I wouldn’t be surprised if you could pinpoint a moment this week—today even—when someone or something you trusted let you down. Maybe you were counting on your spouse to pick up the kids from school, and you got the last-minute text: “Meeting came up. Can’t make it.” Or you were relying on your body to be well enough for a weekend getaway, but a migraine took hold, and you had to cancel.
Trust is the soul’s precious currency. It’s the gold that allows us to take risks, to reach out and grab opportunities. Trust is what lets us live and love. And yet every day, we face situations that threaten to bankrupt us. Appliances break, friends divulge our secrets, disasters play out before our eyes on the news. What we counted on falls through, and there goes some of our trust in the world. Distrust, mistrust, suspicion, skepticism, wariness, misgiving, fear, sadness, anger, lack of confidence: these shades of doubt are all signs of a trust debt. And we all risk being overdrawn—if we don’t take care to replenish our trust reserves.
The Trust Bank
An experience early in life—perhaps you were that kid standing alone on the curb at school, long after all your classmates had gotten picked up—prompts an initial loss of innocence. From there, the soul’s bank of trust can continue to dwindle. If your car breaks down, not only will you have to pay cash to get it repaired, you’ll also likely have to cough up some trust: in the future, you may have your guard up every time you get in the car. Or maybe you suffer from mystery aches and pains. You visit doctor after doctor in search of answers, get a label like “chronic fatigue syndrome,” yet still struggle to make it through each day. On some level, you may feel that your body has let you down, and you’ll likely feel poorer for it.
You don’t have to live like this, always losing trust and never gaining it. Think of the way your finances work. In order to avoid going broke, you don’t cut off spending altogether. If you did that, you wouldn’t be able to buy food or a pay for a place to live—you wouldn’t be able to survive. Instead, you aim for a flow of cash. While money is going out of your account, you (and/or your partner) also earn income.
It works the same way with trust. If we cut ourselves off from trusting entirely, we’d cut ourselves off from life. Every single human interaction requires trust. Plus it takes trust to cross the street, to eat food you haven’t grown and processed yourself, to heal…And so we need to bring trust into our lives, too. There’s a powerful way to fill up your soul with its natural resource, and it’s available to you every day.
Sunset, Sunrise
Every evening, the sun goes down. Every morning, the sun comes up. This has happened each day of your life, and it will continue to happen every single day until you move on from this earth. You can put all of your trust in this fact. It will never betray you. Regularly meditating on this can change your life.
Here’s what to do: as often as you can—whether that’s once a week, three times a week, or every day—pay attention to the sunset. (Don’t sun-gaze, though—that will damage your eyes.) For those few moments while the sun is going down, be present. You don’t have to be on the beach, witnessing the most beautiful sunset of your life. You don’t even have to be able to see the sky. You could be at your desk at a cubicle in a high-rise, with a calendar reminder on your computer as the only clue about what’s happening outside. No matter. Just turn your mind to the setting sun. Remind yourself that the sun will return tomorrow. You can always count on the coming sunrise; it will never let you down. It’s never going to stop rising.
Now, why am I not telling you instead to set your alarm every morning for the sunrise? It would certainly be a good meditation. It just wouldn’t be the meditation to rebuild trust. Focusing on the sunset is key, because you’re facing the darkness. It takes great faith to meet the fading light with the irrefutable conviction that it will not be gone forever. It trains your soul to have equal faith in life itself, to endure uncertainty and letdowns with grace and confidence, even to see the beauty in those periods of waning light. When you turn your mind to the sunset, you attune your body to the earth’s rhythms, so that when the sun rises the next morning, whether you’re awake to see it or not, your soul is aware that something you trusted came through for you.
Unlock Your Potential
For this meditation to have an effect on your life, you have to know why you’re doing it. In much the same way that a computer can be surrounded by wireless Internet signals yet remain offline without the right password, the sunsets won’t unlock their secrets for us if we don’t know how. Knowing that each sunset is about trust is the password. You have to remind yourself every single time that you’re doing this so you can become wealthy in trust.
Then, untold wonders can occur. You can experience the good in the world again—because there is good out there, so much good. You’ll no longer have to live in fear, disappointment, and deprivation. Your body’s healing mechanisms can reactivate. You’ll feel secure enough to spend your trust on the risks that lead to your divine purpose on this earth, to seize the chances to become your truest self.
So go ahead and get started with this simple ritual of observing the sunset. I’m so excited for you to unlock your unique and extraordinary potential.