Trusting your experience
This principle is a practice of surrendering to what is true in our experience in each moment. This includes an attention to penetrate our habitual, egoic self.
Mastery comes form the ability to hold this paradox of surrender and penetration.
It is not an inactive submission; as surrender includes all of our embodied sensations, and it includes our desire to go deeper.
If you embody this principle it is the end of disconnection; at the level of sensation we are always connected, even if that is emptiness, vulnerability, or a sense of distance from those we Circle.
The more we trust what we are feeling, the more opens up in our experience. The combination of sharing what is happening for you and staying committed to connection allows deeper truths to unfold.
Trusting our experience does not mean we are an authority on what is happening in the moment, it involves us staying fully open.
For example, someone says they feel sad, but you do not feel emotion in the connection. Sharing this absence of emotion can facilitate a deeper enquiry, but you must maintain an openness to why this may be the case.
If we enforce our embodied experience as truth we are closing down to what could be happening in the connection, in the other, and in ourselves. However, sharing our embodied reaction enables a deeper presence, and supports others to look more closely at themselves and to continue feeling into their emotions. It often allows new feelings to arise for ourselves from this place too.
The opposite of Trusting Experience can lead to us getting into reflective stories or not showing ourselves—often because we are afraid our experience is not welcome in connection.
Without Trusting Experience, and using the previous example again, it can look something like this: ‘When you say you feel sad and I don't feel sad, I wonder if I am disconnected from my own sadness. I know I have trouble with sadness, it’s a pattern I am used to’.
This is not to say that there isn't an important truth to this interpretation. Yet in the moment of connection if you begin to reflect and question your experience it often ends up leading to less presence. It also takes attention away from the other and on to your story of your pattern.
Staying in connection and having attention on the level of sensation is a much more powerful way of discovering if there are shadow emotions.
Time and time again we find that when people trust their experience, it is usually the best feedback for the person they are in connection with, and their leadership comes from a deeper place.
A simple momentary scan of your awareness into your body can help you to trust your experience. Another element to trusting experience is trusting the natural flow of where your attentions moves. While there is a surrender into your experience there is also a radical process of discernment.
For example: 'Is what I’m feeling addictive behavior to avoid what I can now sense under the surface?'.