What is Safety & how does it change how we feel?
How are you today?
I talk about safety all of the time.
How we need an internal foundation of safety in order to function well in the world.
How we need it to feel safe to thrive.
To feel at ease in ourselves.
To feel our array of emotions – and not feel flooded or derailed by them.
So what is safety? And how do we get it?
Imagine this:
In a nature documentary, you’ve probably witnessed an antelope calmly eating grass when it hears something. It becomes suddenly alert, its head jolts up and it listens.
Is there danger around? Is there a predator creeping through the grass?
No more sounds? It carries on calmly eating.
It hears a threatening sound? In a nanosecond it’s survival response kicks into gear and it starts running.
The survival toolkit is released and the antelope gets a ton of cortisol (the high energy/action hormone) and adrenaline pumped into its body – helping it run like the wind and be ultra responsive.
It disconnects from its body so that if it gets hurt whilst running it won’t feel it – survival being more important than getting cuts and grazes, right?
It develops tunnel vision on the task at hand – no distraction helps it focus on trying to escape the predator and survive.
The survival system is so clever, giving it all the resources it needs to try to escape the lion.
Now, if it’s lucky enough to escape the lion guess what it does then?
Well, it’s got a bunch of high energy hormones in its system – can you remember in your own life the aftermath of a high stress situation when it’s over? Often we feel frazzled, edgy, exhausted, worn out.
The antelope’s nervous system has another tool for that – it goes into a natural reflective shaking response. It ‘shakes off the stress’ and within moments it’ll be calmly eating grass again like nothing happened.
So its survival system is always scanning for danger, it’s always alert – but that doesn’t stop it from calmly eating grass.
It has an alert system: strange sound? Let’s respond immediately and investigate further.
It has a survival response: escape, as your life depends on it.
And all of those hormones in its body that are no longer required? Let’s shake them out.
We humans have the same basic survival response system.
We detect unsafety / threat / danger and so our survival response system mobilises to escape the unsafety. And then we are wired to come out of that response (we also have a natural reflexive shaking mechanism, but we’ve lost connection to it.)
I was thinking of this when I was reading an article in the New Scientist where two zoologists (Chris Barnard and Jane Hurst) discussed how a prey being chased by a predator isn’t necessarily suffering because “nature has ‘designed’ them to function in that particular situation.”
So because prey are wired for escaping predators, this is not a traumatising experience. There will be fear in the moment, but the fear doesn’t linger afterwards – and in fact helps to alert the animal to danger.
To me, what the actions of the antelope display is a perfectly functioning survival system.
And as I mentioned we have the same response system. Except that most of ours aren’t working as perfectly – they are malfunctioning.
Why?
Because of how societies have developed, many of us get stuck in our survival response. And we stay there for days, months or even years at a time.
We are stuck in repeated cycles of stress – having cortisol and adrenaline pumped into us daily.
We don’t know how to ‘shake off the stress’ response hormones after a survival activation.
And it’s no longer lions, tigers and bears that are creating the occasional threat in our environment.
But the continuous and insidious activations that come from an array of places in our modern world.
A culture that encourages us to suppress our natural emotions, anger, grief, fears – so that our emotions end up feeling like a danger or threat to our nervous system.
Being trained by our parents & families that our own emotional needs aren’t important – so we lose touch with how to take care of ourselves and our needs.
Having experiences that were too much for too long, and leaving painful imprints of trauma – that create intense sensations of unsafety around similar experiences (or all experiences.)
And so it’s like we are stuck in a state where we are always listening, hyper-alert, hyper-vigilant to things going wrong / danger (like the antelope when it’s alert and listening).
And this is a low level continuous stress/survival state.
Deeply unpleasant to live in.
Where we aren’t expecting good things to happen, we aren’t present but always mildly rushing / pushing / disconnected / numb / not listening but driving through our tasks.
We might feel very pacey, like we just need to get through the day and land on the dry land of the weekend.
Or we are in full on escape-the-predator mode – where we are in high level panic / rage / overwhelm / escape or shutdown. Depending on how our survival system has been trained to cope with stressors.
Where everything feels way too much.
Our lives feel doomed.
We feel bleak/ trapped.
Things/other people feel terrible.
So what is the way out of being stuck between these two states?
How can we get to that other place – the calm-eating-of-the-grass state?
Safety.
An internal knowledge and regular experience of safety means that we can do two things:
We feel safe enough to ‘calm down’ and we feel safe to mobilise when there are stressors or threats.
“The job of the autonomic nervous system is to ensure we survive in moments of danger and thrive in times of safety. Survival requires threat detection and the activation of a survival response. Thriving demands the opposite—the inhibition of a survival response so that social engagement can happen. Without the capacity for activation, inhibition, and flexibility of response, we suffer.” Deb Dana
When we are living too much in that survival activation – we lose out on so much of our lives. The possibilities of deep rest, of fun & joy, of deep connection with people we enjoy.
When we can learn how to feel safe, our whole sense of our lives changes.
Actively seeking, finding and being held in safety brings about a deep, automatic transformation.
It means we can start to “reorient to a new, less threatening world.” (Peter Levine)
Where we get to become “more fluid, resilient” and to be able to “fiercely defend” ourselves “when necessary, and to surrender in quiet ecstasy” when there is no threat. (Peter Levine)
So it’s this ability to be able to move between states.
To be fluid.
To feel calm, relaxed, joyful, excited, at ease – when there are no stressors present.
And to be able to mobilise our stress/threat response system when there are issues that need to be dealt with.
And not get stuck in them.
So it’s not about always feeling calm and regulated.
It’s building a robust and responsive nervous system that can deal with moments of danger or stress. And then when that is over, it can return us to the chilled out antelope eating in the sun with a steady heart rate and calm body.
Creating an internal foundation of safety is what I think of as coming home to ourselves. Because we are all wired to have this responsive system.
We are all wired to respond like the antelope 🙂
We simply need to find our way home – to our birthright. A body, a home, that feels safe to inhabit.
That feels like our oldest, most trustworthy friend.
Where we can reconnect to our strength, our resilience, our grounded safety.
We all have this ability. And it starts with a gentle journey towards awakening safety within.
We do this by going directly to our nervous system and ‘signalling safety.’
This happens by doing things that show the nervous system we are safe. That it’s safe to turn off ‘survival mode.’
And these are simple things like – reconnecting to our body, deepening and slowing our breath, moving out of tunnel vision.
It’s also being in environments where our nervous system feels safe, and understands intuitively that it’s safe to relax.
It’s then noticing our personal patterns of going into survival – around which subjects / people / experiences that activate the stress response – and learning how to meet those responses with safety.
It’s a journey we take of personal discovery. Where we learn how to be curious about our experiences and responses – and meet them with support, safety & compassion.
If you would love to focus on creating this safe place to live, to return home to yourself, I have a few things to support you this month. At different gradients of commitment.
The first is something free: I have included some effective techniques, that when you do them regularly, start to create this internal sensation of safety, in this recent free class I offered.
The second is a live & recorded experience that guides you into creating internal safety – and that’s my 10 day Online Retreat starting tomorrow – ‘Building Healing Habits’.
If you want to know what it feels like to have safety within, this is an incredible experience. We will be doing 10 days of powerful somatic exercises that will go directly to the places you are holding emotional tension & stress, and teach your nervous system how to release it. How to awaken safety and show your nervous system what safety feels like.
Creating Healing Habits – 10 Day online Retreat
And my third is my signature program Mid-Life Unbound that takes you deeper into this work so that you can learn why you feel how you do, what you personally need to do to move out of your personal patterns of survival mode.
Mid-Life Unbound is a small group, a highly personalised program where I will be guiding and supporting you every step of the way – and it’s the only program where I do personal and small group support.
Doors open for Mid-Life Unbound again on Jan 26th. Email me for more details – diana@diana-bird.com.
This is for you if you are more than ready for this year to be when you finally break out of cycles of overwhelm, panic and dread. To get a fuller, and deeper understanding of what you are carrying – and most importantly what personal steps you need to take to start to move from just about surviving, and to start thriving.
By gently learning how to take tiny steps towards what our hearts & bodies most yearn for – a foundation of safety.
And when we feel safe we can more easily learn how to:
Break out of decades of overwhelm, panic, dread
Release that automatic response of exploding or running away from emotions
Stop shouting at your kids or struggling with their emotions
Handle conflict so we can have deep, honest and strong relationships
What kind of a life is your heart yearning for this year?
For me it’s to carry on down this path I set myself 6 years ago to continue to deepen my sense of internal safety, inner strength and feeling completely at home in myself.
How would coming home to yourself feel for you?
With love,
Diana
💗
