Safety

I believe more and more in the concept of just slowly chipping away at things through focused attention. I believe if you surround yourself with the right people and the right practices, the right emotions bubble up and the right events take place in service of our healing and our purpose. My purpose is to be in service of love.

My journey arguably began when I found John Wineland’s work and I began to use his online course to stop the bleeding from my wife leaving me. My 2nd step with John was to pay for his Path of the Embodied Explorer program. It felt very powerful and was deeply in service of my healing. Today I took a look at my notes and low and behold on the first video he spoke of moving from a place of I am unsafe, to a place of I am safe, to a place of I am love. At the time, that passage was good enough for me to note it but I don’t think I fully understood its implications.

A year later in an exercise at an intensive, we were asked to discern what our biggest wound was from childhood. Mine seemed obvious and related to being loved unconditionally. I didn’t feel very loved as a child, or an adult, and thought I needed to do exceptional things to get even a little attention, much less adoration. So I continued to work though this wound right up through the final practice where my reality was literally ripped apart and it became all too clear to me that safety was my truest deep cut. In short order it became clear to me just how unsafe I actually felt all the time. I worried a lot…about my future, about my health, about the heat, about the cold, you name it. Rarely was it unpalatable but it was certainly always operating in the background. So to finally have this awareness surface it has been quite a thrill.

I have a lot of ways to work on safety but lately I have found just how much safer I actually feel. I can recall running outside at my beach house and feeling deeply unsettled about what was beyond the light. Recently, on a similar run I could sense no real fear in a night run. I am indeed learning to feel safe. So to now see that safety leads to love is quite a powerful realization. Of course you can’t love others when you don’t feel safe. It seems obvious now, but I really didn’t have a solid grasp on this before. I had no idea how unsafe I felt myself, much less how much more unsafe others felt.

Consequently, I have begun to try to cultivate a sense of safety for others in everything I do and again the results have been surprising to me.