Trusting yourself to meet the moment - no matter the moment
Lessons from a month of trust
Good morning everyone,
My friend Toland Lawrence interviewed me recently on their podcast, After the Tower. Here’s a quick description: “In the tarot, the tower card represents those moments when everything suddenly falls apart and the foundations we had relied on crumble. This podcast is a space to talk about these transformative moments that have happened in our lives and how we found our way through to the other side.”
The Tower moment I spoke about was my choice to stop drinking in 2017. As I heard myself speak with the ease of authority, I kept thinking about how a human body regenerates itself every seven years. I am a different person now and this interview made me present to how deeply I’ve integrated this aspect of my experience.
🎧 Listen on Apple podcasts here.
🎧 Listen on Spotify here.
Would love to hear your thoughts and impressions!
Now onto this week’s essay, where I reflect on the lessons of May’s Trust Your Life coaching project—>
This week’s inspiration:
“Over and over again I have to remind myself that with trust comes more ease, more joy, less mental obsession, less energy leaks etc. And yet, I still spend a lot of time in the cycle of overthinking, trying to control, and so on.
I want to trust right timing, so I can spend more energy working WITH the universe to co-create, rather than cycling through old patterns of fear or anxiety about the WHEN and HOW.
I want to trust the universe to take care of the WHEN and HOW and do my part of staying focused on the WHAT and WHY.
I want to strike a balance of effort and ease, so I can find more flow in the surrender.”
-Trust Your Life coaching project participant
It’s been a month since Self Made last landed in your inbox.
May was busy: in addition to the normal stuff-of-life and business, I also had coaching sessions with the twenty-one of you who participated in May’s “Trust Your Life” coaching project. I spoke with people from all over the United States, plus international participants from Mauritius, Delhi, and the UK, respectively.
These conversations held a sacredness for me because self-trust has been the core focus of my own life since 2020. At the time, I was 3 years sober from alcohol, and while my behavior had changed considerably—I no longer feared what I might do, or not do—the brain doesn’t give up its obsessions easily, and all the mental energy that had been channeled into thinking about drinking needed a place to go.
The part of me that was so accustomed to life feeling like a low-grade constant struggle found a new focus: all I had to do was figure out how to control the present and predict the future, and nothing bad would ever happen to me again and I’d arrive at a place where life finally felt permanently peaceful and easeful.
Seeing it spelled out, it seems silly. But it’s not like I was consciously choosing to divert all that energy into another unattainable pursuit. All I knew was that something still felt off: I had finally freed myself from the Very Hard Thing—which was a Very Big Deal and a prerequisite for all that was yet to come. But what I couldn’t shake was the confusion over why that massive shift hadn’t immediately resolved all my issues. There were still mechanisms at play within my system, soul, and psyche that had me interacting with life as a punitive antagonist rather than a trustworthy partner.
In the absence of an active practice of trust, I’d simply traded trickster alcohol for the beast of perfectionism. BLESSEDLY, thanks to an illuminating shower moment (that I’ve written about ad nauseum), my awareness cracked open, ringing a bell in my brain rang that hasn’t stopped ringing since.
Thus began the tediously slow work of untangling the more subterranean inner workings of my experience from the funk of my subconscious. As I became more internally steady, the true transformation I sought became available: I could finally stop jumping through all the hoops to avoid what would actually make a difference, which was of course turning and facing those outdated mechanisms that my system was terrifically adept at keeping me on the run from. Said another way: I had resolved the symptom (alcohol); now I could get to the root cause.
The root cause was, ultimately, a profound disconnection from my core, essential self. In the void of this disconnection, the demands of the inner critic dominated, demands that only served to keep me mired in my conditioning and unable to experience the deeper longings of my heart. It wasn’t until I found a guide who helped shepherd me into the garden of self-trust that I developed the tools to put the critic in it’s proper place and begin a practice of receiving rather than controlling my life.
Even if your struggle isn’t related to a substance, I know you relate to at least some aspects of my story—A. because, you’re human, and B. because I spoke to twenty-one of you last month about self-trust, which gave me a decent glimpse into a sample size of what’s happening in the collective. May’s coaching project revealed that many of you are feeling cut off from a sense of aliveness, or are confused as to why you keep pouring your precious time and energy into perpetuating patterns that your logical mind knows aren’t helping but that you can’t seem to stop, or you’re still allowing your mental and emotional well-being to be contingent on external factors instead of cultivating it from within.
Here are a few of the themes that emerged:
The Gap Between Knowing and Trusting: Almost all of you expressed some version of "I know I have the answers inside me, but..." There was a consistent pattern of cognitive dominance—you’re great at intellectualizing the concept of self-trust; it’s in practice where you’re stuck. Every single one of your heads turned into affirmative bobbleheads when I mentioned balancing the wisdom of the intellect with that of the heart and body; every single one of you longs to connect to a visceral, felt-sense of trust instead of only grinding away at thinking about it.
The Grip of the Inner Critic: While everyone’s inner critic has its own unique flavor of expression (imposter syndrome; undermining confidence; keeping you caught in a cycle of fear over creativity and imagination), all of you identified a harsh inner voice as a primary obstacle to self-trust.
People-Pleasing and Self-Censorship: Many of you spoke of a disconnection from what you actually want because you’re so accustomed to prioritizing others' needs and comfort over your own.
The Hidden, Bolder Self: Several of you referenced a rebellious, creative, or bolder version that wants to emerge, but that actually expressing this feels too unsafe or risky. There's fear about the vulnerability required for you to stop playing small.
Success Redefinition: Many of you spoke of having achieved external markers of success while feeling internally unstable or unfulfilled—and wanting to create new definitions of what success means.
If you recognize yourself in these patterns, hello, hi, welcome to being human.
Self-development starts when you shine the light of awareness on your patterns. Just like self-compassion, self-trust is a practice, not something you arrive at. You don’t check “trust life” off a list. You cultivate it as a capacity over time, and your experience of it only deepens over time.
Based on five years of inquiry and experimentation, I believe it to have two definitions:
SELF-TRUST
Knowing that I have everything I need to meet the moment—no matter the moment, and:
Knowing that life is unfolding exactly as it’s meant to for me to become the person I’m meant to become and learn all the lessons I’m meant to learn.
The explicitness of a definition is helpful to me, because as long as I’m not experiencing the above more often than not (as many of you have heard me say: we are going for consistency over perfection), I know more deconditioning is required. Meaning: I know there are still distances left for me to traverse between head, heart, body, and ultimately, spirit.
Developing self-trust is a process of integration. As you became less fractured and more whole, you gain access to a fresh experience of yourself and life. And because this is a practice and not a destination, you get to start experiencing these things immediately. Even when you fall short of your expectations, even when you backslide or fail.
A practice of self-trust starts has to start within but the results give us the tools to be with our swiftly tilting reality as it is. What you gain through this process are the precise skills required to meet this current moment. Because a practice of self-trust has you interacting with reality as it is, instead of interacting with it based on the interpretations of reality the mind is feeding you. In reality, you are not time traveling to the future or the past. You are adaptable, innovative, agile, creative, and FORTIFIED—and these are the most important qualities the collective needs to raise consciousness and move into a future that is free of the outdated mechanisms we see on full display.
IF YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR!
First of all: thank you.
Second of all: if you’re curious about exploring these themes in a gently structured way with other aspiring punk-asses, Self Made’s second annual SUMMER CAMP begins July 14th.
Summer Camp is a five-week hybrid course and community for reducing the grip of the inner critic and increasing your ability to trust yourself to meet the moment - no matter the moment.
🌻 Practical weekly lessons
🌻 Live calls + asynchronous community
🌻 Two 1:1 coaching calls with yours truly
🌻 Multiple paths to “choose your own adventure”
The greatest inhibitor to self-trust is the inner critic so SELF TRUST SUMMER is all about getting unhooked from its grip and unleashing your inner champion.
I’m excited to adventure with you.
—Discover what you are a disciple to—
🪐 Create a little space
🪐 Choose an experiment
🪐 Head into autumn with more peace and power
—and—
*a greater capacity to trust and respond to life *as is **
Get all the details and register here.
Or if you already know you’re a YES you can sign up—>
SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.
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I love your SUMMER CAMP concept!