010- Safety is a Sovereign Decision of the Embodied Nervous System

We cannot make anyone feel safe. Safety is a sovereign determination of the individual embodied nervous system, and the part of us that knows we are safe, bone-deep knows this, marrow-deep knows this, or does not know this, is not our ordinary autobiographical sense of self. It has almost nothing to do with thinking, though thoughts stream up from it like water from a spring. Follow the thoughts down to their source, and you start to get to the places in the body where this awareness is rising up from.

I want to spend time in this chapter acquainting you (or re-acquainting you) with the bodily experience of safety, and some ways to invite more of it into your life. I am often surprised, though I should not be, at how little we humans understand about what makes us feel well. I have watched many intelligent people undermine their own wellbeing because they do not understand where it is coming from.

In this world we are living in – filled with conflict, war, violence, aggression, transgression, transaction, uncertainty, exploitation, normalized extraction...all the byproducts of a worldview birthed from domination, translated through trauma, and requiring us to spend much of our time defended: armored up against the onslaught of systems perpetually seeking to entrap us – it is of particular importance to understand what the visceral experience of safety can do for us.

I'm calling it a visceral experience, an embodied experience, and I think this is an appropriate word to use because visceral shares the same root as viscera, which means your guts. And the kind of safety that I am talking about really begins in the guts. The deepest belly. You may know that you are safe or unsafe by the talk in your head, or the pounding of your heart, but if you follow these roots down to their source, they end in the guts. Or, better said anatomically, they begin in the guts.