“Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.”
Dr. Gabor Maté
Right now, where do you feel safe in your body?
Close your eyes and let that question linger for a moment. Perhaps you feel safe in the large muscles of your legs, in your solar plexus, or in your face. Perhaps you can locate safety outside of yourself, or as a mental construct, but find it challenging to touch within your own body. In recent years, I’ve been exploring the idea of becoming safe, rather than seeking safety. How do we create safety in our bodies in a world that’s unpredictable and ever-changing? I wonder if safety is not something we cling to, but a home we return to.
There has been much debate as to whether or not the world we live in today is more dangerous than, say, fifty years ago. What seems more certain is that our bodies have become chronically depleted and dysregulated from overstimulation. Creating a safe home in my body is an ongoing journey and an act of resistance in a fast-paced culture. In my experience, becoming safe has required me to expand into a greater capacity for change and conflict.
In order to become safe in our bodies, we must be willing to feel. And in order to feel, we need to slow down.
It was November 2016. The day before Thanksgiving, I sat in five hours of traffic driving to the Vipassana Center in Joshua Tree, a drive that normally would take half the time. I called my best friend, half-jokingly begging her to talk me out of the eleven day silent meditation retreat. I was accustomed to these little performances I did before diving into a retreat or training, just enough to help me process the resistance and have a good laugh. I have a degree in Drama, after all. I would spend both Thanksgiving and my 30th birthday in this retreat. On this particular retreat, you meditate for fourteen hours a day. When you’re not doing seated meditation, you’re doing walking meditation. When you’re not doing walking meditation, you’re meditating while eating or cleaning. And when you’re not doing those things, you’re barely sleeping on an uncomfortable mattress. The Pali word anicca (impermanence) echos throughout the day.
One would think that meditation retreats are the epitome of calm and quiet, but after years of practice, I can attest that the mind is never louder than when distractions are removed. At least at first. When we create space to observe, we can clearly see how the mind constantly runs looping thoughts and agendas, how anxieties and judgment are lingering just beneath an amicable surface. The inward journey requires feeling lots of big emotions. Meditation teaches us how to undo the mind’s pattern of pushing away that which is painful and clinging to that which is pleasurable. If we recognize that this cycle of attachment creates all suffering, perhaps we can taste a glimmer of liberation. We finally rest in what is.
Anyway, I arrived to the center tired, hungry, chaotic, and a few hours late. The sun was beginning to set as I tiptoed into the last few minutes of the orientation — a conference room full of people, appearing to be ages twenty to seventy-plus. I was handed a waiver to sign with an outline of what Vipassana is and what it is not. One memorable phrase was: “It is not an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life.”
One day, (which day, I couldn’t say), amidst one of our afternoon sits, I started inexplicably weeping. I was sitting on my assigned cushion, in the large carpeted room, with about a hundred other participants. The emotion became so immense—big, wet, ugly sobs—that I dashed out of the room. How un-spiritual I felt! My mind immediately went digging to try to explain the meltdown. Is this from childhood? Of course it is! Everything is! Suppressed trauma. Anger. Or grief. God, I’m hungry. Is anyone else hungry? Big emotions can feel unsafe if we don’t have a process to integrate them. Over time, I’ve become a safer in my body not by finding answers or ways to mitigate pain, but by learning tools that help me navigate a greater spectrum of feeling.
Somatic practice has helped me integrate emotions and, in some ways, fill the gaps of certain aspects of my meditative path. Somatic practice is a body-centered approach to healing — this can include various forms of movement, somatic therapy, vagal tone exercises, and breathwork. Through somatic practice, I’ve witnessed that the body does, in fact, keep the score. I wonder if one of the biggest things that makes us feel unsafe is suppressing our emotions. To be able to truly sense safety, we must have courage to turn towards big feelings, rather than away from them. If not, we may use meditation unskillfully to cultivate “zombie zen”, suppressing emotions rather than feeling them. There are lots of reasons that might lead us to unconsciously choose not to feel our feelings. Most of us were taught or witnessed some level of emotional suppression by our parents or caregivers. Beyond that, our educators and society also reflect that dimming emotions is more polite or socially acceptable (unless you live in New York City, where crying is public is commonplace). Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, observed that wild animals rarely experience trauma, but domesticated animals do. Wild animals have in tact systems that are able to complete the cycles required to process trauma. We are domesticated animals; re-wilding is our road back to safety.
Despite our wild origins, our civilized minds try to create safety through control. We think we can build safety through mental gymnastics, blame, data, hard science, or philosophies that make us believe that we won’t experience pain. And while these might temporarily create the illusion of safety, they don’t actually change our physiological experience of it. The good news is, there are many tools that free us up from these patterns and allow us to come home to ourselves. We become a refuge when we can trust that every bit of information our bodies give us—sensations, emotions, impulses—is valuable and worth exploring. Through feeling, we build more capacity to handle the highs and lows of life and allow energy to flow and disperse. With patience and perseverance, we can loosen the grip, exhale, and learn to trust bit by bit.
I’d love to leave you with a practice. You don’t have to go on a meditation retreat, or take a somatic class to learn it, but you do have to do it to feel the impact.
Let’s go back to the question at the beginning. Right now, where do you feel safe in your body? Put your hands on your body and breathe into it. Maybe you can touch the place(s) you feel safe, maybe not. If “safe” feels vague to you, find a place in your body that feels expansive, relaxed, or pleasurable. Don’t conjure or force it, discover it. If you’re having difficulty, or are feeling pain/numbness, there is always a place in your body that feels less painful/numb to become aware of. Anchor into this internal safety for a few breaths. Notice if your awareness drifts into places that feel unsafe, contracted, or painful. Come back to safety with compassion.
The thing is, we can’t think our way into letting go of fear. We let go by making our bodies feel safe. From there, relaxation and trust start to happen.
Safety isn’t a belief, it’s the feeling that comes when we trust ourselves, and thereby, the world around us. We all deserve that. But for some of us, it takes some unlearning. If we attend to becoming safety itself, perhaps others can breathe a little deeper around us, and together we can create a safer, more regulated world.
Oh, there’s one more part I wanted to share about that Vipassana retreat. On my 30th birthday (no one knew!), I broke the rules and left my room at night. I walked out into the desert until I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. Beneath the night sky, amongst the cacti and coyotes, I felt waves of adrenaline rushing through my body. I submerged deeper into the darkness until the fear subsided and only presence remained.
x kat
If you want to go deeper in exploring the relationship between somatic work and the creative process, join me in a 1:1 Creative Consultation or Script Session. My Embodied Storytelling Mentorship has early pricing until June 1st, 2023.