How to Trust Life (Especially When the Path Disappears and the Dumpster’s on Fire)
When I first stepped onto the personal growth path, I kept hearing teachers say things like “trust life” or “trust the universe.”
At the time, I was twenty-one. My mom was in the hospital wedged somewhere between life and death (but closer to the death side of the equation). I still had one foot inside the church door back then (raised Catholic), so I translated that phrase to mean: trust God.
But—how do you trust this so-called dude in the sky who is actively trying to murder your mother? Doesn’t that defy everything psychology teaches us about healthy boundaries and trust-building?
Fast forward thirty years (and plenty of dumpster fires later), I’ve finally landed on a working theory of what “trusting life” means for me.
First: The Problem with Trust
Most of us were taught to put our trust outside ourselves—families, authority figures, institutions, plans, systems, political parties, presidents, even external “gods.” That’s been the human playbook for thousands of years.
Here’s the issue with that: none of these things are steady. Families can fracture (or always were fractured). Institutions and governments come crashing down. People can change, ghost, die. Life swerves. Even your own mind can go wackadoodle on you mid-thought.
The problem isn’t that we can’t trust. It’s that we’re notoriously bad at where we place our trust.
But what if that power (and love/approval) we were told lives “out there” was never really out there to begin with? What if “trusting life” means honoring the same creative intelligence that moves the tides, grows the trees, organs our organs, and breathes all of life. . . within us?
The Solution/Reframe: Alignment Over Control
For me, trusting life isn’t about blind faith or pretending everything’s fine when it’s not. It’s about alignment. Letting go of the illusion of control while staying deeply tuned in to what’s true in the moment, even if it’s painful.
It’s that crazy paradox where the minute you stop trying to control everything and let it be, you suddenly feel grounded, in control, and powerful again.
On a body level, it feels like an inner click. Maybe it’s a fiery, enthusiastic “hell yes”! Or it’s a quiet, subtle sense of knowing. Either way, it’s that coherence that says: This is mine to do. This is who I am. Or, simply: I know everything is working out even if it doesn’t look like it right now.
That’s authentic trust: realizing that what we call intuition, gut, God, Source, Life Force, Tao, the Universe, or Scooby Doo—it doesn’t matter what you call It—is just creativity, life, expressing itself through us.
Living It, Not Just Liking the Quote on Instagram
Trust isn’t a finish line. It’s a daily, sometimes difficult, messy, practice. But, in my experience, every time you honor what feels aligned, life responds. Not because the world suddenly rearranges itself, but because you do. Each decision, baby step, or act of surrender, reshapes what’s possible. That is what I call authentic flow: creative power that rises from coherence, not conformity.
Final reflection: Where are you waiting for something to shift on the outside instead of tuning in to the creative intelligence within?
Because, in my experience, when you start trusting that—life doesn’t just start to flow . . . it starts to blow your mind.
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