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Many people in the world are struggling to feel safe right now given that we are
living in a global climate where danger is ever present and looming and we are
constantly being bombarded by this warning and that warning about all the
plethora of dangers that exist. But even in times that do not pose as much danger
to people of the world as this one, many people struggle to feel safe. Feeling
unsafe all the time is, to put it mildly, corrosive. It's not a state of
being that a person can maintain long term. Feeling chronically unsafe implies
that your body is being constantly flooded with stress chemicals and that
you are living in chronic psychological distress. This takes a toll on your
well-being big time. For this reason, in today's video, I'm going to give you
some tricks for how to feel safer. [Music]
It's really important if you feel unsafe to know that your being needs to be able
to tell you when you are actually in an unsafe situation so you can take actions
accordingly. The goal of feeling safer should not be to ignore important cues
that your being is sending you. The goal isn't to make it feel safer to stay in
an unsafe situation. To understand this, I'm going to give you an example.
Imagine there's a woman who's in an abusive relationship and she's using
techniques to feel safer in that situation rather than taking the action
on that feeling of unsafety to get out of the situation.
Your first go-to when you feel unsafe should be to get out of any immediate
danger that may exist and get into a safer situation. The problem in today's
world is that in this modern world, we are dealing with unsafeties that are not
immediate, quote unquote. They're more complex and objective and chronic. They
look less like being unsafe because a saber-tooth tiger is chasing us in the
moment and more like the ongoing unsafety of censorship that may be going
on in the world and what that means for our sense of safety within the greater
picture of society. On top of this, many people who have experienced trauma have
a very hard time feeling safe despite being in immediate situations where they
are objectively safe. When this is the case, it is important
to help yourself to feel safer. And doing so will help you navigate times of
unsafety and the different types of unsafety that may exist in your life.
Some of us are so accustomed to feeling unsafe that we don't even consciously
recognize that feeling unsafe is what is happening. In order to feel safer, you
have to name and notice that what has been triggered is your danger response.
From there, you need to identify what you are seeing as dangerous. And from
there, you have three basic approaches. By the way, I think the best thing is to
do all three rather than to choose between them. But here they are. These
three approaches to feeling unsafe are to take action to make the situation
safer, to change your perception of the situation to a perception that makes you
feel safer, and to change the way your body is reacting, i.e. calm down your
nervous system. So, let's look at some of the best tools for doing this. One,
turn your attention inside and witness the unsafety itself. Unsafety shows up
inside of you as sensations, feelings, internal dialogue, thoughts, images, and
for some people even sounds and smells. Close your eyes and feel and witness
these like a meditation. This is going to be hard at first because the
sensations associated with unsafety do not feel good. They either paralyze you
as if you're frozen or make you want to do something like run or hide or fight.
Allow those feelings and sensations to echo through your entire body, no matter
how difficult it is. Hear the internal dialogue thoughts and watch those images
as they arise and as they dissipate. You can mentally name the things you are
feeling and seeing and hearing as they occur just to keep yourself in that
witness perspective. Doing this keeps you from dissociating from yourself in
response to fear. If you dissociate from yourself when you feel fear, you in fact
abandon yourself when you feel afraid. Now obviously being afraid and then
being abandoned when you're afraid makes the fear much worse, right? Instead it
brings unconditional presence to yourself which decreases the fear. It
also gives you very valuable information I mean really valuable information about
your fear and your own personal truths which helps you to know yourself better
and make more informed decisions for yourself. It also activates your
parasympathetic nervous system which counteracts the fear response and
promotes a sense of calm. This exercise signals your brain and your body that if
you're focused inside yourself rather than outside yourself externally, you're
not currently in immediate danger. If you want to dive deeper on this
exercise, you can watch my video that's titled the emotional experiencing
process. Just remember that when it comes to experiencing unsafety,
it really helps to name what you're seeing and hearing and feeling because
doing so prevents you from being taken out of the exercise and down a worry
wormhole where essentially an aspect of this exercise takes you off purely into
the mental field where you're engaged only with kind of like a negative
visualization chain of possible bad things that have happened or things that
feel bad or things that could happen. by the way.
And when you are no longer even noticing what you are feeling in your body in the
here and now, the point of this exercise is you really want to be with what is
happening in the here and now. Two, become consciously proactive about
whatever it is that is making you feel unsafe. To do this, I want you to first
write down what you're afraid of. Could be many things, so just pick something.
From there, I want you to identify what you can control about this and what you
cannot control about it. Then you got to accept what you cannot control. Those
things that you cannot control, you've got to accept it in order to let go of
it. And then with the things that you can control, you're going to create an
actual plan for empowered actions that you can take and then do those. If you
don't know what you can do about it, then what you're doing is putting energy
into researching about it. Often our sense of unsafety is extreme because
we're kind of stuck in this passive worry about things. And by doing so, we
slip into this feeling of powerlessness without taking any kind of proactive
approach to the unsafety that we feel. For example, let's say that we've got a
guy named Roger. Roger felt really unsafe about the danger of potentially
losing his 401k retirement money. When he did this exercise, he realized, what
did he realize? Um, he does not have any control over whether the industry he's
in stands the test of time. He has no control over whether the US economy
collapsing is going to be something that happens or not. He has no control over
whether the CEO of his company decides to do this or that with the company. On
the other hand, what does he have control of? Well, he has control over
taking money out of his 401k account. He does have control over whether he stays
working in his industry or finds another industry to work in. He does have
control over finding different methods of building a retirement for himself. He
has control over moving to another country where his industry happens to be
booming. He has control over investing money in different things rather than
putting all of his money into one basket.
Another thing that he might have control over is shifting his perspective about
retirement in general. With this, he goes to work researching and making
plans and backup plans and taking actions that cause him to feel safer
about the future of his finances. Three, identify your fearful thought and
write down any thought that soothes that thought. this exercise, it's best to get
to the root or the core thought. The way you do this is by asking, "Why would
that be so bad?" and/or, "What would that mean for me?" and then answering as
vulnerably as possible. For example, let's say that you had a thought like,
"I'm going to be fired." You would then ask, "Why would that be so bad?" Andor,
"What would that mean for me?" Your answer may be because then I wouldn't
have any money. Now, to that thought, you're going to ask again, why would
that be so bad andor what would that mean to me? Let's say your answer is
because I would lose my home. Um, to that you'd ask yourself, why would that
be so bad andor what would it mean for me? Now, let's say that your answer is
something like I would have to move back in with my parents. To that you would
ask, why would that be so bad and or what would that mean to me? Your answer
may be I would be seen as a failure. You get the drill, right? To that you would
ask, why would that be so bad andor what would that mean for me? Your answer may
be I would be rejected. Again, why would that be so bad andor what would that
mean for me? Your answer may be I'd feel alone and bad about myself. Okay, now
you could technically keep going with this as long as you want to with that
chain of questioning to each thought, even longer. But we have defined the
root of what it is that is truly feared which is feeling alone and feeling bad
about oneself. This kind of core fear thought is going to come with a lot of
vulnerable emotional intensity. Along the way though to getting to this
root thought as you noticed we also discovered that there's a fear of being
seen as a failure, fear of being rejected, fear of moving back in with
the parents. What this person needs to do is to come up with thoughts and
perspectives and evidence that soothes or better yet disproves these thoughts
so that the fear goes down. Thoughts that contradict that I might lose my
job, that I would have to move back in with my parents, that I would be a
failure, that I will be rejected, and most especially the core fearful thought
in this case I would be alone and I would feel bad about myself. So you can
understand what this might look like. Some thoughts that might soothe these
fears would be, okay, I have an aunt that would let me move in with her. I
have a cousin that would be thrilled to move in with me somewhere together, and
plenty of people don't even have parents to move in with, and they have to find a
way to make it work and do. So, I don't actually have to move in with my
parents. That would be a choice. Another thought would be, I have friends who
don't care at all how much money I make or if I have a job at all. So,
technically, I shouldn't really be worried about being alone or feeling
alone if I lose my job. Uh, how about I don't want my self-esteem to write on
how my parents see me, which is obviously the case based off of my
answers to this exercise. I can see it still does. Nor do I want it to write on
whether I have a job or not. This has in fact motivated me to place my
self-esteem in different things that are on the way
to um feeling better about myself and that give me this sense of having a lot
more control. Maybe you would write down that sounds
empowering actually. Maybe the thought other people really don't care if I fail
or succeed because they're too overwhelmed trying to deal with their
own lives to spend time focusing on whether I'm failing or not. Um uh how
about this one? I feel bad about myself even with this job I have. So really if
I lose my job, there's not a whole lot that's going to be changing in that
department. And there are better ways to work on that than trying to prove my
worth through a stupid job. Another thought, I'm acting like the only job
that I could get is this one job. In fact, if I lost my job, I could get
another job. This world is very large and lots of people need my skill set.
And then the next thought, okay, I can see that my poor self-esteem, even in
this scarcity attitude I have towards it, not even crossing my mind that I
have enough value to be in demand by other companies, essentially points to
the same thing, which is poor self-esteem. Again, how about I have
enough money that I don't really need to be getting an income for like three
months, and that's enough time to find something new. How about I don't really
know if I'm getting fired. I am assuming this based off of rumors about layoffs
in the company. Oh, there it is again. I can see my poor self-esteem again in
this assumption. This really isn't that I'm unsafe. This is a self-esteem issue.
Okay, you get the point, right? That's the exercise. This exercise would
essentially continue until you feel significant relief regarding your sense
of safety. By the way, you can involve other people in this process if you'd
like to because some people can see outside the box when we can't. When we
experience chronic unsafety, our mind is usually doing the exact opposite of this
exercise. Our mind is automatically coming up with all of the thoughts and
all the proof that could possibly make us more scared and more convinced of our
own unsafety. With this exercise, we are consciously practicing doing the exact
opposite. Now, this is going to be hard at first because you are so so not used
to it. You've essentially developed this kind of neural rut towards doing the
exact opposite. And also um a lot of us may have a part that's convinced that
looking for proof that you are safe may just make you more unsafe as if it is
choosing denial and putting you at risk of being blindsided. But we're not doing
this exercise to turn a blind eye to dangers. In fact, this exercise helps
you to clearly identify them so you can clarify the situation and respond in
more conscious ways than you would if your danger centers were triggered into
this emergency mode. Four, create a list of things that help you specifically to
feel safe. Everyone's list is going to be different. After all, one person may
feel safe around a specific animal or in a specific environment, and another
person will feel unsafe around that animal or in that environment. One
person may have a negative association to something that another person finds
deeply soothing and has a positive association with. But just to give you
an example of this list, here is a list done by a friend of mine. First, we have
listening to 128 hertz, 528 herz, or 396 hertz music on YouTube. really good ones
to look up. Writing in my positive focus journal, listening to guided
meditations, watching cooking shows, swimming in a pool with goggles on.
Looking at my collection of feel-good images that I put together, listening to
my collection of feel-good sounds that I put together. Hiking to a lookout spot
with a big view. Taking a hot bath with Epsom salts and a bath bomb that is
either pink or purple. Walking on the beach and digging my feet into the sand.
Petting cats. Buying gifts for people and wrapping them up beautifully.
Watching Legally Blonde. The flavor of a quesadilla made with
mayonnaise, melted cheddar, and fresh tomato. And also mashed potatoes. Yes.
Going to my favorite tea shop for a sweet tea latte. The smell of lilac. The
smell of foam mattresses. My weighted blanket. Weddings.
Uh talking to one of my two best friends, Laya. Reading in hay bells.
Watching puppies or other cute animals on Instagram. Sticking my fingers in
uncooked rice, aquariums, grandfather clock noises, watching people be kind to
each other, making treasure hunts for children, popping tar bubbles and old
roads, Christmas and anything to do with Christmas,
walking in aspen forests and listening to Jim Gaffigan, my favorite comedian.
You get the idea. This list could be really long, like a lot longer than even
that one. Um, once you have created your list, get into the habit of going to
that list to pick out either one or a few things on that list to do. Five,
recognize the safety in the here and now by coming into the here and now. When we
feel unsafe, we are actually mentally in the past or the future. We're mentally
living in the negative experience of what did happen before or what could or
will happen later. Your mind does this so that you can try to resolve what
happened or pre-respond to what might happen because it thinks that by doing
so you can prevent it from actually happening or if it does happen it will
be less bad because you've anticipated it. Your mind is telling you that the
bad thing is happening now though. That's how your body's reacting. Right?
To counteract this getting into the practice of deliberately placing all of
your attention on where you are right here and now with all of your senses is
a really good idea. As you do this, you got to ask yourself, am I unsafe right
now? If your mind said yes, then you want to invite it to tell you why. It
will then give reasons like there's a war happening or I might die of sickness
or my job's unstable or the people I love might die or I'm in the middle of a
lawsuit or anything else. With each one of these worry items, you want to ask,
but what is happening right now? It can help to name what is happening. Again,
naming is such a powerful exercise if you're stuck in fear, right? What would
that look like is, okay, right now I'm sitting on a couch in a room. The couch
is bouncy. I can hear a road noise outside. The cat's in the corner asleep.
The sunshine is coming in the window. I smell the breakfast that I made still in
the air. There are white curtains. And keep doing this, noticing that your body
is now starting to calm down and register that you're actually safe right
here and now. For a person who feels chronic anxiety, which is about the
future, or who has experienced trauma, which is about the past, it's hard to
actually be in the present moment. It's like in a whole other dimension that you
don't really spend a lot of time in. So, you have to actually deliberately train
yourself into this practice, but it can do wonders, and I mean wonders, for your
nervous system. Six, create a collection of safety sounds, a collection of safety
images, and a collection of safety smells, and then use them as safety
triggers. It would shock you to know just how much influence sound has on
your feeling of safety. The sounds that cause one person to feel safe are going
to be different than another person. These could be anything. I mean,
literally anything from ocean sounds to bird sounds to city sounds to ASMR
sounds to like certain songs. Um, as a little tip here, by the way, human
beings are particularly affected by bird song. We have been programmed for
millions of years that when birds are chirping, we're not in danger because
guess what? They go silent when there's something bad going on like a predator
is near or a storm or other things like that. And it's particularly effective to
listen to the bird song from the place where your mother just dated you, the
place where you grew up, familiar places that you associate with positive
experiences, and do not forget this one, the lands of your ancestors. For
example, if I knew that my ancestors were from Dorset, England, I would find
bird song from Dorset, England. Seek out and create a collection of the sounds
that make you feel safe and then play them whenever you want to feel safer. Do
the same thing with safety images. These could be anything from images of people
that who you love to people who make you feel safer in the world to photos that
remind you of good memories to artistic photographs that cause you to feel safer
to images of cute animals to images of cartoons or comic book scenes to
newspaper cutouts to images of angels to quotes that cause you to feel safer to
places that make you feel safe to colors that make you feel safer or better etc.
Then you want to look through this collection of images when you want to
feel safer. Do the same thing with safety smells. Seek out and collect
smells that you know make you feel safe. These could be smells from your
childhood that evoke a sense of safety. Maybe specific candles, the smell of
your partner's clothes, the smell of a pet, specific incense, certain spices.
Maybe you want to bake cookies or bread specifically for that smell. Maybe you
want to do laundry specifically for the smell or go walking to the ocean
specifically for the smell of the ocean. As a special hint, these tools are
particularly effective when you do them all at the same time. Why go halfway
when you can go the full way, right? So look through your safety images at the
same time as you listen to your safety sounds, at the same time as you smell
one or more of your safety smells. What you are doing with this exercise is
creating safety triggers. This is the positive version of a traditional
trigger, which is negative. And let's be honest, you probably know how powerful
those are. These can be especially powerful, too. Seven, use two different
breathing pattern exercises. You can pick whichever feels best to you at a
given time. The first is the 4 68 breath. For this breathing pattern, you
breathe in for the count of 4 seconds. You hold your breath at the top of that
inhale for six seconds and then breathe out for the count of 8 seconds. And the
second breathing pattern is the box breath. For this breathing technique,
you're going to breathe in for the count of 4 seconds, hold at the top of that
inhale for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, and then hold again at the end
of the exhale for 4 seconds. With these breathing patterns, do them for whatever
duration feels comfortable and effective for you. Some people like three minutes,
some people like five minutes, some people like 10 to 15 minutes, and others
will use them for far longer. These breathing patterns are incredibly
effective for quickly decreasing stress levels and giving your mind something to
focus on instead of fixating on danger. And essentially, this promotes a sense
of physiological safety. You can think of them like builtin medicine for
feeling safe. Eight, create an internal safe space and
then go there when you need to feel safer. This is a safe place that you
have total control over and that you can mentally go to at any time. Many of us
have never, how do I say this, had the ability to create a safe space within
ourselves that has been an area of powerlessness in our life. So the
ability to actually create a safe place and utilize it is a very deeply healing
thing in and of itself. By creating the safe space in our mind, we are able to
bend the physical rules that govern and restrict our physical reality. For
example, let's say that a cut on our arm might usually take two weeks to heal in
this physical life, but in our safe space, we can put a special salve on it
and it will heal right before our eyes. This kind of thinking is actually a
critical ingredient when we are healing from states of powerlessness.
When you are creating this kind of a internal safe space, I want you to keep
in mind that this is going to be intentionally individual. Therefore,
there's no right or wrong way to create it. What I want you to do is to allow
your own mind to reveal to you what would feel best. Just think of a moment
or a place that gave you the feeling that was like that closest to safety in
life. So, this could look like anything, right? This could be a mossy forest. It
could be Santa's workshop in the North Pole. Maybe a coral reef. the inside of
a protective animal. Or let's say for me, I've got one that's pretty funky,
but it's my favorite. It's like the little bread cave that's inside those
bubbles on a pizza crust. Or it could be the billowing clouds, or your grandma's
house, or the inside of fairy houses, or a place from a comic book or video game,
or outer space, or a school, or the inside of a purple geode, or snowcovered
mountains. That's another one of mine. Or the inside of a snow globe. There is
literally no limit. Just try to identify a space that feels or sounds the safest
to you and imagine this place existing inside of you. When you want to feel
safer, go there, be in it, walk around it, lay in it, bathe in it, play with
it, and engage with the things in it. Each time you go there, you'll be adding
details. For example, say your safe space is on a beach. One day, you may go
there and realize that having beach beds with canopies would feel even safer, and
so you add them. The next you may decide that you want to have your pet dog and
you want to hold your pet dog on the beach. Now your dog lives there. Maybe
you'll have a unicorn that you want there. The next day you may decide that
adding a tunnel from this beach space to like an aspen forest where you can go
lay in the aspens feels even safer. I want you to know that if anything
unsafe appears in your safe space, this is not a terribly negative thing. What
it means is that your mind does not feel any control over being safe because
someone or something was against your safety before in your life at some
point. What is healing for you if this occurs is to become really creative and
troubleshoot the unsafety. For example, you can have protectors such as angels
or Vikings or superheroes or mythical animals come in and deal with the
unsafety. Or you can go look at whatever that unsafety is specifically and deal
with it directly. Or you can have it rain some substance that burns and
dissolves anything it touches that isn't supposed to be there. Or you can
demolish the entire old safe space and create a brand new one.
This place will feel more and more and more and more safe to you and more and
more and more and more real to you and therefore will become more effective as
time goes on and you make a habit of going there. Right? The point is to go
there like you would do a meditative visualization and really be in it with
all of your senses. Resourcing the effect that being there is having on the
way you feel and letting that that feeling of safety spread through your
entire body. Nine. Now we're going to go out on a limb. This limb is to root into
the deeper security of the formless self. There is absolutely nothing wrong
with setting up your life experience so that externally you have the experience
of security to the degree that it does not in and of itself diminish your
well-being or life experience and the degree that it is actually possible. It
is healthy to do so and more than that this is a part of personal expansion and
a big part of universal expansion is inherent in creating safety in this
physical dimension especially for each other. At the same time, there's a point
to which safety is not actually possible in the world of form because it is so
fluctuating and so temporary. Yet, the world of form is where most of us look
for solidness in order to guarantee our self safety. The world of form is
currently the leading edge of expansion. This means it is ever changing.
the structures that you depend on, the job, the laws, the people, the places,
the things in it, your relationships, your health, your life insurance, your
body, etc. They can always change. They are always changing and you cannot be
sure whether they will always be the same or that going forward they will be
there at all. This makes basing your safety entirely on their solidness, such
as them staying the same or always existing, a bit like building a sand
castle where the waves break. Accepting this, and I mean really accepting this,
will actually redirect you to anchor your sense of safety into something
deeper than the world of form. You will be consciously existing in two
dimensions, not losing awareness of nor the truth of one dimension as you focus
entirely into one or the other. That's in fact a main element by the way of the
mastery of a conscious life in a time space reality of contrast which means
that you will be experiencing both the wanted and the unwanted. You're going to
experience both wanted and unwanted things both danger and safety both
pleasure and pain. It is the challenge of unwanted things that brings about
your personal expansion and an increase in your consciousness. This temporal
world including the one life that you are living right now is playing out
within the context of this bigger picture of the evolution of
consciousness itself. What it is is the energetic essence
coming into the dimension of form. It is the timeless coming into the dimension
of time. It is the constant coming into the dimension of change. And this
dimension of existence, most especially this dimension of you, can offer real
security because in this you will anchor into what is timeless, what cannot be
damaged, and what is beyond death. Continuing to come back to an awareness
of that which is beyond this life, including that aspect of you that is
beyond this life, will put you in the bigger picture. And what this does is it
makes things that make you feel unsafe seem smaller and also temporary. So it's
kind of ironic because the very temporary nature of this life that
causes you to feel unsafe can potentially in this way also be the very
thing that makes you feel safer. Remember that while building safety for
yourself and others is perfectly fine. Ultimately being safe was not your
purpose for coming into this life if you didn't notice. If you obsess over trying
to make your life secure and safe, all that will happen with that obsession is
that you will arrive at death very safely.
Any practice that helps you to remember or become conscious of this formless
dimension of that which is beyond this temporary form that you are currently
experiencing the world of form through will help you to feel safer.
As an additional note to this list, I never want you to underestimate the
power of co-regulation when it comes to unsafety. You are a human being, right?
Humans are a socially dependent species. Humans need each other to be safe and to
feel safe. I know that they are also the ones creating the most amount of
unsafety for each other. However, we can't thrive without each other, right?
This means seek out people and be in connection. Let other people help you
out of whatever unsafety you are facing. The feeling of safety is a fundamental
need. It is a cornerstone of the quality of life that you are experiencing.
So, put some conscious energy into these practices and watch your quality of life
improve. Have a good week. [Music]