You deserve to feel safe. That is your basic human right. Feeling safe matters, because it allows you a greater joy in any of your life pursuits.
Though this world has so many components of lack of safety, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and exhausted (and unsafe) in the daily quests to keep your human self-fed, cared for, and loved.
Living this human experience requires so much negotiation and accumulation of resources that we all get turned around and forget why we are doing what we are doing it for. We seek education to increase our ability to land good jobs. We require connection to those mentors and loved ones who can guide and support us. We need to maintain healthy bodies, so we can care for the ones we love. Then we need to show up, have time for jobs, and be ready to go so we can pay our bills. Phew!
Sometimes, this toil is hard and overwhelming. Sometimes it’s a great challenge to be conquered. Many times, we feel we are on a never-ending wheel of resource-seeking. This is all okay. This safety-seeking is part of the journey you are on.
Within the need to manage your physical resource-seeking, you can find moments to step back and center. You can slow down and reflect. You can discover space within your mind and body to regroup. Through finding internal safety, you can fill your well with calm and sunlit hope. There is more than just physical security to consider. When you can provide yourself with other aspects of safety – emotional psychological and spiritual – your daily resource-seeking might not feel so overwhelming. It might actually be fun and lose some of those mundane qualities that drain you.
So much of what drains us are our own fears of not being safe. Whether we are actually safe or not, if we perceive we are not safe, we engage in life in unsafe ways.
As a trauma therapist and energy healer, I work with people wanting help for reasons they cannot define. By the time they get to my door, they have exhausted their current life tactics. They are drained. They speak of fear, anxiety, conflict, or longing. They describe coping strategies and behaviors that don’t work. These were ways of getting their needs met to feel safe when they were young. These behaviors once got them out of scary situations back in the day (screaming, disconnecting, fighting, controlling others, binging, etc.) but create a lack of safety in themselves and others now. They do not feel safe in so many areas of their lives but don’t have the language to express it.
We are not taught to think about our internal world in these terms. Safety was taught to us as a purely physical pursuit. Safety conjures up images of roadside flares and yellow reflective tape. Safety is a 911 call or hall monitor in elementary school. Yet, safety at its core is feeling acceptance and connection. This is a connection to yourself as well as others. When you can connect to yourself in safe and kind ways, you connect with others in this way. Your relationships change and you become a safe person for others.
When you practice the language of safety a whole new inner world emerges. New ways of seeing and caring for yourself activate.
Safety within your body, your mind, and your inner world – physical, emotional, and spiritual safety – is a pattern that you can track to keep yourself safe (see my article “How to Feel Safe”). This helps you to thrive, which helps you engage more enthusiastically and joyously in
your everyday pursuits. Creating internal safety brings you to your power. Being in your personal power is your basic human right because it is a psychological, emotional, and spiritual necessity.