Over the weekend I met with sewers in West Virginia. I looked around the neighborhoods. I went hiking. Perhaps you can relate to the joy and longing when you fall for a place so hard–when it so deeply penetrates the deepest corners of your heart. And the ingredients are there. There is a tremendous need for jobs. It is a heartbreakingly beautiful place with the kindest people I’ve ever met.

But the flip side of the emotion generated when the pieces feel so right and so many people are stepping up to help me build it, is the fear that somehow it won’t work. That it won’t come together. And like falling in love in a relationship, just that thought can cause so much distress.

So I’ve started up a mantra: Trust and love. Love and trust.

Interestingly the “love” comes easier for me. I feel so much love for my work. I feel so much love for the people that are helping me create my dream. Trust, on the other hand, is another matter. Trust causes a gnarl to form in my stomach. Trust causes deep fear.

Over the weekend, we would have these great days, with great people, more pieces of the puzzle coming together. And then I’d get worn out. And in would crawl the fear. How are you going to solve this issue? What if the sewers live too far away? How are you going to support yourself in rural West Virginia on the long road to making this happen? What if you have to take a job that keeps you from your dreams?  And so on. As it turns out, we don’t usually solve our problems at the end of a long day when we are exhausted, by working and reworking every detail.

And so I start up with the mantra. Trust and love. Love and trust. Trust and love. I feel big change coming. Good change. But scary nonetheless. I am working on trusting that it will come together the way it should.

Why is this so hard? Well some of us have been programmed to think that we aren’t deserving of our dreams, or that there is some nefarious force out there hunting them down to squash them if life starts to get too good. Or maybe we think that we can only be who we want and do what we want to do if we are living on the brink of financial ruin and hugely in debt. Maybe deep down we think that we will be not OK if we live out our dream, that we will be deeply unsafe.

If you, like me, are working on rebuilding your relationship with trust, know that trust is the truth. Trusting is what calls forth your dreams. Trust and love.

For further inspiration, follow this link to a beautiful young woman reframing the feeling of new beginnings and the inner turmoil it can insight.

Go, fight, win.

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