How to Trust Yourself: Taking the Leap to Follow Your Heart

What does it mean to trust yourself?

Caroline Myss defines the highest level of trust in yourself as “the confidence to follow your spiritual truth” – or in other words, the path of your heart and soul.

This requires you to trust your intuition beyond reason, beyond your fears.

Your intuition tells you to take a leap of faith when you have no idea what waits for you on the other side.

Your heart might desire something, and all the alarm bells go off in your mind: “I can’t do that… I’m not good enough… It’s too hard… What will people think?”

People might think you’re crazy, but the inner yearning keeps calling.

For me, trusting yourself means you give more validity to the voice of your heart over all the other voices: the voice of your ego and personality, or the voices of your friends, family, colleagues, and “society.”

You start making choices that align with your inner truth.

In a world run by our minds, so many of us have forgotten how to tune into our intuition. It’s hard, because we‘re conditioned to think of the voice of our heart as imagination, pure fantasy –– when it’s actually a wiser and more sophisticated guidance system than our mind.

Ultimately, trusting yourself means knowing who you are. You are worthy, you are safe, you are the powerful creator of your reality. No matter what happens, nothing can truly be taken away from you as a soul.

This level of trust gives you the strength to take the leap of faith – without any guarantees you’ll “succeed” – knowing you’ll be okay no matter what.

Following Your Heart’s Call

Following your heart, your inner truth, requires resilience.

You‘ll need to take one step at a time in the direction of your truth. And here’s the key: you must do so without attachment to the outcome.

It means making each unreasonable choice to believe in yourself, knowing that you create your reality in every moment. Through your conviction and choices, you create the outcome. Your energy and emotions, which feed your thoughts, create the outcome.

And so, in the beginning, you’ll need to take that leap of faith without much momentum. You might look outside of you for confirmation that this is the best way to go, but true confirmation can only be found within. The confirmation is in your emotion. It’s in the level of excitement you feel around each possible step you can take.

The Guidance System of Emotions

Our emotions are a guidance system, signaling us towards our soul’s path. Excitement shows you which direction to go in every moment. When you feel suffocated or anxious, it’s a signal you’re not aligned.

“When you feel excitement, passion, energy – that’s your body’s translation of the vibration of who you really are. Your emotions are the soul’s language. When you act in alignment with your excitement, you’re aligning yourself with the vibrational frequency of who you really are. Which makes everything flow so much easier. When you aren’t acting in accordance to who you really are, you struggle and there’s a lot more resistance. There’s an easier way to live, an easier way to transform.”
Bashar, Channeled by Darryl Anka

When you’re in a positive state, it becomes easier to hear your intuition. As you follow your hunches, you allow more ideas, people, and opportunities to synchronistically flow in.

Strategies for Developing Trust

In her Sacred Power series on Gaia, Caroline Myss discusses the 5 strategies for developing spiritual self-esteem, below:

1. Observe yourself. How much of your time and energy is spent looking for people’s approval? How often are you afraid of what people think? What decisions do you make to please others?
2. When you get a strong intuitive urge or idea, do you start worrying about what others will think? Before you feed the doubts, feed your imagination and savor the juiciness of the idea. This releases the resistance to allow more supporting ideas and momentum.
3. Take one risky choice after another. Your intuition might tell you: “Go this way. I won’t tell you why, and I won’t tell you the outcome. But you feel excited, and that’s your indication that this is the way to go.”

“You always have clarity on what you know you should NOT do. If you’re not sure on what you should do, it’s only because you’re looking for assurance of the outcome. And that is where the true self-esteem is built.” -Caroline Myss

4. Tune into the lies you tell yourself. For example: “I’m not UNhappy where I am. I can handle the stress. Just one more time, and then I’ll make a change.” Tell yourself the truth, your heart’s truth.
5. Have reverence for yourself. Know your worth. Don’t betray yourself. Honor yourself. Move for yourself, not for others’ approval.

Doubt is Part of Trust

It’s normal to doubt yourself. Heavy emotions come up to be cleared, which you can do by feeling them fully and observing the core of the fear.

You move into your heart by loving yourself through all the emotions, seeing them without judgment.

Each time you make an unreasonable choice to keep following your truth despite the fear, you get stronger. You’ll cycle upward to the next version of you.

The doubts will always be there, and new ones will be introduced at each step. But look how far you’ve come. I bet most of the big fears you had 3, 5, or 10 years ago have faded into the background.

One Step After Another

Following your truth doesn’t have to look like immediately quitting your job.

Right now, it could be about slowing down to meditate and reflect, even though your mind is telling you to be “productive.”

You can start trusting the validity of your intuition, natural talents, and passions. They are there for a reason.

Speak your truth, even if someone might not like it. Create time to play. Say no to what doesn’t feel right anymore.

Make one tiny choice each day that aligns with your intuition. It adds up, and the momentum will take you to a place you haven’t touched since childhood – into the joy of being and expressing who you really are.

And more important than what you do, full trust is about knowing that no matter what, all is and will be well.

When you can trust yourself, you can trust life.

You can trust the universe. You can trust whatever is occurring in the present moment. And that, I feel, is freedom.

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Written from the heart, with love 💖

If you want to follow my writing, I share it more frequently on my Instagram @ashmi.path and Facebook.

Love,

Ashmi

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