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Dear Liz,
There are two ways to view the question of whether or not we can trust other people. One is from the perspective of the ego, which is separate and mortal, and the other is from the perspective of the higher self, which is universal and immortal.
What you're struggling with is something everyone has to work through, for it's at the heart of the human journey. Life in the physical would not be the powerful, dramatic learning experience it is if it were not for the ego. We seem to have a limited amount of time and resources here, and are unable to remember the spiritual life we knew before incarnating. Since it seems like this life is all we have, we are naturally very fearful about anything that could threaten our well-being or happiness. This is why physical life is the perfect situation in which to learn to rise above fear and grow into beings of greater faith and compassion.
I think learning to trust (have faith) is the ultimate spiritual challenge. This issue comes up for everyone as they shift from unconsciously interacting with life primarily through the lower chakras to consciously processing their experiences through the heart and upper chakras.
This shift occurs naturally as we gain self-awareness, realize why we do the things we do, and then try to make better choices. In emotional relationships with other people, everyone longs for more love: no matter how wonderful our childhoods were or how blessed we may be now, we've all had many experiences in which we hungered for more love and acceptance than we got.
This is because the experience we are really longing for is the perfect feeling of divine love and wholeness. On some level, we remember what it felt like before we separated from Source, and are constantly yearning to feel that sense of completeness again.
Since most of us don't consciously recognize that our endless dissatisfaction arises from an unconscious memory of the divine, we go through life looking to other people to give us the love, approval and acceptance we think we need. As long as we look to other people to fulfill a longing that can only be truly satiated by the divine, of course, we will remain dissatisfied.
When begin to awaken in self-awareness, we not only realize why we react to experiences as we do, we learn that it's silly to take the things that others say and do personally. We see that others are caught up in their own issues, and how they view us has very little to do with us and everything to do with their own past experiences, life lessons, and current mental and emotional state.
At this point we stop comparing ourselves and competing with others and begin to feel compassion for everyone, for we see that they are just like us: though they may go about it in some unskillful ways, what they want is to be happy, loved and accepted too. We then shift from seeking love and approval from others to offering them the same, and then our fear of judgment/rejection falls away.
Of course, this is not as easy or simple as I'm making it sound. No matter how spiritually evolved we may become, we're still physical beings with very powerful survival instincts. When your intuition is trying to warn you about something or someone, you are wise to honor it. On an inner/emotional level, however, nothing and no one can truly harm you.
We all struggle to stay spiritually centered, to love and accept ourselves, to heal our fears and keep our hearts open, to trust that all is and will be well. In fact, a good amount of the time, I'm running the same social programs you describe in your question. Rising above the ego is an exhausting, demanding, endless challenge, but it helps to realize that we don't really have any other good alternative - not if we want to feel at peace.
You see, I don't think we can ever trust another person completely, at least not if we define trust as knowing that they would never do anything that we would consider to be hurtful. Forunately, once we learn to trust in the benevolent nature of life itself and understand that nothing and no one can ultimately harm us, I don't believe we need to trust other people. The feeling of divine love and contentment we're really after can't be found in temporal relationships anyway - it only be accessed through communion with the divine.
To cultivate trust in life's benevolence, we must also remember the law of attraction, and how what we experience with other people is always a reflection of our own vibration. What we look for, we find; what we fear, we attract; what we desire, we flow toward.
When we're afraid of being rejected or criticized, we tend to manifest those very experiences until we heal the inner wounds that make us fear we are not good enough somehow. When we accept who we really are, others accept us too. Have you ever met someone who was unapologetically scandalous or outrageous and just loved them for it even though you would never dare act that way yourself? You love them because they love themselves. Similarly, it's the things we reject about ourselves that we fear others will reject about us too.
It's thus wise and powerful to ponder how we feel about certain people and what we believe about relationships in general in order to become conscious of what we're supposed to be learning.
For example, I tend to be a perfectionistic, hyper-responsible workaholic. As a result, I notice whenever people are lazy or irresponsible, and this sets off all sorts of ego-based judgments and fearful feelings for me. Instead of trying to make others become more responsible or trying to get everyone I deem to be irresponsible out of my experience (which would never work), my job is to work through my own fears surrounding issues of responsibility. (If my faith that all is and will be well was perfectly sound, I wouldn't worry about a thing.) Once I have learned what I need to learn about this issue, I won't attract or notice it anymore.
Your experiences in relationships truly are designed for your benefit, and if you view them as reflections of your own inner nature, they can be powerful tools for new spiritual growth. So while I encourage you to be gentle with yourself and remember that your struggle with trust is something we all go through, when you feel ready, please know that it is safe for you to greet others with an open heart.
It's also totally worth it, for when we reach out to people on a soul level, all sorts of wonderful things begin to happen. For one thing, when we come from our souls instead of our egos, we tend to bring out others' higher natures, which can transform ordinary situations into life-changing spiritual experiences. --Julia
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