Trust

The next Path Principle is Trust - the willingness to engage with life even in the face of uncertainty, change, and risk.

Trust

One of the central truths of being human is that the future is uncertain. Anxiety is a natural response to this predicament. We are gifted with imagination—the ability to anticipate, plan, and prepare—but that same imagination can easily pull us into a near constant sense of fear. We begin to live inside the stories we tell ourselves about what might happen and how painful it could be. Simply telling ourselves that “everything will be fine” rarely helps, because we know, at some level, that life does not always unfold the way we hope. Loss, discomfort, and uncertainty are part of the human experience.

Trust, as I understand it, is not blind optimism or faith that nothing will go wrong. It is a grounded trust that we can meet reality as it is.

Trust with discernment

There’s a phrase I often return to because it captures this balance well:
“Trust in God, but tether your camel.”

Belief in God is not necessary for this message to make sense. If you are travelling in the desert, it would be unwise to wander off without securing your camel. At the same time, it would be equally limiting and unwise to live as though disaster is inevitable - never leaving your camel for a moment to attend to your tasks. Trust lives somewhere between these two extremes. We need to take sensible, practical steps—locking the door, tying the camel, making plans—but we also recognise that no amount of preparation can remove all risk.

The ways that you experience anxiety around risk might express itself in many ways; it might be in social situations, in relationships, in work, about health or many other areas of life. In therapy, we can explore the ways in which anxiety effects your life, and what it might mean to participate more fully in life with a grounded sense of self trust.

Trusting your capacity to cope

At its core, trust is about developing confidence in your own capacity to cope. No matter how carefully we try to control outcomes, life can still surprise us. Rehearsing possible futures can be useful up to a point—it helps us act responsibly and make thoughtful choices. But when this rehearsal turns into constant worry, ongoing procrastination or a sense of looming catastrophe, it no longer serves us. This is where trust becomes essential.

For many people, the most helpful place to locate this trust is not in guaranteed outcomes, but in their present and future self—trust that you will meet whatever comes next in the same way you are meeting this moment now. When attention returns to the present, away from imagined futures, we often discover that we are already coping.

Trust and the stories we carry

The same is true of how we relate to the past. You might find yourself replaying a painful experience—what someone did, what you lost—telling yourself you’ll never move on. These stories matter, and the hurt they point to is real. And yet, in this moment, you are here. Your body is breathing. You are managing in this moment.

Sometimes the stories we tell about the past keep us at a distance from the feelings that remain underneath. They feed the emotion, but they also protect us from fully turning toward it. Trust, in this sense, involves allowing the story to soften, and bringing attention back to the feeling itself—trusting that you can be with it, one moment at a time.

In the Inner Path approach, trust grows not by eliminating uncertainty, but by learning that you can meet life as it unfolds, and that this is enough.