Trust Your Life To Unfold Perfectly by Martha Beck

Your Best Life Is Waiting
Martha Beck shares her four-step process to get your life back on track. Stillness, truth, desire, trust...what area of your life do you need to work on the most? Take Martha's quiz!
By Martha Beck
O, The Oprah Magazine
January 01, 2006

Step Four: Trust Your Life To Unfold Perfectly

Why Trust Is Crucial
The way to let go of your soul's desires, to achieve nonattachment, is not to go into "martyr mode" and expect a life of blunted appetites or unmet needs. Letting go is the natural result of trust—trust that the Force, or God, or whatever you want to call it, fulfills its own nature by answering your soul's requests, once you have articulated them. To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition. If you can master it, you'll see your soul's desires being filled in ways that are often amazing, and sometimes flat-out miraculous.

Obstacles to Trust
One morning during the Miraval Spa contest-winners' retreat, I knew all the women had received certificates telling them to come get a free outfit from New Balance. When I asked them how they liked their new outfits, I discovered that every woman in the room had thrown away the gift voucher, because they assumed they would be charged for the clothes.

This became a touchstone experience for me, one I've thought about a thousand times since. Here the universe (in the form of a generous company) was trying to give these women a beautiful, free gift, and they were turning away from it without even knowing it was being offered because of their assumption that it would cost too much. If they had trusted their own eyes, they would have seen that the outfit was a gift. Instead, they trusted their pain, their disappointment, their hard-knock lessons that life is difficult and nothing's free. We all have many such experiences. We take away assumptions that all of life is painful, and that we can expect the same bad treatment from the world we may have experienced in limited situations during our childhoods or difficult adult years.

How to Trust
The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams. Begin to hope again, then trust that your soul's desires are meant to be fulfilled.

You can start this with something small as an experiment. Choose a soul's desire that seems modest, like the desire to smell flowers or hear music. Make sure you identify something that's really coming from your core, but make it something fairly modest. Then, deliberately choose to trust that your wish will be fulfilled. Feel so sure of it that you don't even need the outcome, because you feel as if you already have it. Then watch and see. Be open to all ways in which your answer may come. Your trust will be rewarded.

I'm confident saying this because I've worked with thousands of clients over the years, and I've seen how trust works. It may mean an unexpected visit from a loved one, a chance to relax and have a quiet cup of tea, an opportunity to start your own business, the gradual unfolding of a childhood ambition.

A final exercise: Right now, make a list of every desire of your soul that has been fulfilled in the past. Then, taking each fulfilled wish one by one, recall the coincidences, strokes of "luck," generosity from other people or inspired ideas that helped you fulfill that desire. You'll find that your life has already been a linked chain of miraculous delights. And you have many, many more chains to come. Stillness...Truth...Desire...Trust...what area of your life do you need to work on the most? Take Martha's quiz!

More Martha Beck Advice

* 6 steps to see yourself more clearly
* Your guide to self-acceptance
* The best way to ask for what you want


Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Your-Best-Life-Is-Waiting/4#ixzz1khUZjtRK