Safety 3rd

feeling safe as a cosmic sword in a time of great uncertainty

Dedicated to my daughter Persephone, who, with quivering lower lip, shared that all she wants is to feel safe. May this be a bit of manna for that journey, my great love.

Note:

I’m publishing this while we are on red alert for wild fires in WNC, with go bags packed and the town next to us is currently evacuating. I offer this bit of context because this post is a deep AF conversation about safety.

Note 2:

I’m changing. Again! Adapting. After taking in substack … and, taking it in and taking it in and in and IN, I discovered in myself a very familiar uncomfortable fullness. A sitting too long and too fatly at a feast until my innate accordion urge calls me away, in and out, in and out. If we are in proper form, receiving a call to action (in) will result in some sort of outer response (out) and the dance stays in rhythm. If we have forgotten how to dance, we become No-face.

No-Face (顔無し, Kaonashi, lit. "Faceless") is a character in Spirited Away. He is shown to be capable of reacting to emotions and ingesting other individuals in order to gain their personality and physical traits.

To this end, some of my posts will have an offline, digest it, play with it, breathe it in, fuck it up, glue it new chew it true kind of format. This is one of them! I no longer want to contribute to knowledging (learning from the outside). What most of us need is body and soul integration. Wisdom arises from within and that’s where this Substack is heading via evocative stories and spicy little soul acupuncture play posts.

I’m going to sandwich these contemplations with two stories where I accessed safety in a startling way.

Bread #1

When I was 16 I was attacked by a bear while doing my first solo backpacking trip. No phones. It was dusk and I’d set up a tent and was eating lots of greasy delicious food when I saw a shadow the size of a small car come towards me. I backed into the tent as I saw a giant paw rake the tent side open. I frantically unzipped the other side and raced into the now dark woods. My feet eventually found a trail that I followed to a hiker’s tiny toilet hut. I curled up around the shitter and tried to sleep. At dawn I made my way back to find everything shredded.

Later, curled over my own despair on a curb outside a cheapo kind of store a man appeared out of the woods (for the record, I don’t believe he actually existed on this plane). He had a long silver braid and old timey clothes. He walked with a walking stick that felt more like a companion than object. He asked why I was crying and my mouth remembered how to work as I gasped out the whole sordid tale. He waited patiently as I sobbed the especially hard parts. When I was all done I looked up expectantly, and couldn’t have been more surprised if he had turned into a spaceship. He was doubled over laughing. I waited.

He was shaking as if a great comedian had just dropped the boom. I waited some more. Eventually he looked up, wiped his eyes, and gave me a wink. Casually, he threw a package of spearmint green floss onto my backpack with all the pockets hanging off, torn wide open and said over his shoulder, “you’re not the kind of girl to let a little ol’ bear attack stop you, are you?”

I believe that my relationship to safety was forged in the fires of me going back into those fucking woods.

I spent my last tiny amount of dollars to get what junk food I could afford, sewed my pack back up and did the three day hike, alone. I’ve never been scared of the woods or bears since. I think if I’d run from that and let it set the tone of my sense of safety I would have lived a very very small life. Not to get too heavy with the metaphors, but what if the challenges are here to launch-bless our biggest truest selves into existence?

Here’s the printable link to do this a (different kind of) fun way. Absorb it, be whimsical, be embodied. Get scissors, slow down, glue macaroni to things. Be the thing you glue the macaroni to. If you can’t get it printed, send me a message with your address and I’m happy to mail you it. We long to be deliciously engaged by life, and so, we have to start engaging ourselves this way (yo, take the time to print!!) Else, here’s the read!

There’s a joke in our tribe’s world that’s not really a joke

and it goes something like, safety third, or, often, safety 29, as a response to the “safety first” notion. I’ve always felt that considering safety first often put me in the wrong mindset, a fearful, cautious, slightly suspicious cast to my gaze, like a bitter policeman who’s been on the force too long, forced to always look for what’s wrong in life until his heart breaks. I didn’t want to bring that bitter cop energy to my own life, so, as a mom, I just bumped it down the list, with other things vying for first and second positions, fun or authenticity, or a deeply held knowingness that this choice was correct at some profound level even if it results in some kind of challenge or drama. Maybe one and two have always been something like “on path ness” like, this is right for me to engage. Connected to this choice was an innate idea that when I engaged in experience with life from feeling really called to do it and be in it, that my manner and fullness of participation with the moment would allow me to meet the challenges at the highest level. In this musing, I realized that half hearted and fearful participation leads to situations that feel out of control or scary to me. Having not really chosen a thing, I’m baffled about. This feels unsafe.

Contemplation

what’s in your number one and two spot? What are you doing in your life that feels half-hearted? How safe do you feel in those places?

I used to work with people who were in emergency situations

and I’d often find that doing this one Great Trick almost always allowed the person to calm down, let the challenge to turn over into something they are aware of, and to shift into an open, soft, receiving gear. I’d help them develop a bare bones strategy for what they could do now, given their current run, to allow the most basic essence of what they were wanting change on. This forced them to get out of learned helplessness, out of the avoidant, distracted paralysis so many of us live our modern lives in a state of. In the shift, the person envisions themselves crawling out of their berth they’ve been hiding in, and finding the bravery to walk back up onto the deck and put their hands on the steering wheel of the great ship of their life they are sailing on. In that position, in that willingness to develop a strategy they bring back their sovereignty and sense of empowered presence. In the doing of this they will surely have to notice and accept all the places where they’ve become a victim of their own thinking, their own unfelt emotions, their own avoidant patterns. The strategy always included an inner layer and an outer layer.

Most people don’t have a current or adequate strategy to feel sovereign and safe in this time of great change, increasing uncertainty as our civilization collapses. How nerve SHATTERING is that? (From a person who spent the day spraying down her house with a hose? And moving gas cans, to um, that tree over there so they explode, um, differently?).

Contemplation

do you have a strategy for staying in the center of the storm during this time of extreme change? Does it have an inner and outer component? Do you have a support crew who share your strategy? Have you ever had a time when you felt really lined up with yourself and your way of being? How did that feel? How did things go for you?

Someone once told me the story of the Chinese farmer

who gets a horse, which soon runs away. A neighbor says, "That's bad news." The farmer replies, "Good news, bad news, who can say?" The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. “So sorry for your bad news," says the concerned neighbor. "Good news, bad news, who can say?" the farmer replies. In a week or so, the emperor's men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer's son is spared.

I like to hold this story as a way of reestablishing some ground in my heart/body when I’m feeling scared, hyper-focused on something yucky and the mind is spinning out that For Sure things are The Worse and Will Be Forever The Worst. My mind doesn’t know how life really works. I have a deep sense that our outer reality is in response to the inner one. And there are a thousands of oceans of mystery around all that. So I work to feel for a sense of Big Perspective cosmic safety, the safety of being held in the Mystery, of being on a larger soul journey that our minds will never understand.

Contemplation

What’s your current relationship to challenge? When things go wrong what does your mind do? Next time a challenge comes, pause and watch what your mind does. Does it catastrophize? Avoid? Blame? Complain and set fires of drama? Have you ever had a time when you responded “in gear” to a challenge and it felt graceful and didn’t unseat your sense of safety?

A lack of gratitude

is like a garden with no compost or adequate sun. Gratitude accuratizes and restores balance. I literally could not list the number of times that I have felt eerily thin, achingly alone, freaked out and somehow cosmically Impossible and then I do a small list on things that are going well or okay, and suddenly my Life Force returns and I feel possible again. I have fuel for the dance. Deliberate gladness is a self renewing fuel resource. Especially when shit is hard and nuts. Then it is a revolutionary act of bringing resources into the collective Field.

Contemplation

A lot of folks connect deliberate gratitude with spiritual bypass or toxic positivity. What’s your current relationship with gratitude? Do you have any wounds around feeling empowered to focus on the good as a radical act of self care? How do gratitude and a sense of abiding safety connect with each other?

I recently had a revelation

about my emotional life. Having any revelation that recognizes and values my emotional life is, in and of itself, a revelation. It came via my work with the gene keys where I realized how I often think my emotions instead of really actually feeling them. I think them so I can protect myself from the pain, vulnerability and inevitable change that comes when I do actually feel them. I saw my mind like a bug zapper just zinging these unfelt emotions away from me and none of the raw energy of the emotions was going into the cauldron of my body and my life, to be burned up in the alchemy that happens when we fully feel our stuff. It’s a kind of mindless, miraculous magic. It’s like Fantasia with magical creatures and brooms flying around to a symphony of harmony when we let our emotions move and groove and breathe and be. Also! When I feel something, FULLY feel it and let it just be what it is, not only does the emotion move, and become a different state but I move too. Feeling my shit puts me on the boat of my true life. I see a lot of people walking around thinking their feels, and the innate anxiety creates a kind of hiss in their daily life. Also, the feeling of not being on the Right Beautiful Green Boat. A constant yearning to move with the groove.

Contemplation

if you truly feel an emotion, it moves and you with it. If you’ve been angry for 2 years, you are thinking your emotions, not feeling them. How do you feel? What space do you have to feel your stuff? Is it okay to feel your feels? What comes up when you think about feeling more and thinking less?

Feeling your stuff implies

one, you know HOW to feel your things, safely, honestly, effectively, and two you have the space, time and resources to do so. Raw life needs emulsification, digestion, integration. Our emotional cauldron is where a lot of that happens. You kind of have to be in your own lane to know your emotions and tend them. A lot of us are out of our lanes, via various addictions that float us over so we don’t have to engage or grow or hurt well. We keep our loops full with constant media consumption, or worrying so there’s not an ounce of space for divine insight to burble up into. A lot of us hang out in what I call non-Listening states. These insights are here to inform us about many things, including how to stay safe. We are animals, we know how to go to ground when a storm is coming. When we give our attention to so many random things we scatter that animal clear knowingness until it’s so diffuse we get frightened without it. The challenges of our life get a tiny bit of our attention or none at all and so they build as festering pressures, instead of being the joyful launch pads they are designed to be.

Contemplation

ever being in a clear listening state? How did it feel? Did you feel safe? Did that feeling of safety teach you anything about innate safety? What’s the quality of your listening now? What’s your relationship with spaciousness and open loops?

Another fun angle on safety is lying.

Trying to be what you ain’t. No one is more nervous or unseated than a con running a con, hyper vigilant that someone is going to cotton on to their real game. Only, most of us aren’t doing this masked, inauthentic thing in a fun heisty way, we have just gotten very far from our essential expression, have mostly forgotten it exists and is worth heading towards and even if we remembered we have no real idea how to make that journey. I have found that using some wisdom framework to kind of echo-locate my way out of conditioned, false self and back into the green green glowing joy of my essential self helps with a very difficult emergence. I use gene keys (here’s a free mini course to begin) or human design, but even not choosing those, it’s been helpful to understand that most scary people are not being who they really are. Their conditioned patterns are running the show and their cosmic humanity is under siege of those patterns. The safest and most beautiful people I know are the ones who have deeply met and accepted themselves and their shadow patterns. For a long time I was trying to be something I’m not and I hurt people, lied, manipulated and caused harm. The gene keys was a way to run all those crazy patterns thru many filters until they became essential.

Contemplation

do you feel like yourself? When do you most feel like your true self? What parts of your life are still in shadow? What parts of those around you are true, or in shadow? What kind of journey do your shadow bits want from you? How might you make a little more room to give a more generous and friendly attention to those parts?

The poet Mary Oliver famously asked:

“What is it you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?” And I think that when we get buried under mountains of unprocessed trauma, emotions we don’t really feel safe enough to feel, and the paralysis that is an appropriate response to Rome burning down around our ears, we lose track of the raw imperative inside her question - there is something precious about this flame that demands us participating with our hearts healed and honest and in the game of life. Your child self remembers your wildness, how you come alive when you’re alone in a forest for a few moments and that part of you comes online again, that wild and precious steward of life, fierce, warrior song maven, proud to be in this life, on mission, and ready to show up. There are so many pieces of this game of life that we miss when we never feel safe. Safety is kind of like building a mandala out of deeply contemplated colors. Something to with acceptance of the wild west time of life we are in, and even to remember that you deliberately came here for this ride.

Contemplation

Beyond all the fear you’re a big wave rider! Something to do with how former traumas keep us from experiencing now and just keep us repeating the harm pattern which is so frightening to be inside of. Something to do with acknowledging the dance between the inner and outer realities. Something to do with owning your essential nature and gently releasing the false patterns. Something about tuning into the cosmic gps that’s blipping deep inside of you and daring to listen to what you hear. Let these knowings swirl inside of you. Write to me to share what turns up for you!

Time for the bread

Here’s the last story that gave me an important molecule as I built my mandala of safety.

When my daughter had her first child, she did a home birth and the labor when long. Three days in with a pile of midwives, all of powerfully underslept and disheartened by the fact that her labor had stopped progressing I fell asleep on the bathroom floor (weird thread in this post) and dreamt quickly and intensely. The room I was in was filling with blood and my daughter was drowning in it. I woke with a start and told my daughter we needed to go to the hospital.

Here’s the safety part: in a moment of temporary relaxation my inner cosmic gps could talk to me. There was a very strong mental allegiance to holding course with the home birth plan, but my inner fire was lit by this clarity and I fought with my animal body. I had heard “go to ground” and I raged until we were in a car with a very passionate driver who got pulled over (nearest hospital was over an hour away) but the cop heard my daughter screaming and told us to go as fast as we possibly could and gave us an escort thru four counties.

When we arrived, she was rushed into a room, examined and an emergency c- section was immediately set in motion because the cord was infected and both she and the child were in serious danger. In the operating room I swayed on my feet as they pulled Monte out, and put him in my arms. I was mad with a kind of insane gratitude, that I fucking listened, that something deep in me spoke and I listened.

Now, look around you, notice the world, notice the patterns. Who is listening deeply and well? Who is acting lovingly from essence? Not many?

Let it start with you.

You honor me and others by taking a moment to share you thots, insights and breakthroughs. Thanks for journeying, dear pilgrim.