How To Feel Safer

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?" and/or, "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?" and/or, "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?" and/or, "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?" and/or, "What would that mean for me?" Your answer may be, "I would be rejected." Again, "Why would that be so bad?" and/or, "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 ride 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 ride 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 hertz, 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 bales. 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 on 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 4-6-8 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 built-in 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 an 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 snow-covered 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]