Feeling Safe In the Body

I was lamenting to a friend about my lack of results after consciously choosing to step away from my professional career into my own healing business. I have put in countless hours and so much effort, and I was disappointed with the lack of tangible results. She asked me what I had learned from this period of time where I was not ‘working’, and I immediately remembered my journey started and ends with me. I had chosen to take time off work to heal my nervous system. I had come off a streak of working overtime and committing to fixing other people’s problems.

For the first time in my life, it was apparent that I could not hold the feeling of safety in my body - for even a minute it felt impossible. I knew this was not normal. In meditation, I couldn't stop my mind from going to dark places within a minute of me consciously choosing to feel safe. I couldn’t fix this within myself easily. This required internal work, which I started to do but I knew that this practice would have to evolve in order for me to stay in the vibration of safety. 

My practice of finding safety in the body grew from just stating daily affirmations to sitting with the energy of the words I was saying and identifying the resistance within myself. Listening to the resistance and allowing the resistance to sit in my conscious self. For example, this would look like me getting into a settled place for meditation. Once I could settle the ego and the running mind, which typically takes a few minutes. I would then proceed to state my daily affirmation/mantra, ‘I am safe’. I would then sit in that feeling and notice sensations within my body. In the beginning, there was resistance in my heart and in my body. To keep myself from logically running away from my feelings, I would start counting down from 90 to zero. This was primarily to keep the cognitive mind busy while I allowed the feelings and the tension and the resistance to settle into my body. Letting it just be, letting the heaviness in my chest, the tight ball in my stomach, and the lump in my throat to wash over me like a wave of emotions and sensations. But as every wave does, it recedes. And once it receded, I could feel the feeling of safety in my body and it felt light and free. I would continue to sit in this meditation for as long as I could, 30 min to 2 hours. Sitting in the simple feeling of safety. There were times where I would fall asleep in meditation after feeling so safe. I would wake up with this incredible feeling of safety, and it was extremely uncomfortable to me. It was a new sensation, and because it was new, it was weird. Those moments were hard to experience, and I found myself using substances or destructive actions to take me back to the comfortable place of not feeling safe in my body. 

In the first few weeks, I saw little improvement in my mental game of repetitive and destructive thoughts whenever I would allow myself to settle into meditation. I continued to unlock other feelings and emotions that needed to surface to show me why I couldn’t hold safety in the body. This practice of feeling safe in the body took me up and down my chakras and physical body to show me where I was not allowing the ‘negative’ emotions to come up to the surface. 

This process is what made me want to teach others to meditate to also experience the same empowering feeling of safety, no matter what is happening around you.