Concept of Safety - What is safety?

We tend to have reactions to feeling safe or not feeling safe. However, we often fail to stop and reflect on ourselves to determine what safety truly means.

What does the internal experience of safety require? Safety is both internal and external.

There is a demand for the external to keep me safe. But for the most part, your partner just tends to be unskilled or unconscious at times (for both men and women)

The question becomes - how do we make the shift from the childhood consciousness of "I need someone to keep me safe" to adult consciousness - the big shift that we have to work through is "how do I be the safety that the moment needs?"

The pendulum has swung so far to the external that we are not getting into our bodies and contacting what safety feels like in our bodies.

Where do you need to place your awareness to find safety? Or what shape/posture/gesture do you take that creates safety?

In a relationship, how can I be the safety/find it in myself and transmit it into the moment so that my partner feels safe?

So much of our relational decision-making is based on our sense of safety.

Short Practice: Close your eyes and find where you can find safety within yourself.

Questions:

1. A pulling back as one person in the relationship takes on more of their own safety, and the other feels grief of not being responsible anymore for the other person's safety. Where is the balance point? "You used to come to me for safety." Desire for recognition of how he carried safety for so long. Truth and safety are VERY interlinked. When one person owns their truth, it sets a deeper level of safety for the relationship.

"I'm still hurting about something - I need your help. Will you help me?"

Good apology = Put yourself in their, their shoes. "You're right...I did... imagine it did this to you."

2. Feeling the contract when the internal and external safety don't match. Trying to change parts of our partner is not Love.

Her partner's directness does not feel safe. What is the truth of the moment? ie, what they need at that moment. "Softer, my love."

We have different meanings and experiences of the same moment.

We must heal to evolve.

3. Men's group question - Embodiment vs in your head.

4. Feeling into the empty space at the end of a breath practice.

Most of the universe is made up of empty space.

Notice what happens to your nervous system when you really touch the emptiness of space - millions of miles of nothing.

If you struggle to feel the emptiness, start with the emptiness of space and then bring it in - the concept is that we are filled with nothing - tune to the emptiness rather than trying to visualize it.