The Uncomfortable Truth About Trust: Act Before You're Ready and Watch What Expands (Epi. #264)

What if trust isn’t something you wait to feel — but something you expand into by acting?

In this solo episode, I open with a story I first heard in my youth from a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda.

On the surface, it’s a story about a monk, fear, and a snake.
 But it’s really about what happens when you let trust move before the fear is gone.

From there, I weave together neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and a concept called surprisal — the signal your system generates when reality exceeds your predictions.

And what I’ve come to understand is this:
 trust doesn’t arrive before the act — it arrives through it.

You’ll hear how each guest this month offered a different lens on trust — cognitive, somatic, nourishment, and systems — and how those perspectives revealed the same pattern from different angles.

And I share my own journey — from studying AI in the early days to stepping into meditation work at a time when nothing felt certain — and how, in both cases, the signal was there.

I just had to act before I was ready to receive it.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker: A monk was tending the garden at the ashram of Parma Yogananda, one of the most beloved spiritual teachers to bring Eastern wisdom to the west.

[00:00:09] Speaker 3: The monk heard his master's voice. Boom.

[00:00:14] Speaker 3: There is a snake. Pick it up and throw it over the fence.

[00:00:19] Speaker: the monk froze, fear, immediate, bodily real, but this was his teacher and something in him beneath the fear moved. He picked up the snake, he threw it over the fence. And in that moment, something he didn't predict became possible.

[00:00:43] Speaker: It revealed trust. That's not a story about snakes. That's a story about what happens when we discover we are larger than our fear.

[00:00:58] Speaker: Thomas Campbell, Parmahansa [00:01:00] Yogananda Modern Neuroscience.

[00:01:03] Speaker: Three traditions. Three languages.

[00:01:06] Speaker: Yogananda calls it divine intuition. A sixth sense that gives the soul knowledge of itself when the mind is calm.

[00:01:16] Speaker: Thomas Campbell, Parmahansa calls it low entropy consciousness awareness, evolving from fear towards love, and

[00:01:27] Speaker: modern science describes it as a metacognitive, socially attuned brain systems that regulate perception, prediction, and relationships.

[00:01:38] Speaker: Three different frames.

[00:01:41] Speaker: One, convergence, awareness and trust are about aligning with a deeper, intelligence. So what does that mean for how we actually trust?

[00:01:55] Speaker: Before we begin, let everything else wait [00:02:00] just for this moment, and as you settle in, I want you to sit with how you approach trust, not the concept, the feeling.

[00:02:14] Speaker: What does trust ask of you?

[00:02:24] Speaker: Welcome to the Omni Mindfulness Podcast. I'm Shilpa, and this is where we pause before we build, so that what we amplify is clear, intentional, and sustainable. This podcast closes March, and if you've been with me this month, you know, we've been exploring trust what it actually means.

[00:02:45] Speaker: Where it lives and what gets in the way. Today, we're bringing it together not as a recap, as a revelation.

[00:02:57] Speaker: Stay with me until the [00:03:00] end. I'll share how trust has shown up in my own life.

[00:03:05] Speaker: Not as certainty, but as something that moved before the fear did. So let's step in.

[00:03:16] Speaker: Something clicked this month while reading the newsletter of Nia, a movement educator whose work I've been following for some time. I first found her when I was getting curious about somatic movement. I took one of her workshops and that's how I was introduced to the Alexander Technique, and eventually the Feldenkrais method.

[00:03:41] Speaker: In her newsletter, she shared how she's been reading a book, offering insights into how we make choices. Based on minimizing prediction error and how that process can cause something called surprise. She shared how that concept [00:04:00] led her spiraling down a linguistic rabbit hole. Trying to understand the difference between surprise and Al, and something clicked for me immediately.

[00:04:14] Speaker: Because I reflected on how pattern recognition is fundamental to AI and how humans are innately built to access information in much the same way. Here's the distinction worth pausing on. Surprise is an emotion, a birthday party, delight or shock. Fleeting

[00:04:38] Speaker: surprisal is different.

[00:04:41] Speaker: It's the signal your system generates when reality exceeds or defies its prediction, not an emotion, an update the gap between what your system expected and what actually arrived. The bigger The gap, the higher the [00:05:00] surprisal and the nervous system. Like any intelligent system is constantly trying to minimize it.

[00:05:08] Speaker: So what does this have to do with trust? You're probably thinking

[00:05:14] Speaker: everything.

[00:05:15] Speaker: We make predictions based on the information we have. When reality doesn't match, surprisal happens. High surprise signals, the nervous system.

[00:05:27] Speaker: The nervous system flags. Uncertainty and uncertainty for most of us triggers the one response we inherited for survival fear.

[00:05:38] Speaker: But here's what I want you to sit with.

[00:05:42] Speaker: Surprisal is not a stop sign. It is a signal that new information is arriving. Information your system didn't predict, didn't yet have access to trust is what keeps the receiver open [00:06:00] long enough to let that information in.

[00:06:03] Speaker: Fear says close down. This is too much.

[00:06:07] Speaker: Trust says, stay open. This is information.

[00:06:13] Speaker: And science confirms this.

[00:06:15] Speaker: Trust lives in the brains reward systems.

[00:06:18] Speaker: Its emotion regulation networks. Its capacity to update how safe something is when new information arrives.

[00:06:27] Speaker: And science confirms this, trust lives in the brain's reward systems. Its information, its emotion regulation networks.

[00:06:36] Speaker: It's capacity to update how safe something is when new information arrives. It isn't just a feeling, it's an embodied updateable state.

[00:06:48] Speaker: So lack of trust is in weakness. It's a closed receiver, and the practice of trust, conscious chosen, return to again and again is the practice of staying open [00:07:00] to what your whole system is already receiving. Brain body. Heart, soul, all four sending signals, all four, asking to be heard

[00:07:16] Speaker: And the monk, he just experienced the highest ris of his day. Something he didn't predict became possible. His receiver stayed open and trust revealed itself on the other side.

[00:07:33] Speaker: Thanks to the lens each guest brought this month, I could see this pattern from four different angles.

[00:07:41] Speaker: Dr. Fred Moss gave me the cognitive lens. 

[00:07:45] Speaker 4: He is a psychiatrist who left the system because he saw what labels do. They tell your nervous system. This is who you are. Stop updating. Stop receiving. Reclaiming identity means [00:08:00] opening that receiver again, trusting your own knowing over what you've been told. 

[00:08:09] Speaker: Jennifer Juniper gave me the body lens. Her Crohn's disease wasn't, her body's failing her. It was her body sending her surprisal signals. She had been taught to override healing begin when she stayed open to that information, instead of shutting it down, trusting the body's signal.

[00:08:29] Speaker: Even when it was frightening,

[00:08:32] Speaker: Amy Toscano gave me the nourishment lens. She taught me that when we override the body's signal long enough, we stop hearing them altogether. People lose touch with hunger, with fatigue, with the quiet signals that were always there and rebuilding trust.

[00:08:51] Speaker: Real trust begins not with a new protocol or stricter plan. It begins with listening fiercely [00:09:00] consistently until the body believes you're actually paying attention.

[00:09:05] Speaker: And Jonathan Mast gave me the systems lens tools that work with your nature rather than against it. AI that amplifies the receiver rather than replacing it. Trusting what extends you rather than what overrides you.

[00:09:26] Speaker: Four lenses. Four doorways. Fear was present in every single one, and trust moved away.

[00:09:37] Speaker: We've been taught that trust means the fear is gone, that you wait until it feels safe, until you're certain. 

[00:09:46] Speaker: But here's the uncomfortable truth.

[00:09:49] Speaker: Fear is the most human thing there is.

[00:09:52] Speaker: We inherited it for survival.

[00:09:54] Speaker: It kept the species alive, but survival and expansion are not the same thing.

[00:09:59] Speaker: Fear [00:10:00] is the ceiling of the human operating system and trust conscious practice chosen is how we begin to move beyond it, not by eliminating fear, not by bypassing it by staying.

[00:10:14] Speaker: Open alongside it. Trust emerges when awareness reduces internal noise and accurately perceives that something larger is. Oriented toward growth.

[00:10:28] Speaker: That's yogananda's. Divine intuition. The souls knowing when the mind grows calm.

[00:10:35] Speaker: That's Campbell's. Low entropy consciousness. Moving from fear toward love.

[00:10:40] Speaker: One choice at a time. 

[00:10:43] Speaker: That's what modern science calls metacognition. The brain's capacity to know that it knows to check for error, to update

[00:10:52] Speaker: and intuition. That instant knowing that arrives before the words isn't the woo kind. [00:11:00] It's your whole system synthesizing everything it has ever received. Every pattern, every experience, every signal from brain, body, heart, and soul compressed into a single moment of knowing

[00:11:19] Speaker 5: this is what it means for consciousness to be your compass.

[00:11:24] Speaker: Trust is what lets you. Follow it.

[00:11:28] Speaker: I want to be honest with you. I have been on the right track more than once and walked away, not because I was foolish, because the receiver was closed. I studied AI in the early nineties. The signal was there. I didn't trust it. I was at hp. Ambitious, frustrated, and frustration.

[00:11:51] Speaker: Was information a redirect? Yet, I couldn't hear it at that time. When I found Sura Flow years before I trained [00:12:00] with her, something in me recognized it immediately. I followed that thread quietly, and when I finally signed up for her certification, the fear was still there. Part of me asking, is this right?

[00:12:13] Speaker: I have a master's in computer science, should I stay the course? Yet, I signed up to become a meditation coach. Something quieter said, do it. Yes, before my mind could catch up. the training. Ironically started the same day the world would go into lockdown.

[00:12:35] Speaker: Fear was very much in the room that day. And so was the clearest confirmation I had received. That's when I understood, not intellectually, but in my body, in my heart, in something deeper than both. That trust doesn't wait for fear to leave. It just moves. This is a living [00:13:00] lesson.

[00:13:00] Speaker: I'm not teaching from the other side of fear. I am teaching from inside the practice of staying open alongside it. The pause helps, the softening helps, not because it removes the fear, because it creates enough space to hear the signal underneath it. So here's what I want to leave you with.

[00:13:28] Speaker: The next time fear shows up, pause.

[00:13:32] Speaker: Don't try to make it leave. Just ask what signal is underneath it?

[00:13:40] Speaker: What is my whole system trying to tell me?

[00:13:46] Speaker: That's where trust lives, not in the absence of fear, in the choice to stay open alongside it. If this resonated, pause with purpose and the [00:14:00] founder's why Compass? We're both built for exactly this kind of inner work.

[00:14:06] Speaker: The links are in the show notes. If trust is the practice of keeping the receiver open, intuition is a signal that comes through when it is, and that conversation, what it means to hear that signal clearly, to follow it, to build from it. In an age where AI is moving faster than our wisdom. That's what we are exploring next month.

[00:14:35] Speaker: That conversation is just beginning

[00:14:40] Speaker: your pause. Is your compass.