How to Trust Yourself with Rick Hanson

When you’ve been triggered enough times, it’s easy to start living smaller: avoiding certain conversations, second-guessing yourself, and staying inside an invisible cage that looks like caution but feels like contraction.

In this talk, I explore what “trusting yourself” really means—not as bravado or blind confidence, but as an embodied sense that you can stay steady, return to center, and take the next step even in uncertainty. Along the way, we connect this to early conditioning (basic trust/mistrust), to good intentions, and to practical tools for staying grounded when someone tries to pull you into their script.

00:00 — Mindfulness of breathing + why early Buddha teachings are so practical (six-step Anapanasati sequence)
03:12 — Emptiness, in two useful meanings (and “empty doesn’t mean light”)
09:35 — Trusting yourself: what “trust” means and how it starts with what feels true
12:16 — How mistrust gets learned (world → attachment → self-doubt) and how we “shrink our world”
15:12 — What self-trust feels like in the body (and why it’s freeing)
19:13 — Building self-trust: owning good intentions; trusting love underneath emotion
23:37 — Trusting your earned experience: effort, skills, competence, and training
25:12 — Trusting the Three Jewels (teacher/teachings/community) + trusting your deeper nature
36:15 — Staying steady with provocative people: silence, curiosity, slowing down, staying out of their script
46:28 — Healing “unlovable” training: linking, letting the positive win, and embodied anchoring (somatic marker)

You can see the meditation that went along with this talk at https://rickhanson.com/talk-meditation-how-to-trust-yourself/

If you would like to join the free, online Wednesday Meditations, sign up here: https://rickhanson.com/wednesday-meditations-with-dr-rick-hanson/

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