011- First Doorway: Safety is the Medicine

THE SAFETY OF WHICH I AM SPEAKING

The safety I am describing, even the most blessed among you can barely fathom.

You know it not.

It begins in the center of your heart

A place you have not touched

You will have to dig down deeper than you know to get there

clear away what has overgrown the ground

to this place in silent center

this Original flame 

untroubled by any breeze

any hint of danger

with no flicker

/

to get there you will have to find your way home,

through millenia of hurt

everything that has been done to your ancestors

to your Sacred body 

every blessed damn time you have been here wearing a skin.

And even that is only the beginning,

for once you have found this place in yourself

once you have located this unperturbed flame

you will have to fan her

coax her out upon the lacelines of the nerves

until she spreads and consumes your body entire.

Only then will you know,

in your body, the safety of which I am speaking.

***

It is hard to be you

in ways you barely understand

so much has been thieved from you

you are the victim of human sacrifice

over and over and over again

sacrifice upon the mountain, the steps of the altar

your body strapped down and your chest opened by knives

and you don't remember this

because you can't.

your depression, your contraction is the veil,

the sheet wrapped around what has happened to you

what the body knows that you cannot know

/

we are the grandchildren of the humans sacrificed

on the altar

of the empire of domination.

Our bodies have been broken into

our heads separated from us

we have been hung

broken

quartered in four

ritually

the violence enacted upon our sovereign bodies is

unthinkable.

We know this

in the bodies we are wearing

and yet

we know it not

/

You will have to let all of this go

and yet

only by feeling it can you do so.

/

And how will you have the courage

to feel this

when your heart today is wracked 

by all the pain it bears

just trying to make it through

the battle

of the aggressions in the unkind

world we find ourselves in?

***

The kind of safety I am speaking of

it comes from the center of you

the silence beneath the voice

you know as your truest self

the you beneath the verb of you

the ground out of which

that figure-in-motion emerges.

From safety like

that a new world

is born.

I am going to walk you home through five doorways, and safety is the first doorway. Let us start with the recognition that safety, a moment-to-moment felt embodied sense of safety, is one of the deepest substrates of wellbeing. Safety is the medicine.

Since this is so, augmenting your moment-to-moment experience of safety is a direct route to experiencing more wellness. In addition, because of our biological tilt toward noticing 'what's wrong', called negativity bias in science, most of us do not have acute tracking of our own embodied experience of micro-increments of increased safety. We simply do not attend to them because we do not realize they matter. This is food we leave on the table because we don’t notice it.

Let's look at our lives through the lens of safety to see about increasing access to this foundation resource.