On Safety

Do you feel safe? Do you have a habit of assuming you are physically and/or emotionally safe in this world? As a trauma survivor and an autistic person, I never felt safe. Not as a child, and not in my life as an adult for several decades. This feeling of being in danger was so normalized in me, I didn’t even realize it was a thing. I chose to live in New York City in part because feeling unsafe and being hyper-vigilant seemed normal here.

Once I realized (in my 40s) that I didn’t feel safe, I started to wonder what safety might feel like. I started to wonder what life might be like. I started to imagine safety.

Safety can be super-triggering if you were ever lulled into a sense of safety with a perpetrator. Safety can be the last thing a survivor with PTSD wants to imagine. But I knew that my body (suffering with 4 autoimmune diseases at the time) wanted to heal. Feeling like a personal inflammation device ready to go off at any moment wasn’t helping my body at all.

I began to search for ways to create a lived sense of safety in my body. I tried yoga and meditation and self-defense (I highly recommend PrepareInc.com for amazing female-owned self-defense trainings in NYC and beyond.) But it wasn’t until I started doing somatic work that I was fully able to shift my habitual bracing and clenching to allow myself to begin to heal, and that meant allowing myself to feel safe.

We are bombarded with danger in the news every day. When we feel endangered, we become disregulated and often resort to coping mechanisms. We over-eat, or over-spend, we isolate or push ourselves into busy-ness. So I am very careful what news I let in. But this week, for me, the news could not be pushed away. I have added more meditation and more somatic work to my daily routine. More kindness, grace, and more sleep.

Do you start each day feeling safe, but as the day goes on, does your nervous system ramp up into a kind of clenching sense of danger? Are there physical parts of your body that habitually brace?

If so, you might want to begin to create a new habit of trying to establish a sense of safety within. Not only will this help you regulate your nervous system better from a place of calm aliveness, but it will send a message to your cells that they are safe. This is a subtle but effective way to regulate and inspire your system to create more healing, health and wholeness.

One way I do this is to re-orient myself toward safety. When I was always hyper-alert my body constantly used to track my environment looking for danger with my senses. Now I use my senses to deliberately look for safety. I let my body know that I’m safe by going through each of my senses, what I can see, hear, smell, taste and feel in order to be mindfully aware that I’m safe in this moment.

In other parts of the world, there is plenty of danger, and I’m not suggested you look for safety when you are actually in danger. But for me right now, and I hope for you, we are actually safe. The more I remind myself of this, the more I can breathe deeply, extend my out-breath (slows the heart rate to do this), and remind myself, I am safe. In this way, I can respond to the present moment, more regulated, able to engage.

I pray you too can create a new habit of enjoying a lived sense of safety in your body. One moment at a time.

New Somatic/Parts Work Brave Coaching Group forming soon! Let me know if you’re interested and good days/times!

From one of the Brave Space prompts this past week: Warm up with IMPOSSIBILITY - “Most of us live in a state of impossibility,” [Natalie] Diaz says. What do you think is impossible? LIST impossible things, as many as you can, including world events, climate events and personal impossibilities, dreams and deep desires, don't forget impossibilities for your characters... What longing feels impossible? Can you have a character tell another character about it, with some sort of attitude about it, like Sarah's dream of having a child in her 80s, and then came Isaac...

What would it mean to believe in an impossible thing? What kind of character harbors such a belief? Who, of your characters, is the least likely to be hiding an impossible dream? And what is just too hard to fathom and makes us turn away -- how do we behave when we are refusing to consider something we want to think is impossible?

Consider moments in history right before big impossible things happened. Who anticipates the impossible? Who refuses to believe in it? How does denial serve us? How does imagining the impossible help? Write for 5 minutes without stopping. 

BRAVE SPACE schedule for the next 2 weeks: Mondays at 12pm ET & Monday nights for All Humans at 615pm ET (see note, usually 7pm); Tuesday at 10am; Wednesday at 3pm; Thursdays & Fridays at 12pm. Let me know if you want a link!

UPDATE: Monday night 10/16 I was invited to read a poem on the Rattlecast at 8pm, so Brave Space will start at 615pm ET that evening and finish at 745pm ET. If you want to join the Rattlecast to hear the reading of mine and many other new poems by Maryann Corbett and others, LINK HERE

While I don’t typically list opportunities for writers, here’s one for newer (not necessarily younger) playwrights to check out from Playwrights Realm. LINK HERE

Onward with Creativity, and with prayers for peace,

Emma