beneath your patterns and conditioning, beneath the noisiness of the world, beneath the fixity of your identities. It’s how you know what is yours to do, and what right next steps are yours to take, because you are connected to inner cues of yes, no, not yet, maybe.
→ When you know who you are and what is yours to do, you become less likely to be swayed by inner and outer pressures and influences.
→ Though you might dip in and out of comparing yourself to what others are doing, or soliciting feedback from trusted advisors, ultimately, your higher self is at the helm.
→ From here, you become the author of your lived experience. You have say over your story, and the agency and power to live in alignment with what’s most important to you.
With practice, something rad starts to happen:
You face a challenge or struggle, and instead of being at the mercy of your habitual, knee-jerk reactions, you slow down, get quiet, and go inside. You plug into your higher self. You listen, and allow the next right step to reveal itself to you, waiting for what I refer to as a lantern on the path to emerge. Over time, the grip of the contexts that used to run your life loosens. The ceiling starts to lift; possibility and potential reemerge; creativity and imagination begin to pool in.
Making practice the goal
Creating space for self-trust isn’t something you just cross your fingers and hope will happen. It’s not one-and-done, it’s not something you check off a to-do list.
Instead, it’s an ongoing, highly attuned, forever conversation with your most core, essential self.
This is a fancy way of saying: Making space for trust requires practice.
Practice doesn’t have to be complicated. Think of it as a structure you show up for consistently, inside of which you can pay as-undistracted-as-possible attention to what is happening—and what wisdom, information, or insight you might glean— within.
Practice is a way you invest in yourself. It’s what roots you into your life so that when a crisis occurs, you don’t stay knocked down, because you’re able to call upon your reserves. It gives you ground to stand on from which you can observe the natural ebbs and flows of life without abandoning yourself, getting buried, or being swept away.
In other words: Practice is what gives you the capacity to stay engaged.
This could look like traditional meditation; sure. It could also look like long, phone-free walks in nature; journaling; breath exercises; guided visualizations; reading and reflecting on poetry; or listening to beautiful, uplifting music. It could be as simple as sitting quietly with a cup of coffee in the morning before the day begins, just you and your senses, relishing in the quiet peacefulness of the present moment.
What’s most important is not so much what you do but that you do it.
So no, I’m not going to give you a Developing Self-Trust Checklist. What I will do is encourage you to experiment until you discover what works for you, because if a practice is to be successful, that’s the only thing that matters.
I’m sure this isn’t new information. You already know all about “self-care:” The benefits of meditation, and digital detoxes, and morning routines, and hydration, and so on.
What is new is approaching practice not just as one more thing to get through, but as an opportunity to listen and know.
→ Who is here, underneath the noise?
→ What wisdom, message, or guidance is present?
→ Where is the greatest need in me?
→ Based on all this, what is *my* next right step?
If the connection to your higher self has been neglected (hint: This is the case for just about everyone), you might hear crickets at first. Know that this is part of the dance of self-discovery, and not an indication that you’re doing something wrong. Indeed, every time you stay in the water instead of returning to the familiar shoreline—everytime you keep your commitment to your higher self—you reinforce new, more helpful thoughts and behaviors instead of capitulating to the familiar frustrating ones.
“Making practice the goal” is how you fall in love with life on the way to wherever it is you’re going.
It’s how you weave yourself into the fabric of your days, finding joy and presence in the messy, mundane moments, even as you work toward your big dreams and goals. It’s adding richness and texture and depth into your life, instead of superficially skimming over the top.
“Making practice the goal” honors the sacredness of your efforts. It’s how you nurture the vulnerable, honest part of you that is waving the white flag on current conditions, no longer willing to be ignored. And, it’s the foundation from which self-trust can bloom.
Making space for trust takes time: Give yourself the gift of surrendering to your experiment. Remember, this is the beginning of a great unraveling, an inner unspooling from which an entirely new way of orienting to yourself and the way you move through your life can make itself known to you.
TO RECAP:
There's a greater, nearly constant barrage of attention-grabbing influences fighting to be a part of your identity than any previous generation of humans contended with.
The way to counteract these influences is to connect to your inner guidance.
This is a relationship that is cultivated with practice over time.
CONTINUE READING →
Next: Part 2 of 3: Mapping A New Inner Terrains
“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure… and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”
— Maya Angelou
Phase #2: Mapping A New Inner Terrain
Mapping a new inner terrain is the process of taking wise action toward unhooking yourself from all the habits, patterns, and core wounds that block you from creating an authentic, self-expressed life. Every time you stay in the water through the inevitable discomfort that will arise when you face your shadows, you have the opportunity to discover who you are and what you’re made of.
You stay in the water, and you prove that you can trust yourself to be with whatever comes your way, and that everything you need to steer your own ship is already within.
Along the way, as you liberate yourself from the deeper, less observable resistances that keep you on the hamster wheel and endlessly avoiding the wilderness inside, you begin to move in the direction of a life that is an expression of your essential nature.
You become a cartographer of your lived experience, shaping your reality.
In Phase #1, you made space to connect to the directives of your higher self, and put supportive practices in place to nurture that relationship.
You might want to sit down for this one, but: Phase #2 is marked by confrontation. You start to bump up against your expectations around what change is supposed to be like (aka, bright; shiny; linear; social media worthy), and face the truth of what it’s actually like (spiralic; tedious; messy; uncomfortable; even boring at times). Right at the moment where relaxing into self-trust would be most useful, you instead find yourself in the same frustrating, habitual loops that pushed you onto the path in the first place.
This is also the part of the essay where I let you in on something you won’t hear from the mainstream wellness machine:
As you step onto the path, the first thing that happens is the path disappears.
Despite your best, most diligent efforts, at some point along the way of developing self-trust, you face something that shatters the status quo and shoves you in a new, unexpected direction. The wind gets knocked out of your sails, and suddenly everything you understood about what was happening or was going to happen morphed, mutated, or vanished completely.
You look around and you are in uncharted territory.
As you grasp for certainty, a few things tend to happen:
✓You try following other people’s maps
✓You read memoirs and listen to interviews and follow the social media accounts of people recounting similar troubles as you.
✓You return to the comfort zone of information gathering, your intellect insisting that if you just think hard enough, a NEW THOUGHT is bound to arrive that will suddenly solve everything.
✓The familiar voices you created space from in Phase #1 fire back up—
—Oh, you’re a mapmaker now? Is this *really* the best use of your time? Why don’t you come have a seat over here, back in the Land Where Things Make Sense?
—and though you might glean insights from other people’s stories of change, or avoid a few obstacles by studying the maps of people who have gone before you, or hire an experienced guide with whom to traverse the unknown territory that lies ahead, ultimately, you cannot follow someone else’s map. Nor can you think your way into change.
As you leave behind the familiar territory and set forth into the unknown, different rules apply. This is often where people jump ship because mapping a new inner terrain is uncomfortable and involves throwing overboard what you know to be true about how things work and how things should go.
Mapping a new inner terrain is how you relinquish the fantasy versions of yourself so you can stake a claim in reality.
This requires facing the more subterranean and heretofore lesser known inner landscapes you haven't wanted or been able to look at until now.
(Incidentally, it’s also how you unleash your creative gifts into the world.)
The Rules of Cartography
→ Adjust your relationship to time. Progress and results are going to take longer than you would like or think should take (this is another reason why it helps to make practice the goal).
→ Embrace setbacks and welcome obstacles. What you learn about yourself when you stumble or regress provides evidence and increases confidence that you can deal with whatever comes around the next bend.
→ Learn to be alone. The promises of self-development are inherently isolating because they require a certain amount of solitude to unfold. As you amplify your higher self, tap into a frequency of self-trust, and learn to listen to who you are underneath what family, society, and culture had convinced you you were, the external horizons have to disappear—or at least quiet down—for a while.
→ Release outcomes. Though it can be comforting to look at other people’s maps to get a sense of what you might expect, don’t forget that predicting outcomes presupposes a linearity—a cause and effect—that doesn’t exist in the realm of human development and evolving human consciousness.
Developing self-trust takes time, effort, attention, and patience. Luckily, there are infinite interventions available to support the deeper work of mapping a new inner terrain.
Here are three approaches to support your lifelong cartographic efforts.
ONE | REDUCE THE DOMINANCE OF THE MIND
The mind is the home of creativity and imagination. It’s what helps you consider potential outcomes and consequences, make connections and see patterns, get through to-do lists, move from Point A to Point B, plan for the future, and come up with new ideas.
A mind in balance offers guidance and wisdom. An overworked mind leads to diffuse and scattered focus, and keeps you defenseless against your critical thoughts, unquestioned beliefs, frustrating behavioral patterns and habits, and the voice of the inner critic.
In order to craft a new map, you have to learn to interact with your mind in a new way, because without intentional intervention it’s easy to lose perspective and to experience reality through a very narrow lens.
One way to reduce the dominance of the mind is to increase your skills of metacognition, which is the ability to not only have thoughts, but to observe them. As you strengthen this aspect of consciousness, you bear witness to your thought processes and stop identifying as closely with them.
Anything that puts you in a zone of self-reflection is an exercise in metacognition; think of mindfulness practices like meditation or journaling as great practices for developing this skill.
Because you live in a culture that pedestalizes the intellect above all, it’s easy to miss out on additional aspects of your intelligence that can inform your responses to life.
Increasing metacognition not only slows down automatic reactions and habitual thought patterns, but it also makes it possible to connect to the wisdom of the heart and the body.
In many wisdom and spiritual traditions, the head, heart, and body are known as the 3 Centers of Intelligence.
→ The heart is the abode of feelings and emotions, and the gifts of the heart include qualities of intuition, empathy, compassion, joy, pleasure, and play.
→ Embodiment—also known as somatic intelligence—helps you navigate the uncertainty baked into reality. Familiarizing yourself with the signals of your unique biology is the gateway to experiencing safety within yourself that isn’t contingent on any external person or circumstance bestowing it upon you.
→ By increasing metacognition and balancing out the 3 Centers, you can create a map that shows you how to navigate the messy middle of reality, rather than keeping you stuck in limited concepts and tired thought loops.
When you’re stuck in cognitive dominance, you miss the gray area between extremes—and all the nuance inherent—which, incidentally, is where real life actually happens.
TWO | FIND THE RIGHT TOOLS
It can feel unmooring when the ground beneath you disappears and you get thrown into the current of the unknown. You have no idea where or when you’re going to land, let alone who you’re going to be when you land. The identities you’d been attached to start to loosen, or dissolve completely. You’re confronted by the obstacle of self-doubt; you long for the comfort of the familiar and bemoan ever getting started in the first place.
And, it’s your responsibility to do what is in your power to turn and face the more subterranean aspects of yourself that keep you grinding away at the same tired gears, instead of trusting yourself to map out a life that is a singular expression of who you really are and what you’re meant to do.
You do this by finding the right tools.
Ancient seafaring was revolutionized by the advent of navigation instruments, helping sailors determine location and direction, and making it safer to go on longer voyages. If the first suggestion in this section of the essay (section?)—reducing the dominance of the mind—gave you your bearings, finding the right tools is what keeps you in the water because it keeps you safe while you explore.
As your deeper patterns come into bolder relief, you’ll enter choose your own adventure territory—a process of trial and error where you discover what tools would be most appropriate to support mapping the contours of your newly rearranged inner landscape.
Here’s a quick example of a tool:
You might notice that the voice of your inner critic is so assertive that it’s sabotaging the directives from your higher self. A tool to help quiet this voice and assign it to its proper place is the practice of self-compassion, which teaches you how to talk to and treat yourself with the same warmth, generosity, and care you would a dear friend. As a strategy, self-compassion can motivate you to stay on your path of change not as a response to deficiency or weakness, but from a place of positive self-regard. Treating yourself with increased friendliness improves your quality of life, regardless of whether or not your external circumstances change.
Before you throw yourself into the deep end, slow down and start with what is most accessible. Right when you feel the urge to hurry up and go, slow down. Have a look around. Choose one direction to start with, and then experiment until you find the tool that makes a difference.
THREE | CONNECT TO A DEEPER WHY
Before you ditch this essay for cute puppy videos on YouTube, a promise: What awaits you on the other side of mapping a new inner terrain is the discovery of meaning.
In difficult times, knowing your values lights the way to your why. It calibrates your higher self's inner compass, pointing you not back to who you were, but toward who you're becoming.
One of the characteristics of developing self-trust is that it leaves you fundamentally changed:
→ Your self-perception is disrupted, as aspects of your identity prove to be far less fixed than you’d understood.
→ You question how and with whom you spend your time; you become hyper-aware of the fleetingness of time.
→ And though you don’t yet know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, what you do know is that everything is different.
Connecting to a deeper why is what keeps you in the water during moments where everything in you is urging you to give up.
🌟Values are beliefs about what is important to you.🌟
These beliefs shape your values, which in turn form your identity.
You inherit limiting beliefs about the world from your parents, your ancestors, and society itself. You then assume that these beliefs are fact instead of what they actually are: Beliefs you were handed by somebody else.
Connecting to a deeper why is the work of discerning your own beliefs—and therefore, your own unique values—so you can choose to consciously embody them in your life.
There are plenty of online tests you can take to help you determine your values. I prefer a less linear approach, which is to encourage you to ask yourself bigger questions.
Consider: What questions are essential to your journey of becoming the person you yearn to be?
You are looking for HOLY SHIT level questions that completely obliterate the regularly scheduled programming. These types of questions point you toward a more expansive way of relating to your creative work, your relationships, your whole life.
You want these questions to make you live your life differently, more fully, more intentionally.
→ What does it mean to be fully alive?
→ How can I “be the change I wish to see in the world” as the world exists for me in this moment?
→ How can I design my life and my work around peace and satisfaction, instead of endless growth, seeking, and expansion?
Anyone can connect to a deeper why, and I hope they do. But no one can copy your life, and your answers, and your experience of the world.
Living these questions, instead of merely intellectualizing them, lays a foundation for uncovering your deepest held values, mapping a way forward that is an expression of the vision you hold of your ideal self. You behave in ways you can trust, because you’re guided by something bigger.
It would be foolish to expect that the first map you ever created would be a permanent representation of a dynamic, always adapting, ever-shifting human life.
Just like coastlines are in constant flux due to the action of waves, currents, erosion, and tides, your lived experience is affected by the social and environmental contexts you operate inside. Revisiting and readjusting your map is how you train yourself to be flexible and responsive to life, rather than rigid and perfectionistic.
Wisdom is letting curiosity lead the way, and embracing adaptation and growth at the same time you learn to let go of whatever is no longer working—regardless of how well it might have worked in the past.
Mapping a new inner terrain is a refinement process of learning to track the subtleties of your inner landscape with closer attention, making it easier to orient yourself not only to where you are, but where you’re being guided.
And though it never gets easier when what you thought was steady ground disappears, what you discover, develop, and devote yourself to along the way gives you something no one can take from you: The knowing that you can surrender into and be changed by the current, because you are a trustworthy expert of your experience.
TO RECAP:
Reducing the dominance of the mind connects you to broader intelligence beyond the intellect's binary thinking.
Finding the right tools requires patient experimentation to address your unique patterns and resistances.
Connecting to a deeper why through your values provides direction when obstacles emerge.
CONTINUE READING →
Next: Part 3 of 3: A New Way of Walking
“We cannot solve the world’s problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
— Albert Einstein
Phase #3: A New World is Waiting
Here you are, alive on the planet at this specific moment in time. You’re devoted to your inner work, and though the process isn't without its discomforts, your days are infused with discovery and learning. The promises on the other side of developing self-trust are coming to fruition and you’re just out there, swimming, increasingly relaxed and settled in yourself and what you’re up to, cruising along, lantern-by-lantern.
It’s also true, as I mentioned back at the beginning of this essay, that you are living through a period of great change.
Now what?
What's the point of all this self-development, anyway? Why continue to do the inner work when the world is on fire? Why stay committed to your own healing and transformation?
The reality you’re facing isn't a temporary disruption after which things will "return to normal." You’re living through a fundamental restructuring of social, economic, ecological, and political systems.
The question isn't whether change will happen, but how you’ll respond to it.
Developing self-trust gives you an individualized playbook for how you can most authentically and effectively participate in the co-creation of a future that is generative, co-creative, visionary, and joyful in the face of destruction and decay.
Because if it's true that "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction," then it follows that for however intense the darkness of the world currently feels, there is an equal amount of light blooming in tandem.
A new world is waiting—Phase #3 in the journey of developing self-trust —translates to maintaining enough energy in the tank to fuel not just rebelliousness and resistance, but also, the innovation required to build something new.
My invitation with this essay is to stop chasing the (moldy) carrots being dangled in front of you by the people in power who promise that if you just keep plugging along, if you just trust their experience and expertise, that the certainty and stability you long for will be achievable.
Instead, I’m asking you to reimagine what's possible for yourself, your people, and the world—and that you put structures and relationships in place to live into a deeper sense of engagement and aliveness as a counterbalance to distraction, despondency, disconnection, and despair.
I'm extending this invitation because if you don't disrupt the autopilot (all those strategies, practices, beliefs, habits, and structures of interpretation that have you convinced of a certain story about the way things are) and learn to expand your capacity to move with change, instead of fighting against it—you'll miss a once in a lifetime opportunity to usher in what is being birthed at the same time you're witnessing the death of the old ways.
Regardless of whether or not these concepts spark eyeroll-inducing levels of "duh, Dani," or you're only recently waking up to just how high the stakes are in this current era, it's still bizarre to be experiencing the rapidness of the decline in real time, and to face the fact that everything you were trained to believe would give you meaning and purpose, stability and security—all the information and promises that were downloaded and programmed into you by culture, society, family of origin, media, education, and so on—are dissolving in real time right before your eyes.
You're seeing behind the curtain and realizing that The Great and Powerful Oz is nothing but an illusion—and that, my friends, is one hell of a dissonant sounding bell that can't be unrung.
Self-development is inherently personal. But if you're picking up what I'm putting down in this essay, you know that a meaningful life must go beyond just you.
Phase #3 isn't about "finding yourself" (or at least, it's not only about finding yourself)—it's about discovering how your individual self-expression contributes to the larger web of life.
→ It's reimagining life as a collaborative partner, rather than something to get through or control or tolerate.
→ It's taking steps toward increased personal satisfaction and funneling it into greater collective thriving.
→ It’s learning to serve—or amplify the ways you already serve—not only yourself and your inner work, but the entire ecosystem in your sphere of influence, one decisive action at a time.
Developing self-trust helps you rewrite the narrative on what it means to be responsible not only for yourself, but also for your participation in the elevation of the collective consciousness.
The more you free yourself from the limitations of your patterns and conditioning, the wider the aperture of your potential grows. You can concern yourself with so much more than shitty habits and petty grievances. You can trust your behavior and how you show up. You can be up to something bigger, which organically translates to plugging into deeper relationships, collaborations, and impact.
The reason self-trust is a prerequisite for personal and collective transformation is because what you transform from the inside becomes a reflection of what you experience on the outside.
As the result of turning toward the wilderness within, and facing your hidden, scary, uncomfortable parts with guidance from your higher self, you begin to respond to the outer wilderness with imagination, flexibility, and creativity.
You understand that you do not have to wait to be perfect in order to participate in making a difference, because you know that real life happens as the result of the messy authenticity of your human fallibility, not in spite of it.
Superficial self-trust is ceding your authority and agency and relying on external people or systems in order to be OK. It’s an experience that exists only in the mind, keeping you on the lam from reality. It's uncompromising, unforgiving, and keeps you endlessly distracted by external metrics and markers. It's constant self-management and control, and it's rarely any fun.
It's easy to trust your life when things are going well. The work of developing self-trust forces you to consider what this looks like when everything is hard and weird and even grotesque.
→ What if I could trust *this* too?
→ What if life is unfolding *exactly* as it's meant to?
→ What if I have everything I need—*what if my community has everything it needs*—to meet this moment?
This moment—this strange, precarious moment in history—is precisely when our collective creativity and innovation are most needed. The systems you’ve grown up with are revealing their cracks, limitations, and outright failures. But rather than succumbing to despair or nostalgia for a stability that never truly existed, you have the opportunity to become a collaborator with what comes next.
Innovation doesn't always look like technological breakthroughs or world-changing inventions. For most of us, it's about finding new ways to be with each other, new ways to organize your communities, new ways to relate to the natural world, and new ways to distribute resources and care.
It's about asking, "What if?" and being willing to experiment with the answers.
The world doesn't need more people who can perfectly execute within existing systems. It needs people who can imagine beyond those systems. It needs people who have done the inner work to disentangle their sense of worth from external validation, people who can hear their own inner guidance above the noise of superficial wisdom and homogenized expectations.
Those who cling to rigid expectations about how life "should" be will struggle the most.
Those who have developed self-trust will be best positioned not just to survive these changes, but to help shape what emerges.
Trusting your life isn't about being passive in the face of injustice or accepting harmful conditions. Rather, it's about distinguishing between what you can and cannot control, and focusing your energy where it can have the most impact. It's about developing enough self-trust that you know when to resist, when to adapt, when to create alternatives, and when to simply bear witness.
The tools of self-trust become resources not just for personal wellbeing but for collective adaptation. As more people develop these capacities, our mutual resilience grows. We become better at responding creatively to challenges rather than reacting from fear. We become more capable of holding complexity without rushing to simplistic solutions. Instead of clinging to past ways of operating or thinking, we can relax and trust what is upon us.
Increased productivity and efficiency are false gods; shiny objects distracting you from the path of developing self-trust and a relationship with your higher self. In the context of oversaturation from external stimuli, there is very little space for imagination and creativity—let alone the emergence of a way of being in the world that allows peace, ease, and enough breathing room for you to focus on the things that would actually contribute to meaningful change.
If you never develop the capacity to get quiet enough to listen, you might, as Lily Tomlin said, "spend the rest of your life climbing the ladder of success only to realize it was leaning against someone else's wall."
Developing self-trust leaves the delusions of late-stage capitalism behind, acknowledging instead that the way out of the current climate of polarization and divisiveness—and toward something new and different that honors the differentiated expression of every individual—is by strengthening the omnipresent web that connects us all.
It's understanding that even as you do what is yours to counteract and resist chaos and uncertainty, it's equally important to devote time and attention to the radical evolution of human consciousness that’s on its way, that’s already right here, can you hear it? It’s already here. You just have to slow down and get quiet enough to listen.
TO RECAP:
Self-trust empowers you to participate in collective transformation during times of great societal change.
As you free yourself from limiting patterns, you respond to external challenges with creativity rather than fear.
Your authentic participation helps shape what comes next, even amid uncertainty and upheaval.
CONTINUE READING →
Next: Final Thoughts
“Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something beautiful.”
— Assata Shakur
Despite the #1-3 linearity this essay might suggest, the truth is all of these phases are happening concurrently. You make space, you map the terrain, you move into the world. All of it is happening over and over and at the same time. The actual map looks less like a meandering river and more like a chaotic, freaky, dynamic, spiralic tumble of life.
And ultimately this is what developing self-trust prepares you for: Allowing life to be messy and recursive and surprising. Knowing that you'll cycle through these phases again and again, discovering new layers each time, and that your ongoing work is not to force those layers off, but to relax and trust that all is unfolding exactly as it’s meant to for you to become exactly who you are meant to be.
With each cycle through the cosmic rapids, your capacity expands. Your relationship with your higher self deepens. You know how to stay engaged in your own personal development, and participate in elevating the development of the collective, at the same time. You can be with the beauty and delight of the world just as much as the pain and terror.
A world full of people who trust life—who can hear their own inner guidance, who can face uncertainty with creativity and courage, who can hold space for both individual expression and collective wellbeing—is a world that can navigate whatever comes next.