Safety In The World Begins Within
One Conscious Breath: Issue 19
Even while it's collapsing, safety within keeps us from collapsing with it.
“We can become the beacon, the barometer, the ballast in the sea of chaos.”
Before we begin, I invite you to take one conscious breath.
Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes into your body.
And then exhale. Out of your mouth. Slowly. Elongate the release as much as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your jaw soften. Feel your feet firmly on the floor.
Now pause.
Give yourself permission to simply be. In this silence. For just one conscious breath. And then gently meet whatever arises ~ whatever has been waiting underneath all the inner and outer noise ~ for a moment of stillness like this one.
And when you’re ready ~ let’s begin.
Safety begins within first and foremost. Then we can feel safe extending ourselves outward to others. And now, closing this trilogy: feeling safe within the world ~ even while it’s giving us every indication it’s not safe.
As I sit down to write this one, I notice my heart beating a little faster, a tightening across my shoulders. A holding in my breath. My nervous system is telling me something, and after twenty years of helping others learn how to listen to the signals of their bodies, I know how to do it for myself too.
Is what I’m feeling right now, this nervous system reaction, necessary and helpful to write these words? Or is it simply sending me a signal that what I am about to write isn’t safe? Or is it just exciting? It’s important to learn how to differentiate the two. There is no threat right now that needs this level of sympathetic activation in my body.
So, I take a deep breath in. Elongate my exhale. Feel my shoulders drop. And begin to type. I don’t want to override the system that is meant to protect me. But oftentimes it signals a threat that is not actually happening in present time. Our power lies in learning this difference. And instead of overriding it, we learn how to update it.
Before I became a therapist, I was a community organizer. It was my specialty in graduate school. I truly believed that if I could make communities and the world safer, I would finally feel the safety within I’d always been missing. I burned with purpose and passion. And I burned all the way out. So much so I wrote my thesis on burnout. Ironically enough, while I was burning out. It felt like I was constantly in overdrive ~ one foot all the way down on the accelerator. Until I hit the wall.
While I was reading and learning as much as I could about burnout, I came across an article by bell hooks. One line awakened me: when you’re unhealed and you lead a revolution, you get an unhealed revolution. (This is my annotated version of her words, you can find the full quote and article in The Shambhala Sun June 2006).
It felt like she was speaking directly to me ~ I am one of those unhealed people. It wasn’t a judgment. It was a fact. The most direct and honest thing I’d read and felt in years.
It’s a false choice to believe that fixing what’s outside ourselves will finally make us feel safe within. It might momentarily, but it never lasts. It’s not sustainable because we have very little control over things outside ourselves. And there will always be something that feels unfair, unjust or unsafe. But when we show up to what is happening in the world, from a place of inherent safety within, we have more capacity to find solutions and solve problems.
When we are attempting to show up in the world from a place of fear instead of safety, no amount of organizing, fighting, fawning, absorbing, or self-abandoning will change the system. None of it leads us back to a felt sense of safety. Not really. The world doesn’t make us feel safe. It is (or isn’t) felt within before we even enter it. Which is why that bell hooks quote changed my life.
We need to be able to discern if the drive to make the world a safe place is coming from us feeling safe within or if it’s a survival strategy learned long ago. Because when the drive is coming from us not feeling safe within yet, we may still be operating from that same old, unconscious, survival strategy. And we will continue to burn out. Because if a younger, unhealed part of us is attempting to change the world, it doesn’t have the full capacity and resources we have now. And we need adults, fully resourced adults, standing in their core self to be working to make the world a safe place. Each of us deserves not only to know, but to feel, we are safe now.
Feeling safe within is not about retreating from the world’s chaos, disillusionment, or heartbreak. It’s not about looking away, or pretending it isn’t real. It’s about showing up and being present for what is happening within your life and our world from your fully resourced, present-day self. Feeling into your capacity to stay engaged, without collapsing into rage or despair.
Our outer struggle always mirrors the inner one. And when we’ve learned how to feel safe within first, something shifts in how we move through the outer world too. We have more capacity to show up for all of it from a resourced place instead of a depleted one.
This isn’t a resistance to what is. It’s not about fighting against what’s broken. This is a compassionate call to turn toward ourselves, first and foremost. To use our fully resourced core selves, to amplify what becomes possible when we move from safety instead of fear. When we stop trying to resist what we don’t want, and we start bringing more of our energy toward creating what we do.
The drive for a better, safer, more just world becomes sustainable, because we’re no longer moving from an old, unconscious need to feel safe. Instead, when we’ve reclaimed our safety within first, we begin moving outward knowing we bring the safety. We become the beacon, the barometer, the ballast in the sea of chaos.
A Practice for This Week
The next time you feel the desire to fix, to save, to change something outside yourself, pause before you react.
Take one conscious breath. Notice where that desire is coming from. Where does it live in your body ~ check in with your chest, your gut, your jaw. And then ask: am I moving from an old, unconscious need for the world to feel safe so that I can feel safe? Or am I moving from a place I’ve already made safe within?
There’s no right or wrong. Just notice.
Then choose ~ not because the world has become safe, but because you have.
Safety begins within. It then extends to others. And from there, it becomes what we bring into a world that needs it now more than ever.
Three letters. One thread. Rippling from the inside out.
Remembering, reclaiming and revealing. It all begins within.
It always has. And always will.
I’d love to hear where this trilogy landed for you. Comment below and let me know how you’re finding safety within, with others, or in the world these days.
With love and One Conscious Breath,
Jody
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