“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” - Pema Chodron
When do you feel safe? Imagine a photograph of yourself from a time when you were completely at ease, feeling physically strong and steady, with a mind that was alert but soft, open to whatever happened next. This image can come from real memory or can be made-up. As you consider this photograph, describe what it feels like to be you when you feel safe, grounded, and at home in your body. Who are you when you release tension, drop your armor, and allow the earth to support you?
Safety is a multilayered experience. Feeling safe has wide reaching implications that influence almost all areas of our lives, both publicly and personally. Our institutions use different criteria to protect us from risk than we do in our daily lives. Whereas public safety is focused on reducing risk through environmental systems such as fences, locks, fire alarms, and surveillance, our personal sense of safety is more visceral, primarily a bodily reaction. Unlike our institutions, which depend on algorithms and analysis to evaluate risk, our individual cognitive evaluations related to our personal safety play a secondary role in our feelings of safety. Our most accurate assessments come from a neural process known as neuroception, in which our bodily responses, initiated in our nervous system outside of conscious awareness, send signals related to risk in the environment. In essence, safety is visceral, a felt experience initiated in the body, that may or may not coincide with what your head is telling you.
Neuroception is an automatic process that occurs in areas of the brain that detect and evaluate cues related to safety, danger, and threat. We can think of it as our body’s surveillance system that scans the environment for information related to our survival. Once the cues are detected, our physiological state will shift to optimize survival. Whereas we aren’t always aware of the cues, we typically can sense the shift in our body. We might feel this as tension in the shoulders, clenching the jaw, a shift in our breathing rate, or in our gut as a sense that something just doesn’t feel right. Just as it can ramp up our nervous system, neuroception also helps us relax when it recognizes cues for safety. By downshifting our nervous system, neuroception encourages physiological states that promote trust and helps build supportive relationships. This downshift also enhances the use of higher brain functions that promote creativity and encourage emotional regulation.
The process of neuroception plays an important role in our relationships as it enables us to evaluate the state and intention of another person. These cues are connected to a person’s tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, and posture. Since these cues are detected outside of conscious awareness, we may not always have the words to explain this information but tuning in to how they make us feel can guide our actions. More importantly, cues of safety and danger are personal. What is unsettling or uncomfortable for one person may be enjoyable to another. We need to respect our responses to the world in which we live, avoiding generalized definitions of what is safe so we learn to trust and embrace our own lived experiences.
We don’t always need to make sense of our gut reactions, but we do benefit by tuning in and listening. Bodily reactions don’t need to be rational in order to guide and inform us. Accepting and listening helps us to pause and create some space, which can then guide us to take action that will bring us back to a balanced state. Our nervous system can be like a petulant child, throwing itself into a temper tantrum when we ignore it. We get into trouble when we discount our deep, visceral feelings. Doing so only narrows our focus, shifting our attention to analysis and problem solving as we look for ways to dampen the sensations, to “fix” them or make them go away. Tara Brach, a Buddhist psychologist and meditation teacher, likens this to being in a motorboat, noisily zipping around in search of a safe place to drop the anchor. We zip back and forth searching for this place but, in doing so, we make more noise and turbulence. The harder we try to fix how we feel, the faster we zip back and forth, and the more disruption we create. All that zipping around blinds us to what we need: throttle back the motor, bring the boat to a stop, and wait for the water to become still.
Part of feeling safe is the sensation of being supported. It is a deep sensation of being held, either physically by the ground beneath us, or emotionally by our social circle, a trusted companion, or loved ones. This sensation is what is referred to in yoga as grounding, the ability to feel a connection with the ground beneath us, to notice how and where our body lands on the earth. Grounding is a prerequisite for feeling safe. The visceral sensation of being completely supported is a cue for our nervous system to downshift, which generates physiological changes that are associated with safety. The resulting calm allows the prefrontal cortex to expand our awareness and tap into higher cognitive functions. From this space we can tune in to our body’s wisdom and make choices that better serve us.
How skilled are you at allowing your body to land, to be supported by the earth beneath your feet? We’ll explore this tonight through a practice that features Earth Salutations, which focus on building strength and stability in the feet, legs, and hips. Poses in Earth Salutations tend to be held a bit longer and are generally more muscular, helping us explore the paradox of pressing into the earth to lengthen the spine. This is referred to as “rooting down to rise up”, an action which, with practice, opens us to experiencing stability and safety on a much deeper level.
Many of us approach balancing poses with a sense of dread. Our discomfort can be fueled by self-imposed story lines related to—either rationally or irrationally—fitness level, health, aging, fall risk, etc. We tend to create elaborate narratives around balancing poses. We use these stories as a way to explain our unease, but they only serve to increase tension, making balance even more elusive. When approached with open-minded awareness and curiosity, we can tune in and listen, which typically changes our experience of the pose.
Before you start your practice, I invite you to consider this question : When do you feel safe? What do you feel when your body lands on the ground, completely, with steadiness and ease? Who are you when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do? What does it feel like to be you, at home, safely resting in your body?
Comments