What is Safety in a World of Existential Threat?
One of the crucial contributions to the modern discourse on wellness is surely Dr. Stephen Porges conceptualization of neuroception, with its concomittant awareness of the role that an embodied felt present moment registration of safety, danger, or lifethreat has upon the variable recruitment of Autonomic systems.
Part of what Polyvagal Theory has shown us, so elegantly, is that we have access to different neural circuitry when we feel safe, as compared to when we are in danger, and different neural circuitry still when we are in danger as compared to when we are in lifethreat.
Porges had to invent a word to describe the neurological faculty of this discernment, since there is no word that exists in English adequate to the task. He chose neuroception, from neuro-, for neurological, and -ception, etymologically originating in the Latin, where it means layers, and could be taken to mean ‘nested inside itself’.1
So this inward neurological perception, that drives our sensory and interoceptive engagement with the environment as we check for safety inwardly and outwardly– the same way your dog, when introduced to a novel environment will sniff, walk the perimeter, and circle before marking territory and settling down to rest– governs the autonomic systems that center our experience.
What we then know is that a bodily felt registration of safety is required for flourishing. It is pre-requisite to wellness.
I have argued in my book The Neurobiology of Connection that wellness will arise spontaneously if we can spend 51% of our present moments with our Connection Systems online. This is because when these neurological systems are available, the systems that Porges calls ventral vagal, our bodies coordinate the internal rhythms required for health, growth, and restoration. Our bodies repair themselves, return to equilibrium. This is accomplished, bio-physiologically, through the rhythmic pulsation of safety. To be perfectly clear, safety is the frequency whose pulsative cadence organizes your physiology, and allows your connection system to coordinate the activities of your other autonomic systems (your movement system (spinally-mediated) and grounding system2 (deep belly-mediated).
Many traditions, including ancestral and Indigenous healing lineages from around the world, are aware of, have conceptualized, and work with this pulsation of safety. It is not abstract; rather it is a coordinated waveform that can be assessed physiologically and the coherence of which can be measured quantifiably. It is not Heart-Rate Variability, but is reflected in heartrate variability. It is not a function of breath, but is reflected precisely in breath. While signals of danger are constant, signals of safety are always pulsatile in nature.
I have the honor at the present time of teaching a seminar in Autonomics. The seminar has two cohorts: a post-doctoral section comprised primarily of wellness practitioners centering autonomic physiology in their work, and a cohort that includes distinguished thought leaders and change-makers from a variety of fields. When the seminar began, I didn’t intend for it to organize along these lines, but it became apparent that there were two distinct sets of learning needs, depending on how much background people had with autonomic physiology.
Learning autonomic physiology is an embodied learning process, and it takes time because it begins to reorganize your experience of yourself. What do I mean by this? As we, for example, begin to understand lifethreat responses, and begin to review our own pasts for places where we have moved into shutdown, and begin to do the healing work to transform these places, our systems begin to heal. As this process unfolds, endogenously, it begins to change our physical bodies, the way we occupy them emotionally, the degree of our embodiment, how much time we spend in our heads, our understanding of our own histories, how we feel in our skin, and who we understand ourselves to be.
For people who have been using the maps of autonomic physiology as frameworks to help them transform their experience of their experience, which is the most useful way to relate to these materials, there is an experiential confirmation of its reality that really begins to sink into your bones. Learning and embodying these maps, particularly in community, allows us to directly grasp the primary levers of our own transformation. And this process takes time to unfold. The wellness professionals I am training know this– many of them have been involved in this work on themselves, and with their clients, for decades.
Yet for brilliant people new to this, unfamiliar with the language and conceptual categories, the learning process is different. A few weeks into teaching the class for change-makers I realized that I wanted to attempt to strip away all of the technical language, and see if we could meet the needs of the class directly without falling into jargon. What we are talking about are the deepest layers of our humanness– could we approach this directly in language that is close to our experience?
And this is where we encountered something fascinating around safety. One of our colleagues asked– How does the autonomic notion of neuroception relate to psychological safety? Another colleague, an activist, aware of the degree of existential threat all around us – endless war, ecological catastrophe, economic turmoil – simply stated that ‘Safety is an illusion.’
I think we can boil this down to a single question: What do we mean by safety in a world of existential threat? I contend, in agreement with this person, that we are in collapse at the end-stage of capitalism. All you have to do is look at the news cycle to be reminded of the encroachment of existential threat. So what do we mean by safety in the midst of all of this?
Sometimes I get extremely frustrated with the English language, which is the first language I learned to speak, because of its great poverty of description around interior states. I got so frustrated by this, nearly thirty years ago, that I embarked on a project of gathering words from other languages to address the lexical gaps in English, particularly words that address facets of relating. Words that address our relationship internally with ourselves, to interstitial spaces (i.e., spaces between), and to our relating with the Living and the More-than-human world.
This linguistic poverty is a function of words that are missing - for example, there is no word in English for a knowing that comes from the guts, whereas both German (bauchgefühl) and Yiddish (kishkes) have such a word (other languages do as well). We can speak in English about a gut feeling, but this word doesn’t carry epistemological weight. It is not understood to be a way-of-knowing.
Another example: there is no word in English for the felt interior of a word. When you say to someone, Thank you, it can be transparently sincere (if you hear someone say this- I heard a four-year old say it to her mother, Thank you mommy, the other day, and it cracked my heart open like breaking an egg over a bowl, made my knees weak, caused tears to leak from my eyes in a sudden upwelling). Or it can be an automatic transactional word, like a bank teller saying thank you because it is part of his customer script. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME WORD. One has an interior of cosmic reverence, the other is plastic. Yet there is no word in English that can differentiate between the felt valence of these two seemingly identical utterances, one made of prayer, the other made of shit. In Japanese, the word kotodama means the spiritual interior of a word. Learning this word, in my twenties, was a fragile reassurance that I was not crazy, that some other culture had perceived this thing that seemed so obvious to me but that I could not say because there was no word for it in the tongue I grew up speaking.
At a deeper structural level, English is a noun-based language, with nearly two-thirds of the most common words being things. This contrasts with a verb-based language (many Indigenous languages are verb-based), such as Lakota, which describes the motion of energies. My friend and mentor Tiokasin Ghosthorse calls the old Lakota language a ‘non-mathematical quantum mechanical language of intuition.’ To understand the difference between a noun-based language and a verb-based language, imagine the difference between saying the word ‘Sun’, and then invoking the feeling of sunlight on your face. One is a noun, the other is a verb. One conveys the notion of a thing (static, abstract category), the other conveys energies of a Being.3
As I grapple with this notion of safety in a world of existential threat, it becomes apparent to me that safety is an approximation for a territory that we would do well to spend some time naming in ways that enrich the associational matrix of the meanings we would like to accrete as it relates to our wellbeing.
Each of you reading this is held within the gravitational field of a planet hurtling through the void of interstellar space at unfathomable speeds, spinning on an axis, where at the present time human civilization so-called is engaged in the projects of undermining the integrity of the only biosphere in the known universe, blowing one another up, and binge-watching Netflix on smartphones to dissociate from all of this. For those of us making an effort to unplug from the machine and soberly assess how to live in a grounded and loving manner amidst the plunderings of the extraction engine of end-stage capitalism, while attempting to feed our families, and stay sane, it is an important and legitimate question. Does safety even exist at an existential level? Which is to say nothing of the more granular negotiations of the everyday- from engagements that are strained because of money, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, family, etc. Does safety even exist?
And while I cannot answer this in an absolute sense, beyond wondering aloud with you– in our several million year long species heritage, when we were still wandering in small bands of hunter gatherers as we did for 99% of our lineage history, still held within the ambit of ancestral human normalcy evolutionarily speaking– gathered around the fire on the savannah, at night, with apex predators loping through the dark, would we not have wondered the same thing?
And yet, in this archetypal formulation, down in the very roots, the toes if you will of our humanness, comes a possible response. Out there, in the night, No, safety does not exist. Alone, solitary, in the dark– No, safety does not exist. Yet here, in the glow of the fire, little ones held close, their tiny fingers and toes enclosed by adult bodies nearest the warmth of the fire, and eyes looking out, watching, Yes, there is more of it. Some possible temporary island of it.
I always wonder why you see little piles of poop in the center of fire roads. Have you noticed this hiking in nature? There is a squat line running down the center of dirt roads through the forest, as if all of the mammals know that nature’s porta-potty is a line down the dead center of a dirt road. Why is this?
It is because taking a shit is very vulnerable if you are a mammal. In order to push it out, you have to relax a certain amount. And when you drop your drawers, so to speak, when you are squatting there, you are less vigilant, more exposed. If you are going to be vulnerable, you don’t want to be snuck up on. And if you don’t want to be snuck up on, it’s a good idea to have some open space around you that reveals anyone approaching. The raccoons, the bobcats, the coyotes- they know this viscerally. It is common sense.
If you are going to let down your guard, come out of vigilance, you need space around you. Let’s call it the squat line. A space where we can allow ourselves to become vulnerable. A space where we can come out of vigilance, turn our attention inward, interoceptively, to feel what is moving through our bowels.
The reason I’m bringing you down into the guts, into this shitty example, is so that you can feel the question of safety in your deep belly. Because this is where the question really resides. It resides in the same place as your bauchgefühl, your kishkes. This question of safety, at an embodied level, is a way of interoceptive knowing that originates in the guts.
At its deepest level it has nothing – zero – to do with cognition. About the life and death nature of it, in starkest terms, the calculus resides entirely in our enteric brains.
Yet safety, this word, is still problematic. What are we really pointing at here? What is the physiological hinge that determines whether we can, so to speak, lower our guard, turn our attention inward, attend? Can we unhook our attention from the mesh of associations constellated by this notion? And here I propose some alternatives to the word safety, because the language of the deep belly is not a word, it is a feeling. What is the feeling we are pointing at?
What if, as Gabi Jubran proposes, we think of this in terms of home? At the dawn of western culture, as I was taught it representationally through the canonical books that delineate a meta-narrative trajectory of the modern mind, is The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem. It tells the story of Odysseus, that man skilled in all ways of contending, who is stranded far from home and hearth. He is filled with yearning for home. In the Greek, Nostos.
This yearning animates him throughout the text. Adam Johnson, Pulitzer-prize winning fiction writer and my creative writing teacher, taught that yearning is the great governor of character. Not just for Odysseus, but all of us.
And the great yearning of character, the archetypal yearning at the root of the story of the modern world is a yearning for home.
The Odyssey, to my eyes, yields most readily to interpretation as a text that grapples with the question: How do we get home from war?
This is the literal line of the story– our hero is stranded in the wake of war, but The Odyssey is a psycho-symbolic narrative, I would propose to you. The war is inward. The question is how do we get home, inwardly, from war, which is itself a palimpsest for alienation.
Distillation of the Odyssey: How do we overcome separation and re-unite with the Source?
I share with you here a work of short fiction, my attempt to inhabit the Odyssean frame:
Can’t Get Home- a short story (Odysseus speaking)
And what do you know of yearning?
I picture her at night, in the dress she wore when first we met. It is gathered above her knees, and she is standing in the river, laughing. It is not the sound of a girl laughing, but of the entire valley laughing: the water, the rushes in the water, the trees on the bank of the river, the sunlight itself. Harmonious everything. The sound catches inside of me, it stitches me back together, sews my soul back into my body, circumnavigates the interior re-attaching me to myself with such quick fixity I keep my face turned away from her as I pour water in hatfuls over the back of my neck to cool down. Years later, when we have been married a decade, I will watch her fingers doing needlework in the glow of the fire and feel the pass of the thread sewing me together same as that first encounter on the bank of the river Eurotas. In the darkness I hold my hand out in her direction and I know that she is waiting for me.
What do you know of yearning?
The hearth in my home is large enough to stand three men vertical abreast one of the other. The stones of the hearth were laid before Ithaca was a kingdom. I swept out the fireplace when a boy although we had a manservant for that. From him I would take the olivewood broom, shoo him off with it. Even before I was ten, I would shovel the ash into a bucket and walk it out to the ashheap myself, then carefully sweep the lurid dust from the corners, return with water and a brush and tend the fireplace until the stone was without blemish. From beneath the center of the hearth you can see clean up the chimney to the sky. An escape route even if the entire palace is shut in on itself like a fist drawn tight. An umbilicus in the center of the kingdom: I knew that even then. Tending my future I was, I knew that even then. Cleaning the fireplace at the center of the kingdom. And it is here I take myself, in my dreams, or when I am seasick, or washed up on any of these numberless islands.
The Aegean is a vast bowl. Turning and turning in the widening gyre…I must find my breath and master it not to grow dizzy.
What do you know of yearning?
My son is holding, clenched in each tiny hand, my smallest finger. We forget how much effort is required to learn to walk. His small plump legs, still learning to press down– he keeps dropping down into a squat, his tiny bottom nearly brushing the floor. Pushes himself up, pulls on my fingers, and I am smiling at him and the look of concentration on his face as he pulls himself upright, again and again, and I memorize the shape of his tiny face, the angle of his nose, the residence of each dimple, the sparkle in his eyes – did I know even then? – I caress every hollow in his upturned face with my eyes, follow it with the precision required to carry his image crystal clear in my heart, and now he is simply gazing into my eyes as if he can feel the intensity with which I am studying his face. And for a timeless moment we gaze upon one another wondering, who is this one?
What do you know of yearning?
There is a cliff at the edge of the water, a place you cannot reach if you do not know the path. The climb is arduous, the path sticky with pine resin that adheres to your palms as you lean on trunks for purchase, the trees ancient, their roots a labyrinth. For so many generations have goats and goatherds been ascending and descending this pitch that knobs of wood have a burnish as if they have been polished by cloth. At the top a lookout, a place from which you can see the bay entire, watch the green water undulate, articulate in planes of cascading and refracturing cerulean. Here I sit before the emerald water as before a crystal ball. Here I breathe in harmony with all waves. Here it was made plain to me before I understood the message that I would be taken from this place–that the measure of my life would be weighed in my determination to return.
The gods give you everything, then they pluck you from your place and dare you to find your way home, and upon this everything depends.
WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF YEARNING?
You, who live in your place, with your people, at your hearth, with your families? You who have not been torn by war, the vagaries of history, the caprice of the gods from where you belong? What do you know of yearning, and if you know not of yearning, what do you know of life? What do you know of anything, any of you, and here I find myself with longing hot as embers and yet I
can’t get home4
And so what if, instead of safety, we mean ‘At-homeness’?
Can we access a relative version of that? Can we feel ‘at-home’ enough to let our guard down, to bring all of our autonomic systems online? To coordinate our breathing up from our deep bellies in an inhalation of belonging?
The first Tibetan buddhist retreat I ever attended, prior to each session of discourse with the Rinpoche, there was an invocation amongst the assembled to generate the energy of boddhichitta. This translates roughly as awakening-mind. We could also call it the yearning-to-awaken. It is a verb-based feeling. A reaching, as towards the Sun, even if we cannot see it.
If, at some level, safety is an illusion, can we awaken within ourselves the yearning-for-home?
Can we make our way down, out of our heads, out of the cranial certainty, out of the depthless loss that burbles and rants as incessant naming, and home to the deep belly center of ourselves, a silence in subterranean caverns of self, and from here can we yearn-for-home? Can we reach for it?
And in the proper context, with the proper support, can touching into the possibility of this ignite the re-organization of our physiological systems to draw us back into the coherent pulse of life?
Can we prostrate ourselves before the difficulty of it all, link arms, and find our way home?
-4 October 2024
The Neurobiology of Connection is now available for preorder in paperback. Shipping January 1, 2025.
Kinship with interoception - inwardly nested inside itself, e.g., the sixth sense, and other words ending in -ception
I would like to thank Jordhynn Ariel Guy for this linguistic innovation in referring to the Deep Belly System as the Grounding System, which helps us to feel what it does in the presence of safety.
If you want to deep dive into cultural linguistics, and the words missing from the English language, see our book Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words, and the Missing Words Substack.
This is the opening story in my short story collection Can’t Get Home.