Creating new connections can satisfy so much of our longing and belonging. It can bring bursts of energy, insight and oxytocin. But building a relationship with someone, whether it’s friendship, romance, or collaboration, includes a fair amount of mystery. Who is this person? Do they walk their talk? Can I trust them?
It’s common to lean on others to answer these questions.
If I meet someone through a trusted friend, I tend to open quicker to them. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it skips the vital phase of swimming in the mystery, receiving information and letting my body sense how close or how masked I want to be with them.
Despite the well-intentioned rhetoric around opening our hearts more, if we prioritize heart opening over swimming in the mystery, we get in trouble.
Our power lives in discerning when and who we share ourselves with, not how quickly or deeply we can connect.
When we open to new people without discernment, we can walk into the biggest bridge burner of all relationships: assumed trust.
Assumed trust can look like forgetting to ask permission to show an explicit photo, or assuming your choices around risk would be the same for another. Being vague about an invitation because they “trust us”, right? When we don’t pause and ask what someone else wants because we’re so excited to move towards what we want, we shield ourselves from the discomfort of the mystery. Of who they are, what they want, how they’re different from us.
But as we know, trust isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. It can take many shared experiences of joy, pain, honesty, witnessing and mistakes to align our nervous system with another’s, and let go of the many layers of questioning and protection. As the mystery of who someone is gets some details filled out, we can jump into the mystery of what can happen between us when our bodies understand each other more acutely. That’s often when the magic opens up, and opens us up in the process.
I’ve been on all sides of assumed trust, and everytime it uses a sense of urgency to skip over the mystery. But the mystery has so much wisdom to share, as do our bodies over time.
The world I want to co-create is not void of mistakes - but there’s a depth to exchanges, a slowness to their progression, and a willingness to stay in the mystery and discover who we are to each other without urgency. Because ultimately, trust lives in the body. And our bodies have very different timelines than just our heads.
Comentarios