an you be trusted with this one precious life you have been given?

Can you find your internal ally who will help you make conscious choices? Decisions made from acceptance and compassion?

Will you pick this good friend instead of the anti-coach who jumps in to sabotage your life?

I talk a lot about the importance of keeping commitments when it comes to maintaining a meditation practice. To make an agreement with yourself to sit for a particular length of time, to put it on your schedule, and then actually do it.

It makes a lot of sense to me to create agreements like this. Because the voices of resistance will take a practice such as meditation and begin to fabricate their own “rules” about how to do it. They’re always on the lookout for “better ideas” to thwart us.

They’ll insist, “Don’t keep your hands like that. That’s too uncomfortable.” Or, “You were told to do it sitting up, buy lying down would feel so much better.” Or, “The instructor said that 5 minutes was plenty, but you know an hour would be impressive!”

The next thing you know, meditation may not even resemble the meditation practice you were taught. Or meditation becomes this Herculean contest you must endure to meet some nebulous standard.

So when you don’t do it, what will the voices say? “This meditation thing just doesn’t work. It’s too hard. You’re not cut out for this! ”

And you end up quitting.

So the voices can rack up meditation as just one more thing you’ve failed at. How handy! Since one of the things meditation does is ferret out the voices and expose them. So you can see what they are, what they do and how they work.

But we must take our lives back from the voices.

We must keep our agreements with ourselves because what we are doing is building trust within ourselves.

And before you can trust yourself, you must become trustworthy.

Imagine that you have a friend you’re counting on to show up for you. When the time comes, that friend doesn’t show up. And so you ask that friend to show up for you again. And once again, that friend fails to show up.

What will happen?

You will stop trusting that friend! That “friend” can’t be counted on!

It’s the same within you!

This lack of integrity is the reason most of us have a jaded relationship with ourselves. We’ve let ourselves down so many times that we can’t count on ourselves anymore.

We are continually abandoning ourselves when we follow the voices in our heads. They talk us into unhelpful activities and behaviors. And when they’re not doing that, they’re talking us into ignoring the beneficial ones we’ve agreed to!

After a time, we begin to lose faith that anything will ever make a difference for us. Or that we’ll ever change for the better. Because we have given up on ourselves so quickly and consistently. We eventually say to ourselves, “Why bother?”

Every time we fail to keep our commitments, we become more and more untrustworthy with our lives.

I’m telling you this not because I want you to feel bad about it. That would just put this insight back into the hands of the voices to abuse you. I’m sharing this because it’s good to take note of how this works so you can start the process of turning it around!

How is that done?

The first step is to learn how to direct your attention. Learning to direct your attention is a process. It’s something most of us have never really been taught how to do. It’s the beginning stages of becoming your own best friend. To keep your attention with yourself instead of the voices.

When your attention is with you, you can then learn to practice self-mentoring. Self-mentoring is learning to see yourself as a person who is perfect just the way you are. From a place of wholeness, you can then assist yourself to become whomever you want to be.

There is a deep and satisfying pleasure that comes from starting from a place of perfection rather than seeing yourself as damaged or broken. Or someone who needs to be healed first.

It’s empowering and life-affirming.

From this confident stance, you approach Life and ask it, “What can I offer you? What have I been given and how can I give that back? What am I compelled to give that would be of service to you? What would be selfish of me not to give?”

And once you discover the answers to these questions, to then ask yourself, “How can I support myself to accomplish this? How can I take this mission out of the hands of resistance and apply it, bit-by-bit, with kindness and compassion?”

Begin with these simple steps.

Over time, you will start to train yourself to become more trustworthy. You will replace what is not helpful to you with what is vital. What is mean and cruel with what is supportive and encouraging. What is isolating with what is connecting. Poisonous with life-giving. Self-hatred with compassion.

Best of all, you will gain a true friend who is trustworthy.

YOU!