Last week I wrote about the claustrophobic mindset that does not trust that everything will be okay.

Trust that I’ll be ok. Trust that I’ll make my mortgage.  Trust that I’ll succeed at work or in my marriage.

In distrust, a rabbit hole emerges and anything to get out of it is in vain until something else happens.  Something to unhinge us from the reptilian “fight or flight” system that psychologists say we are hooked into from caveman days.

How do we break free? Trust that we have enough, are enough? Trust that we are safe?

Sure, we can change our mental game. We can think new thoughts. Switch the channel. And that helps. But we must do something else.

Tap it. Yes, tap it. Ever tap a beer keg?

Here we tap something else – The Deep Well.

The Deep Well of connection to something bigger than yourself.
Connection to community, family, humanity, spirit, nature, Great Mystery, God.
The Deep Well of self-trust.
The Deep Well of “I am enough”.
The Deep Well of “I love you” in all its forms – self, other, universal.

The Well is infinite and often a battle to get past the critic-gatekeepers, who stand in your way – protectors and saboteurs with fiery spears, shouting “DO NOT ENTER IF YOU ARE NOT WORTHY!”  Are you worthy?

No one can answer – not your partner, your friends, your parents, your colleagues.  Only you can answer, believe you are worthy. And that can take an instant or years. I’ve seen it many times in clients.

Often it requires a crisis, a death, a divorce, a deep unravelling to survive, from which to discover your worthiness. It’s the gift of hard stuff. It’s the undoing of old programming and not enoughness. I speak to this in great detail in Chapter 4 of my book “Fixing You Is Killing Me.”

“In the thick of crisis, we must pause and survey the landscape around us, not just react.”

And yet, the Well may be elusive.  If and when we do drink from it, we forget it exists.  It disappears. We become it. We can no longer see it. We lose the “drive”, the motivation to get “there” as we’ve arrived. There is no “there” at the Well. There just is.

And let’s get clear. The Well is not a divine answer to all things, where all is perfect, and there is nothing to do.  Tapping the well and continuing to be in its flow requires great discipline, work, cultivation and practice, daily.

Some fear that if they tap it, they will lose their motivation to go to work in the morning or be “responsible”. What will actually happen is that one’s motivation, or lack of, will be more transparent than ever. A refinement and filtering will happen – of where you’re lying to yourself, running with your ego – for your wealth, your good looks, your big muscles, your fancy car, or whatever you think will make you complete or gain you accolades from others.

Fear the upending, not the ending… if you must fear.  Or just tap, drink, and trust.

The Well inspires action and creativity from the flow of its source, instead of the deprivation of its presence.

How does one drink from the Well? You might wonder.

It happens instantly, in the pause of your day, the looking up from your screen, the noticing of a moment, the looking out your window, the stopping and seeing off the trail.  And yet that’s just a drop.

How do you tap the swell? Make it less random, more daily, more reliable.

Next week, I’ll speak more to that and share a simple action, that terrifies many, if not all, of us. A simple action to daily, consistently drink from The Deep Well, available to you and all of us. Sign up to the right to get next week’s blog.

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