How to Trust Life (Especially When the Path Disappears and the Sky’s on Fire)
When I first stepped onto the personal growth path, I kept hearing teachers and healers say things like “trust life” or “trust the universe.” At the time, I was twenty-one. My mom was in the hospital undergoing an experimental bone-marrow transplant, wedged somewhere between life and death (but closer to the death side of the equation). I’d been raised Catholic and still had one foot inside the church door back then, so I translated that phrase to mean: trust God.
But practically speaking—how do you trust the bearded man in the clouds who is aggressively trying to take your mother away? That defies everything psychology teaches us about healthy trust-building. You can’t be murdering someone’s mom and still expect blind trust and loyalty. A giant WTF on that, right?
Fast forward thirty years (and plenty of sky fires later), I’ve finally landed on a working theory of what “trusting life” actually means for me.
Why Trusting Life Can Sometimes Feels So Hard
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 problem with that: none of those things are steady. Families fracture (or maybe always were fractured). Institutions come crashing down. People change, ghost, abuse, and disappoint. Life swerves. Even your own mind can go wackadoodle on you mid-thought.
The issue isn’t that we can’t trust. We’re actually pretty decent at trusting. We’re just notoriously bad at where we place our trust.
But what if that power we were told lives “out there” was never really out there to begin with? What if “trusting life” means honoring the same intelligence that moves the tides, grows the trees, organs our organs, and breathes all of life. . . within us?
The 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 that truth is painful.
It’s that crazy paradox where the minute you stop trying to control everything and just let it be, you suddenly feel grounded, in control, and powerful again. On a body level, it feels like an inner click. An energetic “yes.” That sense of coherence that says: This is mine to do. This is me. This is my jam. Or, simply: Everything is going to be just fine.
As I see it now, that’s creative flow: realizing that what we call intuition, gut, God, Source, Tao, the Universe, or Scooby Doo — it doesn’t matter what you call It — it’s just life expressing itself through us. Real trust isn’t about certainty. It’s about resonance. When you’re aligned, life responds. Not because the world suddenly rearranges itself, but because you do. Each decision, each baby step or act of surrender, reshapes what’s possible next because you’re not following a pre-drawn map anymore. You’re co-creating it as you walk.
Living It, Not Just Liking the Quote on Instagram
Trust isn’t a finish line. It’s a daily, often messy, practice. Every time I honor what feels aligned, especially when it makes zero logical sense, I strengthen that inner compass. That’s what I call authentic flow: creative power that rises from coherence.
So here’s the question: Where are you waiting for signs from the outside instead of tuning in to the creative intelligence within you? Because, in my experience, when you start trusting that — that’s when life doesn’t just start to flow . . . it starts to blow your mind.
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