In Trust We Trust
There are three kinds of trust. Not understanding the difference can lead to fear and disappointment.
By Phillip Moffitt
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 I had just ended our Sunday sangha, and people were coming up to ask me
questions they were not comfortable voicing in front of the whole group, when I noticed one yogi who was hanging back patiently waiting for everyone else to finish. She was a serious student of the dharma with lots of retreat experience but was new to the sangha. When we were finally alone, she explained that she had recently been betrayed in a relationship and kept getting upset with her lover about what had happened. She was also feeling distrustful of her boss who had a pattern of acting unfairly and was worried about her job. It was making her miserable. "I place a lot of importance on being able to trust someone," she said, "but from a spiritual perspective isn't trust just a disguised form of clinging?" She frowned, shook her head, and continued, "Aren't I really just wanting people to behave in a certain way and using trust to hide how much I am clinging to future outcomes? Shouldn't I stop caring so much if someone is trustworthy, if I truly want to learn nonattachment?" Her voice broke as she stood there waiting for an answer to her questions.
The yogi was asking herself an important dharma question, but she was
jumbling together two separate perspectives on trust without realizing it. Her pain and confusion were the inevitable result. If you stop and reflect, you may discover you too lack clarity around issues of trust. You may have trouble trusting others in particular situations because of past disappointments, or you may not trust yourself in certain ways. Worse still, you may experience others not trusting you at times and may even recognize justification for this lack of trust. If you are like many people, you may go to great lengths to avoid facing your issues of trust because they are simply too unpleasant. Yet having a healthy, balanced sense of trust is a bedrock for being truly alive, and when it is lacking, the ground of your existence is shaky.
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