Where Safety Begins
Updated: Aug 18
One Conscious Breath: Issue 17
One Conscious Breath: Issue 17
Our longing to feel safe again starts within.
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.
Last week, we talked about the drop. From our brain into our heart. The moment we stop analyzing our way toward connection and simply feel it instead.
Most of us learned to think our way through a feeling. As children, being with a feeling required someone steady to help us feel safe as it moved through us. For those of us who didn't have that attunement, this capacity simply hasn't been strengthened yet.
Increasing our capacity to feel is the foundation of my life's work, and everything that will follow in these weekly newsletters. The next three letters are a trilogy of being: With self, with others and with the world. And reclaiming connection to ourselves first is what allows us show up authentically with others, and within the world. Each one builds on the one before. And it's essential to begin with ourselves.
We've been taught that our wounds are where the light enters us. That love and heartbreak crack us open so something from the outside can finally reach us.
I'm going to flip this paradigm, as I often do.
What if love, and any heartbreak that inevitably follows, doesn't let light in. It lets our own light out. Our light, our love, was never coming from the outside ~ it's always within us ~ however hidden, however protected. Feeling love and heartbreak simply removes the fortification blocking what's always been burning inside us. This is the difference between waiting to be illuminated and remembering our own light.
This remembrance is the gift ~ our light has always come from within.
Think of the last time you felt fully yourself, fully alive, around someone ~ even for just a fleeting moment. No performing, no managing. Not even searching for what was safe to say. That feeling didn't come from them making the space safe for you. That was you, finally feeling safe to let yourself be free.
And we can find our way back to this freedom. Back to our light, back to our love, in one breath, and then lose it in the next. It's not a striving to get precisely right. Or a task to complete. It's a gentle, compassionate return. A revealing. Breath by breath. Moment by moment.
So the question this week isn't how do we get there.
It's how do we reveal it.
Because somewhere along the way, for many of us, staying open and shining stopped feeling safe. And then our nervous system built a wall to protect us ~ keeping our love and light hidden deep within. Brilliantly necessary, then. This was never a flaw. It was survival.
And if shining now feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, that makes sense too. Stepping into something new may feel unsafe, even when it's actually a returning. A remembrance to what is true. This isn't a flaw either. New experiences ask for courage, and compassion, while we build our new familiar.
Here's the truth: we know more now. We have more resources, more choice than we did then. And our nervous system was never meant to stay stuck. It's meant to be flexible ~ to return to opening ~ when any threat is over. And the threat is over. In this one conscious breath, you are safe. Safe to shine. Safe to love.
Breathe into this truth.
Whether the crack that reveals your inner light comes from heartbreak or from someone who simply helped you feel love again, the illumination is the same. What you felt in that moment ~ was never actually coming from someone or something outside yourself. It was your own inner light, your own love, being reflected back to you.
The light of your own heart has always been there, simply waiting for you to remember it, to reclaim it, to reveal it. And once you know this and really feel it ~ once you've returned to this deep re-connection with your own heart ~ you'll feel safe to remain open. Because that safety was never someone else's to give, or take away. It was, and always will be, a choice we make for ourselves.
A heart that is fortified, keeps us from fully entering relationships, most importantly with ourselves. Remember, we are our longest relationship. We get to be the one who offers ourselves that safety.
And when we make this choice, to remain open-hearted, something remarkable becomes available: we get to feel ~ it all. Not just the ease. But the grief, too, when it comes ~ because grief is simply a reflection of how deeply we're capable of loving. We don't get one without the other. Both rise. Both release. What remains, underneath all of it, always, is a heart that was never actually broken. Only protected. And when you feel safe enough to reveal it, everything you are and bring into the world will reflect back to you from this place of open-heartedness and love.
Just as that love was never simply someone else's to give, nor take ~ what was ignited within you is always yours ~ so is everything you meet outside yourself. It's not the source. It's simply the mirror.
And here's what's waiting for you on the other side of this choice to remain open-hearted ~ not the extremes of a fortified wall or no boundaries whatsoever. Something more stable, more consistent and more authentic emerges: a strong back with an open heart. Steady yet flexible enough to meet whatever comes and open enough to actually feel it when it does. You stop bracing for what might come or go, because you're no longer giving anything outside yourself the power of keeping you safe. That power is yours, always. One conscious breath at a time.
And this is where it starts. Within you. With reconnecting to your own heart, first.
Because safety within is what makes safety with anyone, or anything, else possible.
As I shared at the start, this is the first of three letters ~ Self, Others, World ~ each one building on the one before it. Next week we explore how feeling safety within allows us to feel safe in our relationships with others. And the week after shows how this embodied safety ripples out into how we show up in the world.
Each one strengthens and deepens the one before it.
A Practice for This Week
At some point today, notice a moment when you're waiting ~ for someone to reach out first, to reassure you, to prove it's safe to feel what you're already feeling.
Pause. Place a hand over your heart. Take a deep breath in. Elongate your exhale.
Ask yourself: what would it be like to give myself permission right now to feel whatever it is I'm feeling, instead of waiting for someone else to offer me safety or permission?
Take one more conscious breath. And offer yourself that safety and permission.
You are your longest relationship. I invite you to begin treating yourself like it.
With love and One Conscious Breath,
Jody
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