When you’ve been triggered enough times, it’s easy to start living smaller: avoiding certain conversations, second-guessing yourself, and staying inside an invisible cage that looks like caution but feels like contraction. In this talk, I explore what “trusting yourself” really means—not as bravado or blind confidence, but as an embodied sense that you can stay steady, return to center, and take the next step even in uncertainty. Along the way, we connect this to early conditioning (basic trust/mistrust), to good intentions, and to practical tools for staying grounded when someone tries to pull you into their script.
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Talk: How to Trust Yourself
Timecodes & main topics:
- 00:00 — Mindfulness of breathing + why early Buddha teachings are so practical (six-step Anapanasati sequence)
- 03:12 — Emptiness, in two useful meanings (and “empty doesn’t mean light”) 09:35 — Trusting yourself: what “trust” means and how it starts with what feels true
- 12:16 — How mistrust gets learned (world → attachment → self-doubt) and how we “shrink our world”
- 15:12 — What self-trust feels like in the body (and why it’s freeing)
- 19:13 — Building self-trust: owning good intentions; trusting love underneath emotion
- 23:37 — Trusting your earned experience: effort, skills, competence, and training
- 25:12 — Trusting the Three Jewels (teacher/teachings/community) + trusting your deeper nature
- 36:15 — Staying steady with provocative people: silence, curiosity, slowing down, staying out of their script
- 46:28 — Healing “unlovable” training: linking, letting the positive win, and embodied anchoring (somatic marker)
A Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing – the Buddha’s Foundation Instructions
This gentle, step-by-step meditation invites you to “come home” to yourself through mindful breathing and whole-body awareness. Guided by the Buddha’s original teachings—adapted with care and flexibility—it helps you settle the body, quiet the mind, and open into a deep sense of calm, presence, and peaceful joy, using the breath or any anchor that feels safe and supportive for you.
