About twelve years ago, when I was going through a difficult time, I had dinner with a good friend. I don’t know why,’ my friend said, ‘but I think you should meet my colleague M. She does these meditation evenings at her house. It could be your thing.’

I texted M. and started going to her meditation evenings once a month. For the first five or six times, I wasn’t sure it was my thing – there was no big neon sign saying YES, DO IT when I took the train to her house – but I went anyway. I always felt calm afterwards.

We sat on pillows on the floor in a small room in M’s flat. If there were more than five of us, our knees touched. We always sat in a circle; a candle burning in the middle. After the meditation, M. often invited us to practice other things as well. Once, we did an exercise where we held the hands of the person next to us and were instructed to tell that person everything we saw before our inner eye. ‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ M. reminded us. ‘Just try and find words for what comes up.’ That evening, the person whose hands I held grew emotional when I told her what I saw. ‘You are perfectly describing what I feel, Lena. Thank you.’ But how?, I wondered.

Another time, M. gave us crayons and paper and told us to imagine our future and draw the first image that appeared in our minds. I produced a wonky sketch of a house bordering on an ocean, with mountains rising behind it. I will live there, I thought, and immediately wondered where the thought had come from. I had no such plans! But three years later, without me ‘planning it’ at all, I moved from Switzerland to New Zealand and lived in a house by the ocean with mountains rising behind it. That exercise, and hindsight, taught me that intuition is funny and magical and not always useful in the present. But it’s not useless, either.

One evening, in summer, two people canceled at the last minute and I was the only one who showed up at M’s place. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. I was glad to be outside; I had been feeling sad and stuck for months. I just couldn’t figure out what to do with my life and I punished myself for it. I told M. as much. There was a stretch of forest behind her house. The grass was high and the last light of the day was golden. We walked for a while without talking. Then she stopped, her chin slightly up. I followed her gaze and saw a squirrel in a tree. ‘Is that squirrel telling you something?’ she asked. No one in my life had ever asked me such a question. But I had been in the meditation group long enough to remember that I wasn’t supposed to give ‘the right answer’, I could simply wait for whatever came up. I never felt silly in M. presence.

‘I think perhaps the squirrel is telling me to let go a little. To relax. But that –’

‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ M. said.

And we walked on, all the way back home.

I’ve been wanting to write about self-trust for a while and never found the words. Then I started wondering about my teachers and M.’s face appeared, her thick head of hair, her glowing brown eyes. It took me years to understand her lessons, to let them become a part of me. She helped me come to my senses. She gently insisted that I take my intuition seriously, that I practice and stumble and return to this terrain far beyond where things make sense. There’s a path there. ‘It is made by walking’, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote. M. also taught me, in her own strange way, to love my mistakes and let them become part of my self-trust. Our entire life is a practice of having to make decisions about things we know so little about. I expect I’ll still get things ‘wrong’ in the days before my death. But that doesn’t mean I don’t trust my intuition.

I listen to all kinds of animals now, squirrels included, and I listen to trees and rivers too. When I feel a small whisper inside to go somewhere or talk to someone, I do it. Not always immediately. Often, the whisper will ‘follow’ me around for weeks, even months, before I finally give in. The practice of trusting myself is ongoing. I’m slowly learning that my ‘self’ is woven into everything around me, that my life is dependent on each tree, river and squirrel who crosses my path. No earth, air or water? No self. I guess my self-trust is only as good as the trust I put into all that I’m sharing this earth with.

So, if a bird, cat, fox or squirrel happens to cross your path, why not ask them if they have a message for you? Why not ask the flowering fruit trees in your backyard, too?

In other words, why not trust and see what happens?