Mistrust

I woke up yesterday morning with an ominous feeling and a knot in my stomach in the shape of a halfmoon under my ribcage.  While I was noticing how that was feeling in the body (and how my inclination was to ignore and avoid it), I noticed I was ready to be set off by almost anything.  I'd get waves of feeling as if I could burst into tears if someone said anything even slightly emotional to me.

I wondered what my dreams were like for me to just wake up in this state.  I was scheduled to have the first review meeting with a new client later this morning and I knew I was a little nervous about that, but I have meetings with clients on a very regular schedule so I suspected something deeper was at work.  My mindfulness weakened as it usually does while I'm absorbed with work.  At some point well after the meeting (which went fine), I noticed that the knot wasn't completely gone, but had softened.  My mental state was much better.

As I was riding the bus to the train station home, I began to drop back into my body and reflect on what had happened this morning and what might have been the setup, I realized several things:

• The knot and the emotional sensitivity was in fact about that meeting... and more...
• What was underlying it all was a fundamental mistrust of myself and my abilities
• It wasn't very hard to make a connection going back years to middle school and elementary
• Despite having very little evidence from recent history that I would cock things up, my body/heart still expected it
• It became very clear that I was causing suffering by this mistrust
• The mistrust didn't exist cognitively, it was based in the body/heart, not the thinking mind

I'm still feeling a little raw and sensitive to it, but with a completely different relationship to it.  Now the strong reactions seem to be a response to the suffering I've put up with and the cumulative effect it must have had.  Each time I touch into that sadness or worry, compassion rushes up to meet it.  I'm curious to see how such a relatively small insight might change my orientation over time.  I can't imagine that I won't be tuned in a little bit better to that sense of mistrust.

Ajahn Brahm said something to the effect that you can have the delusion that meditation is hard, or the delusion that meditation is easy, so why not choose the delusion that's more helpful.  I feel like I could benefit from some similar logic with my mistrust of myself.  Why mistrust, when I can trust.  Which is more skillful?