Inviting the Body to Feel Safe

Emotions are felt in the body, they come up and ignite a remembered response, familiar and practiced throughout our life. Although the triggers can be many, coming from tangible conscious information or beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they set off what seems like a cascade of sensation, emotions, beliefs that loop and reinforce messages of unsafety and disempowerement.

So much has been said about the body's response to stress, of the role of the limbic brain in creating the survival based alarms, and in the way it organizes the nervous system towards the relentless focus on what could go wrong. Without this survival mechanism our ancestors wouldn't have survived, we would not have survived. This incredibly helpful structure, and all the others whose main purpose is to help us stay alive, has evolved with us in some ways, but fundamentally it still functions at the same way it did thousands of years ago. It's symbiotic connection to our body has also functioned undisturbed for millenia.

The importance of responding to our cues of danger, internal or external, should never be undervalued. It is thank to these patterns that we learned to stay frozen, or flee from a dangerous scene, or fight if needed or fawn and align with our potential aggressor in order to be spared in some way. Clever mechanisms born out of previous prototypes throughout our species evolution.

The thing is though, that our limbic brain's read on risks we may face, creates deep engrained patterns through repetition in hopes of keeping us alive. Neural pathways governing information, choices, options, motive, intention and action are deeply set by these older survival and fear based organisms and systems. Our younger frontal cortex brain is no match for the parts of us that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Our emotions, our body's response and self beliefs are deeply shaped by these pathways and the code that drives them. The body not only keeps the score of what's happened to us, it also takes more time to understand and reset towards safety. The body is dense, patterns that have been successful in keeping us safe, despite their limiting strategies (avoidance, freezing, overthinking, overdoing, etc), will hold these patterns in place for years to come, survival is the goal, the guide in all things.

Can patterns that are evolutionarily successful and reinforced through our own lineage and experience be changed in our lifetime? I believe that they can, but it requires effort, intention, action and repetition, lots and lots of repetition. Think of it, not only did we inherit the structural architecture for caution and fear, we also inherited the particular ways in which this was important for our ancestors and our family. The important ways to sense, understand, to react, to feel and believe, these have been passed down to keep us safe. The body inherited these patterns, that our muscles, our fascia express, through tension, through avoidance, through pain, set in a way to carry out the codes of safety. Clever, clever mechanisms.

So how do i invite my body to safety, how do i create the interest and curiosity to shift the inherent and stubborn patterns of reactivity, numbness or avoidance? There are countless of ways to do this, in fact, i would say that most activities we engage in on a daily basis can be utilized towards this purpose, but it intention, purpose and awareness would have to be the format they are engaged with .

Therapeutic modalities designed to help us retrain and rewire our fear based responses are many; EMDR, IFS, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Dance and Movement Therapy, Family Constellation, Hakomi therapy, Guided Imagery, Clinical Hypnosis, Mindfulness techniques, Plant Medicine (Psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca, Ketamine therapy among others), Meditation practices, Yoga, Five Rhythm Dance, etc. All of these can be successful in creating more feelings of safety if facilitated in a trauma informed, compassionate and skillful manner. In addition to these practices Nature and our ability to mindfully engage with nature can increase shifting from fear to safety.

Here's a very simple practice to engage your body into safety and to compassionately move out of a fear response. The next time you begin to notice your body reacting to an external or internal cue of danger, unsafety, rejection, abandonment and all the other ways in which we have associated being at risk, notice the sensations that surface. Bring your attention to the way in which your body is holding this experience, what are the sensations, where in my body. I invite you to notice, try not to push it away, or bring it in closer, just notice it, let it rise and fall, like a wave, notice it.

Notice any emotion that comes up, any belief about yourself (they'll probably be negative) and again just observe, don't judge, don't make it bigger, don't make it smaller, watch it rise and fall, like a wave. As you engage in this practice (it takes practice, again and again), look for a tiny little speck in you that feels safe, grounded, steady, It could be as small as a grain of sand, just notice that and let your attention keep coming back to this little speck of safety in you. Imagine it expanding, growing in waves through your body, coming into contact with the part that are tense, scared, slowly, gently, inviting sweetly.

Go back to the parts that are scared and imagine inviting them to come closer to the growing expanding safety in your body, the space that your intention has created. Keep doing this again and again, keep growing and expanding this experience of safety, keep inviting the fearful parts in, slowly, gently, sweetly. Practice again and again, inviting, gently offering the fear to notice and connect with the safety in you. Keep at it, be gentle, be slow in inviting your body to safety.