Trust The Discomfort – Rev. Linda Jackson
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
This month we are exploring Divine Discomfort with a focus on Iyanla Vanzant’s Four Essential Trusts – Trust in Self, God, Others, and Life. But what about trusting the discomfort itself? When you trust the discomfort, it can be a guide to foster personal growth, resilience, and deeper self-trust. Harnessing the lessons hidden within discomfort unlocks your potential for a more empowered life! Join us this Sunday to explore the transformative power of leaning in to trust the discomfort.
SUMMARY
In this transcript, Rev. Linda Jackson discusses the theme of divine discomfort and the importance of trusting life’s challenges for spiritual growth. She introduces the book “Trust: Mastering the Four Essential Trusts” by Iyanla Vanzant, which explores trust in self, God, others, and life. Jackson shares her personal experience of moving and the discomfort that comes with it, emphasizing the need to trust the discomfort and embrace the lessons it brings. She highlights the significance of feelings and emotions in rebuilding self-trust and offers a practice to develop awareness of body sensations, emotions, and thoughts. She concludes with a prayer for trust and gratitude.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
Thank you so much. And I love that choice of that song because as we’re talking about this discomfort, divine discomfort and trusting discomfort, I think we feel like the fool sometimes, right? But we’re only fooling ourselves. So I am Rev. Linda Jackson, I use she her pronouns. And we are in this June theme of divine discomfort, which is really about trusting that life’s challenges and the things that we’re moving through are essential for our spiritual growth. Maybe even the universe’s way of nudging us and moving us into greater self-awareness so that we can be our full potential. Because we get comfortable playing small, right? And our book this month is Iyanla Vanzant’s book. I always find it tricky to say her name. See if I can say it as many times as I need to today and still get it right. Iyanla Vanzant’s book, Trust Mastering the Four Essential Trusts.
And there is trust of self. Oops, I went too far. Trust of self, trust in God, trust in others, and trust in life. And Iyanla says, and many others have said this, I actually think it’s even a Buddhist concept that everything is happening for our awakening. Even heard it said that the soul chooses our experiences for our awakening. And many of you already know this. I am in the process of moving. I need a little bit less cord under my feet there. I’m in the process of moving and we’ve got a little renovation going. We had a couple of things that came up that we weren’t expecting, which is typical, nothing unusual, but I’m not really sure of the timing of where I’ll be living for the next couple of months. So I have options. I have a lot of options, but what I am doing right now is putting or preparing to put the majority of my belongings in storage.
So when you talk about discomfort, I really like my bed. So anyway, I’m in a huge letting go and I’m sure many of you have your own version of moving through discomfort, right? This transformation. I know Typhanie is going through a big move and transformation. John’s moving. I’m sure we have other ways of transforming besides moving going on, but Cityside is also moving, right? So let’s jump in and see what’s here for us.
I have trust the discomfort as the name of my talk. And no matter which of the essential trusts, trust in self, trust in God, trust in others, trust in life, trust in general requires leaning in to the discomfort. And that’s where my talk title comes from. We have to not only trust ourself and trust God and trusts others and trust life, but we have to actually trust the discomfort. We have to trust that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable.
It makes us more resilient. It moves us into deeper self trust, which is my area of focus today. The discomfort has lessons within it so you can open yourself to something greater, like our overused metaphor of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, right? It’s still a great metaphor. It comes with discomfort, but the transformation is worth it. And you could even go a step further that we can take what’s coming up and transform it until it feeds you, until it feeds us. So that’s our work. And we have Ernest Holmes saying, “trust in your own self above all else”, I’m just having a flash of my mother would’ve really had an aversion to that because she came from an old school Christian background and it would’ve been – trust in God above all else. And this idea of trusting in self, to me it’s not a separate idea because God expresses through us.
But Ernest Holmes, for those who maybe new or someone online is not familiar. I think most of you in the room have been around. Ernest Holmes is the author of the Science of Mind book, the Founder of Religious Science. And that’s the spiritual philosophy, that is the foundational teaching of centers for spiritual living of which we are a part. And as quirky as the name religious science can sound to some people. I’m going to just expand a minute here on this teaching. I often say that science of mind and my dog at the time saved my life. And it sounds a little dramatic, maybe it was more like they renewed my life. They reminded me that I still had reasons to keep going and I had just come to a point where my life wasn’t working anymore. I was doing kind of the same stuff over and over. And I like to think that there’s somebody here in the room who maybe can relate to that. It’s not just me, but this teaching put into words and a philosophy that I knew in my heart was true. It supported me to look at life differently. And one of the key ideas being we create our experience But this is not in a like, oh, you created that, it’s your fault. Not at all. It’s the exact opposite. It’s that we can take wherever we are, whatever’s going on and move into the possibility of creating something new.
So the four essential trust that Iyanla lays out here, trust in self, trust in God, trust in others, trust in life. Aimee opened up the conversation (slide). Aimee opened up the conversation last week with divine discomfort and eventually I will get to trust in self. But I’m going to speak for a moment about each of the essential trusts with trust in God. Over the last couple of years, you’ve probably, if you’ve heard me speak before, you may recall me saying that I was focused on making God my primary relationship. And I always laugh when I say that because I think as a minister you’re probably all going, well, it’s about time, but it’s just what was up for me and like all primary relationships that requires trust.
And another Ernest quote, I believe it’s Ernest that says, God appears to us as we believe God to be. So of course I have to trust myself in order to trust God. If it’s how I believe God to be, I have to figure out what’s going on in me. What are my beliefs about what God even means in order to move into trust? And you’ve probably heard me share in the last few months about my son and I buying this building. I was just talking about it a minute ago and I’m going through this experience with him of a new way of being in relationship. We’re business partners. I don’t think he’s figured that out yet. We’re business partners and with all relationships, it’s an ongoing practice. I have to keep coming back to me, keep coming back to like what’s going on over here that is bringing up this stuff between us.
Whatever it is, we’re actually doing pretty well, but it isn’t without discomfort. So this trusting others, even though it does require boundaries and other healthy habits, it starts with trusting myself as well. And then I’ve also shared that what happened right before we started looking to buy a place was that I had to look around at where I was living, this space that I’d been in for five years since I sold my home. And that was a big let go. Selling my home and moving there. I thought it was temporary. It ended up being five years for various reasons, but it got very comfortable and it was beautiful. I say was because there are boxes everywhere right now and it’s not so beautiful. But I have loved this space. I felt very comfortable in this space. It became a sanctuary for me and for various reasons, partly because of pandemic, I really came within myself a lot more and I spent a lot more time alone and I really have come to enjoy my quiet time and my routine.
And as soon as I was willing to look around and say, yes, I’m willing to let go of this, the universe just put me in wooosh. And man, within three weeks we had a contract. Within three weeks we closed and here I am. And it’s that trusting the universe, trusting life that opened that up. But I had to trust myself. I had to trust that I would be okay letting go, that I would be okay being out of my comfort zone, not having my little sanctuary that something else will come and perhaps even something greater where if I stay in what is, I could do this happily for the rest of my life, but would I grow? Would I become bigger, greater? Would there be more in my life? And I’m not saying y’all have to go move in order to have something different. I’m just saying this is my experience. And I wouldn’t be in this hands off the wheel kind of experience if I didn’t trust myself and God and others. So as is often the case, these essential trusts kind of weave together. They’re not just separate little things that happen, but they all require that I am trusting myself. Another Ernest Holmes, “God, (or you can put in source, creator, universe, life, whatever you want) God can only do for us what it can do through us.
This is the good news. We are individual expressions of the divine. We are these expressions creating uniquely as us from infinite possibility. The Science of Mind creative process explains that universal law operates in the subjective or the subconscious realm. And if we have a bunch of gunk in there, if we haven’t done our work to clear it out, to clear out the subconscious, the stories, we make up the small versions of who we are. If we haven’t done that work, it’s going to create through that. So if there’s weeds in the soil, the healthy plants can’t grow. We have to do our work to clear out the subconscious. And that work is how we learn to trust ourselves.
And maybe it’s more accurate to say we rebuild the trust in ourselves – as Iyanla calls it -the negative ego. We have to clear up some things with the way the negative ego parts have been coping. Like taking some dominion over the voice of fear that’s always warning us or stopping us or keeping us in that comfort zone. It’s a lot easier to stay comfortable, but the rewards are great when we’re willing to move through the discomfort. Now I have another quote. I think I’m paraphrasing this Ernest Holmes again, “there is a place within you that has never been hurt, harmed, or hindered.” I believe that’s an Earnest Holmes quote. I put that on there without checking. So I hope I didn’t quote a misquote.
But – it’s our job to find that place within us – to find the place within us that has never been hurt, harmed, or hindered. That’s our work. That’s what clearing up that negative ego, that fear-based ego thinking – really is remembering that place within us that is always okay, the part of us that knows our oneness with the divine. And from that place, you can create anything, whatever’s going on in your life, whatever situation or experience you have when you know this place within you – you are a clear channel through which the good flows, through which God creates. And when I consider my current situation from this mindset, I don’t need to figure it out. I don’t need to know where exactly I’m going. And trust me, that feels scary. Just saying, I won’t go off on that tangent. I know we have a lot to cover today.
I have to trust that there’s something for me to learn from this feeling of being untethered. I have to trust that. I mean, honestly, my word that came up with my mentor in my sacred covenant for my ministry was freedom. So it shouldn’t be any surprise for me that I have to feel untethered for a minute. I don’t think it’s permanent. I think it’s just a part of the process of me becoming something else, becoming more than what I am right now. (Oh, have you not been hearing me?) So what I realized is if I try to control it, if I try to, oh, I’ll get an Airbnb for two months or I’ll go stay at my sister’s house or all the things. I have lots of options and I have many friends that I’m planning to visit and it will be wonderful I think.
But if I try to reel it in and make it comfortable for myself right now, then I’m missing the opportunity. I’m missing that possibility for me to experience something new, to experience something greater than what I’ve been living in. So once I realized that, I can honestly say that I don’t really want to know exactly what’s next. I’m kind of getting a kick out of this new way of being in relationship to my life. It’s the first time in my adult life that I didn’t have a plan. I mean, I have a loose plan, but I don’t have a plan for where I’m going after this. Well, kind of I do, but I think you get the idea. But I want to see what else is there for me. And in order for me to experience the four essential trust, trust in self, trust in God and others and in life, I have to remember the truth of who I am as that unlimited potential, as that freedom, as that expression of the divine.
This is an opportunity for me to experience more God moving through my life. Who doesn’t want that? I’d be a fool. Like the song said. So how do we get there? Iyanla says, trust can be complicated. And I’m adding to that “and sometimes confusing”, right? Iyanla shares a lot about her grandmother, growing up with her grandmother raising her, the underlying message and her well-intended efforts. She was a religious woman and she sort of ruled with an iron fist and there was a lot of confusion for her in that, right? Her mother had died, her father was absent, her father was an alcoholic, her grandmother was doing her best. But Iyanla realized that she couldn’t really trust others. That was what she came to believe.
And she stopped trusting God and as this coping mechanism for trying to move through life with all of this uncertainty, she realized it was safer or it felt safer to her not to even trust herself, not to trust her own instincts, because a lot of times her instincts would tell her to do something and it’d be the very thing that she would get in trouble for. And a lot of us have had experiences like this where we’ve moved through life maybe in our childhood, maybe later, where we have felt we should do something and then we were shunned or shamed or ridiculed or put down for it. And so we stop trusting our divine intuition. And she offers many examples of her own and other stories where people have their instincts invalidated. And she says that adults are usually better at trying to control the situation than they are at dealing with the emotions that come up.
And I’m just kind of curious if anyone can relate to this feeling, “you have nothing to cry about” or “I’ll give you something to cry about,” right? “You’re imagining it. That can’t really be what’s happening.” That sort of gaslighting thing. And I hope you folks online are sharing also. How about when we give the kid a Popsicle in the store to have ’em be quiet instead of asking them what they need? How are they? What’s happening?
I think we know better as parents now than maybe some of our parents did or their parents did. But in extreme cases with abuse, it’s even more confusing when someone we love or someone responsible for our safety is violating us in some way. It may feel safer as a matter of survival to give them what they want, not really knowing what the price will be that we’ll pay for that later. Where we have further eroded our self trust thinking it’s my fault if I was abused. Even sympathizing with the abuser what is that – Stockholm syndrome? When trust is violated, we learn to not trust anything or anyone and eventually not ourselves. And a lot of us have trained ourselves to ignore our intuition.
There’s an idea of a nourishment barrier, which I learned in some training I did. I’m not going to go into it – if this is resonating for you – I invite you to look it up. It’s a complex idea, but it’s based on the idea that we need to feel safe. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our basic need for safety. And when we’re trying to get our need met for safety and it doesn’t feel safe to try to have that need met, it doesn’t feel safe to feel safe. We learn how to live in a world that is a little chaotic. And this is just one of the many ways that Iyanla is encouraging us, inviting us to look at what we have experienced, to look at the stories we’ve made up, to look at what we believe about ourselves in the world, and to clear that out and to remember who we really are.
So everybody take a breath. This is heavy stuff. Big breath.
So from the Facets of Unity by ah Almaas, when this state of basic trust is present, the development of the soul moves toward being. And when basic trust is relatively absent, the soul develops more toward ego. I think this is really fascinating. So we always develop an ego, but we identify with it to the degree that we have basic trust. So however much basic trust we have determines how much we get into our ego and our personality, right? – I love it. Y’all are taking pictures. Somebody likes this one. – So it explains why spiritual development comes so easily for some and is largely non-existent for others. That idea of basic trust. And in that writing of the Facets of Unity, they explain the ego as a psychic structure that is based on crystallized beliefs. What we believe about who we are, what the world is, and we experience ourselves in the world through the filter of that structure.
And our spiritual awakening involves getting outside of that ego construct, reconnecting with those aspects of experience that have been sort of obstructed by that ego part. This is such cool stuff, folks. It can be difficult to let go because we’re so identified with the ego. It feels like a part of us. We’re losing a part of ourself, right? That’s why many of us never fully let go. That’s why many of us keep ourselves smaller. But when we’re willing to move through the discomfort, it is freeing, it is expanding, remembering ourselves as this pure potential, remembering ourselves as love, as light, as creativity, as freedom, all that God is. It’s the infinite nature of who we really are that we get to lean into on the other side of the discomfort.
So when we are living primarily through the fear-based ego construct, we might cut ourselves off from carrying what anyone else thinks. That’s another way of not feeling our feelings. Or we may go through life managing how other people are feeling, taking more than a hundred percent responsibility, which by the way, that extra percent is enmeshment. And for some it appears as people pleasing. For some of us, we think we’re taking care, we’re helping, that they need it, right? I need to do this for them. But what we’re really doing there is also trying to alleviate our own discomfort. We’re not letting someone else go through their growth. It’s a typical hero on the drama triangle. And it’s an indication that somewhere along the way we learned to override our feelings.
So “not only do we not trust our bad feelings, we don’t trust our good feelings.” And we probably don’t even know how we feel when we’re in that role. I know that’s how I lived many years around that time when my dog and Science of Mind saved my life. I was just starting to realize what I was doing. I didn’t even know what I wanted or what I felt. I thought I did. Anybody else have any of this? Y’all just let me bear my soul and know, okay, I got it. There’s a few nods, a few smiles. All right. So when we do not trust our feelings, we cannot trust ourselves. Not only do our feelings matter, they are at the core of whatever we believe is the matter with us. Feelings are a fundamental means of communication that arise from our internal landscape to rebuild self-trust and to begin our healing, we have to retrain ourselves to pay attention to our feelings.
So I just want to pause for one second and say, what are feelings, right? Because as a society, we conflate emotions and body sensations all as feelings. So it’s very important for us to understand what we’re talking about when we’re talking about how we feel. And I like to use the words, an emotion or a physical sensation to help me separate or distinguish between feeling of an emotional kind and of a physical kind. Iyanlla had said feelings are a fundamental communication that arise from our eternal internal landscape. It appears she’s talking mostly about emotions, but I think it’s important that we are paying attention to both our physical sensations and our emotions. They are speaking to us all the time, and we have to retrain ourselves to pay attention to both the physical sensations and the emotions. A lot of us have been living from the neck up for a long time, and we can get back into our feelings. Iyanla says, “feelings are the language through which your life speaks to you. It is important to trust what your life is trying to communicate. If you have a limited emotional vocabulary, meaning you cannot name what you feel or a sparse emotional library, meaning you have little to draw from, you will spend a great deal of time chasing things that will not truly fulfill your needs.”
That was my life from my twenties to my forties, folks. Woo-hoo. My girlfriend used to say, chasing fun. Yeah, it was fun for a minute until I felt empty, right? Until I really realized that what I was seeking out here was not going to fulfill what I needed in here. You can’t hold on to the fun. So trying to fill ourself with that up from the outside, chasing things that don’t fulfill our needs is how self-trust breaks down. I think that’s really a valuable little nugget – when we’re trying to fill ourselves up with things on the outside, we break down our self trust. We have to remember to rely on ourselves. We have to retrain ourselves to pay attention to what your feelings are telling you. Develop that emotional vocabulary, expand our emotional library and fill ourselves from the inside. So just have a couple more slides and we’re going to go into practice, but it’s going to take a minute just to get through these slides. I’m warning my musicians here.
So when you’re not in touch with your feelings, when you cannot name them or do not give yourself space and permission to feel them, you are left with needs that do not go away and that you are unable to fill. I just did a training on peace building and restorative justice, and most of the conflicts that we experience in the greater world are unmet needs. Our conflicts with one another are based on unmet needs. If we get in relationship to our unmet needs and take care of that for ourselves, we can resolve much of the conflict in our other relationships and in the world.
So when we spend time gathering facts externally, we miss the information that we’re getting internally. And when we don’t feel our feelings, we get stuck ‘thinking about what you should feel rather than acknowledging what you actually do feel.” Anybody ever thinking what I should be feeling right now instead of how I actually feel? Alright, hang in there. We are going to put this into some practice.
Once you begin to identify and separate your truth from all the misinformation that you believe about yourself, you’ll understand that you just as you are, are fully equipped to navigate through all the challenging people and circumstances in your life. And come out on the other side intact. Always remember, this power is within you. It will guide and protect you and you will be okay. That part that will never be hurt, harmed, or hindered will move you through.
Alright, so my musician friends are going to come up here and give us a little underscore as we take this into some practice. So as we take this pause for practice, it’s an invitation to create more awareness about body sensations, emotions, and thoughts. And I learned some of this from the 15 commitments to conscious leadership, but I’ve modified it and I’ve made it my own practice. It’s a great way to develop awareness of how we feel and rebuild that trust. So I invite you, if you’re comfortable, to turn your attention inward, to allow yourself to relax and trust the process. Maybe take a couple of deep breaths to get yourself fully centered and present to yourself to doing this work for yourself. And allow a recent trigger to come to your mind. Whatever it was, whoever was there, whatever the situation was, just allow something to rise up and let yourself refresh on what was said or what happened and how it went. And just stay there for a moment and allow yourself to notice what happens in your body when you have this trigger. What are the sensations that you’re feeling? No story here. Just the sensations.
Identifying the body. Experience the body sensation. And then notice what emotion or emotions you’re feeling might be a cocktail. Sad, mad, glad, scared. Some variation on those. Anxious again, not making up a story, just identifying it. And then taking a moment to notice what the thoughts are doing. Just watching, witnessing, observing. What are the thoughts now doing? So staying in, you can ask, does this physical sensation, this body sensation have a message for me? Is it trying to tell me something? Now, this is not your fear telling a story. This is your body giving you insight, wisdom, just identifying that body sensation and listening for information and trusting that if there is a movement or a physical expression that would support you in moving that energy, you are welcome to move and express here. Or you can take it home and do it later. But noticing how moving the body can move that energy and help release those body sensations. And back to the emotion. If you have more than one, go with the one that feels the strongest and just inquiring, does this emotion have any information for me? What is it telling me?
And again, knowing that emotional expression, making a sound, crying, yelling, that these are ways to move those emotions. And it is perfectly acceptable. Staying in this process, listening to the physical sensation, listening to the emotions, simply ask, what were the unmet needs? What unmet needs have been running in the background? And what can you offer yourself to meet those needs? As you offer yourself this practice, you begin to rebuild self-trust. You can trust yourself to listen to what you need. You can trust yourself to meet your needs. And as we trust ourselves, we can trust the divine. We can trust in God and others in life.
And so I just take this into our closing, just affirming and knowing that each of us is deepening in knowing ourselves as an individual expression of the divine. That as we rebuild this trust, as we say yes, to caring for ourselves, honoring ourselves, meeting our needs, that we calm that inner fear, we calm that part of us that is afraid or playing small. We open ourselves to greater possibility, to greater freedom. We trust in the divine. We say yes to spirit. We allow spirit to guide us, direct us. And we trust and know that all our needs are met, that we are guided into the high idea of who we are here to be, and that we are a yes to living that full expression. All of our resources, all of our needs are met. And I just speak a word of gratitude for the willingness to do this self-inquiry, to look at ourselves, to rebuild our trust in self, in God, in others, and know that we do this in service, not only to ourselves, but in service, to the collective, to the world. Peace within peace without, and I’m so grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer. I release it into the law knowing it is done. I let it be so. And together we say, and so it is.
Typhanie Monique:
And so it is.
Rev. Linda Jackson:
Thank you.
Typhanie Monique:
Thank you. Rev. Linda Jackson, my Cityside family sing along with us.