A Spell for Building Trust

As we usher in this new year, I want to explore trust.

It's a silent power—like the glowing embers of a fire.

And it's cultivated through action and experience.

Each experience, whether successful or challenging, contributes to the embers of trust.

May this spell light a spark in you, inspire you to embrace experiences, and take steps, no matter how small, towards building the trust that sustains you and propels your growth.

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Mentioned:

Episode 139: A Spell for Making a Big Change https://www.nataliekmiller.com/mindwitchery/139

Make Magic:

Believing in our ability to grow through experiences, trusting in resilience, and embracing change incrementally are the sparks that feed our trust embers.

Transcript: A Spell for Building Trust

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I'm your host, Natalie Miller, and I'm so glad you're here.

Hello, my love. Those are the very first words coming out of my mouth this morning. Can you tell? [laughs] I still have a little bit of sleepiness in my voice. The house is very quiet. I made my coffee, and I came right downstairs to record this episode for you, because this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, teaching about a little bit, and I hope it will be helpful for you as you look toward the new year, as you look toward 2024. Although, whenever you're listening to this, this spell will be helpful, I promise you, because when can't we use trust?

So, today's spell is less a mantra or an affirmation, and it's more conceptual. When I think about what trust is and what trust is made of, the vision that I get in my mind, which I hope will be helpful for you, are the glowing embers of a fire. Trust has that, like, dense, quiet power, I think. Whether it's self trust or trust in a relationship, like, just the idea that, like, yes, I can count on me, or I can count on us, or I can count on them.

And for any of you who have built fire, I have to pause and tell you that this is the year, 2023 is the year that I learned how to build a really good fire. [laughs] I went to the woods of North Carolina with one of my very dearest friends, and I was in charge of the fire, and I learned how to do a really good job with it. And then I came home, and I discovered I can also build a really good fire in our own fireplace.

This is neither here nor there, but here's the thing about fires that I want to tell you. It's that what makes them really powerful and easeful to keep going are the embers. Once your big chunks of wood have burned down, and they are glowing red hot in the base of the fire, well then it's so easy to throw on another log, right? The fire is very hot, it's got a lot of condensed power in it, and it's easy to keep it going. I think trust is just the same, right?

So, I don't know about you, but I have been through periods in my life where I've been especially adventurous or especially courageous, like the moment in my life where I was living abroad a lot and traveling abroad a lot. And during that time—well, okay I did have the advantage of youth, which I think lent me a bit of invincibility, but more than that, like, I was just used to navigating an unfamiliar city, or I was used to being someplace where I didn't speak the native language. And because I was putting myself in those situations and surviving, thriving, figuring it out; with each little trip, with each day, with each figuring out how to take public transportation from one town to another, I threw a log onto the traveler fire. And as those experiences played out, happened, those logs burned down into these embers, and I had a very strong trust in myself and my ability to find my way anywhere in the world, and also I think just in the act of traveling itself.

Now, fast forward—I don't know, 15 years—when I've been living stateside for a long time, I haven't traveled for a long time, I haven't been in a place where I don't speak the language in a long time, and because I haven't had any of those traveling logs burning, I don't have the embers. And so, even though I did it once upon a time, I don't any longer feel that warm glow of power and capability, that warm glow of trust that makes me feel free and ready to travel again. Yeah?

Have you had this experience, I wonder, where you can look back at a certain part of your life? Maybe there was a time where you were just dating confidently, or there was a time in your life where you were really putting yourself out there. Or maybe a time in your life where you were happily on your own, making your way in the world independently and feeling amazing. Sometimes we can look back at those moments and be like, "How was I able to trust in myself and trust in life and the world? How was I able to trust enough to do that?" And the point of this spell is that I think we build that trust through action, through doing the things that we want to be able to trust ourselves to do. That's what I mean by putting logs onto the fire. It is, on purpose, engaging the types of experiences that you really want and knowing that the trust comes through having the experiences. The trust develops as you burn through the experiences.

And this is actually very, very important: I don't believe it matters how the experience goes. It's not like you're only going to trust yourself after you are successful. I don't think that's how it works. I think going through the experience in and of itself and coming out the other side, whether it is victorious or humbled, whether you have gotten exactly what you wanted and more, or whether you have learned some hard lessons, the trust comes as a result of engaging the experience. The trust comes as you realize, "Hey, you know what? No matter what, I can make it through this." Or, in the case of a friendship or a romantic partnership, "No matter what, we can make it through this." I will tell you in 45 years on this planet I have not discovered another way to build trust.

I just got a vision of—you remember that kind of cheesy, like, team-building exercise, the trust fall? I mean yeah, it's kind of like that, right? To generate the trust, I've got to turn around, and open my arms, and close my eyes, and lean back, and perhaps I will build trust in my team for catching me. Or—maybe this is controversial, I don't know, but—or maybe I'll build trust in my reflexes that, wow, when I wasn't being caught, my knees bent and my abs contracted to protect me from hitting my head. I don't know what's going to happen through the experience, but having the experience, welcoming the experience, moving through the experience, burning through the log of experience, that is what generates the embers.

Okay, so returning to the image of the fire here, I will use some of my now newly cultivated fire knowledge [giggles] to elaborate. So, the bigger the log, right, so the more daring, the more substantial the experience, the more embers it's going to generate. Yeah? So, let's say I want to trust that I could leave my partner and live on my own again. Actually moving out into my own apartment, that is a big-ass log. [chuckles] That's really, really big, and if I don't have the self trust built up, like, if you put a giant log where there are no embers to help it catch fire, it'll be really hard to get that guy going, right?

So, the way that actually you begin a fire is by using a variety of materials, a variety of sizes, and some of the things that you use to really get the fire going are much smaller, right? They're much, much smaller. So, if I'm starting a fire of self trust, I'm not going to start it with a giant move, necessarily. Rather, I'll start it with some smaller moves. So, maybe like a weekend away by myself, or maybe a week away, but my sister's coming out for half of it. Something like that, right? So, I might begin to build the trust through smaller actions.

Another example let's say my partner and I are opening up our relationship, we're practicing non-monogamy, and we know that that will require an enormous amount of trust in one another and in the relationship. We can't expect that trust to be a given, right? That trust will build over time. That trust will build as we take the steps toward opening the relationship. Now, there may be trust embers there glowing because we've had each other's backs for a long time, or because we've been through a lot together. But to introduce a new way of being in the relationship together and to build the trust around that, like, the only way I think to build the trust is to actually take the steps toward it.

So, we may not go straight to going away with a lover for a weekend in the woods, we may start with practicing having open conversation about all that we desire. We may start with sharing textual conversations with potential partners, but in an open way so that we're both aware that it's happening, right? And it's through those experiences, it's by burning through those experiences that we slowly build the requisite trust to be able to do the bigger things. Yeah?

So, I had a spell not too long ago that is maybe a version of this, actually, episode 139, "A Spell for Making a Big Change." And the idea there is similar to this one, right? It's like, if I want to make a really big change, I need to recognize that that big change happens tiny step by tiny step, right?

Sometimes we get arrested, we get stopped and stuck when there's something bigger that we want to do. Like, ugh, I really want to take a whole summer sabbatical from my business, for example. And it's like, well, in order to build the trust in yourself, in your business, in your team, to be able to take the whole summer sabbatical, you start by not attending every single meeting that the team is having. You start by delegating more and more of the business tasks that you'd rather not do. You start move by move, small stick by small stick, these experiences that are easier to burn through. You start to generate the self trust that then allows you one day to say, "Hey, I'm taking August off this year, and then maybe the next year I'm taking July and August, and then maybe the next year July, August, September." Right? We build up to that experience by generating those embers of trust.

So, try this: If you fully, deeply trusted yourself and your resilience; if you fully, deeply trusted in life, that life is a place to grow, and trusted that as long as you are intent on growing you cannot get this wrong; if you fully trusted that support, and belonging, and opportunity are always available to you; if you had these glowing hot embers of trust, what would you love to do? What's the move you would love to make? Personally? Professionally? What would you do if you fully trusted that it is definitely going to work out in your favor?

The thing that comes to your heart and mind, you can begin building the fire of experiences that generate those embers of trust. You can begin building that right now. So, what are some of the tiny steps that would be easier to move through? Find those. Assemble them like kindling.

When is a time in your life where you did have some of those trust embers? Think back to that and remember how you got them. Realize that, very likely, you got them not just through your successes, but more broadly through your experiences. Know that trust is buildable. Like, we can cultivate it, but only through the fire of experience, only through being willing to try some things.

The Bruce Springsteen line is coming to mind, "You can't start a fire without a spark." And that's probably another episode, [laughs] where we get that courageous spark that gets things going, so we'll save that for another time. But in the mean time, I know that when we trust ourselves, when we trust that we can grow through all of our experiences, when we do that, we live life to its fullest. And when we live life to its fullest, we're never only doing it for ourselves, we're always doing it in service of the evolution of humanity. I really believe that! I really believe that. How do we evolve? How do we move forward? We trust that there could be a better way. And the reason we trust that there could be a better way is that we've begun taking and making the better way.

All right, my friend, thank you as always so much for listening, and bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.

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