The Practice of Feeling Safe

My family has been through its fair share of trauma in the past few years, including a stillborn baby, two brain tumours, a divorce and a near heart attack, to name a few. During these times I have learned many things about my family, mainly, how resilient everyone is, and despite our differences, how deeply we all really love one another. Whether we like it or not, these kind of events change us, and the changes are usually a mixed bag of the good and the bad. None of these events happened to me directly, they happened to my sisters and father, and I hope that in those times I was able to be some sort of help for them, however feeble. When a loved one is going through a crisis, we tend to go into management mode, trying to sort out the details so that they can deal with the pain. We push our own pain aside because it isn't about us, and to admit to ourselves that we need healing as well can feel selfish somehow.

My sister's second brain surgery in eight months for a type two meningioma hit harder than I had realized. She came through the trauma like a champ, yet again, but it took me a few months to recognize what was going on inside of me.

I am a person with a very sensitive body. I feel a lot physically, emotionally and energetically. Clean eating and excerise is not an option for me, it is a necessity. Same for meditation and lots of hugs and kisses. I am a total smell-snob, so if you're even a little bit stinky, please don't come near me. I often feel like the canary in the coal mine. So I am generally very aware of what is happening in my body at all times, but a few months after the surgery I started misinterpreting the signs. My sister's baseball sized tumour had grown so slowly over a twenty year period that her brain had adapted to it, and she only started noticing symptoms in the year before it was discovered. What if my own body was adapting to something terrible without my realizing? What if my kid's fever was a sign of something worse than a virus? What if the cramp in my leg wasn't really from working out? What if, what if, what if? When you get into the what-ifs of life, they begin unfolding before you in an endless and often terrifying stream of possibility. The unhealthy emphasis on every little twitch and change in my body soon had me obsessing about death, that one Great Certainty that we have absolutely no control over. It took a few months of terrorizing myself with my own thoughts before I started to understand that, though all of these things that happened weren't to me, they had still changed me and I needed to deal with the aftermath. I began thinking about the importance of feeling safe in my day to day life and set an intention to have a daily practice of feeling safe.

The first thing I noticed upon embarking on my little experiment, was how bad I was at it. If I were a character in a movie it's pretty much guaranteed I would be The Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz. It's easy enough to say a few gentle words to yourself each day, but to maintain that sense of peace is something else. Lot's of things in the world leave me feeling unsafe these days. It's hard to turn on the radio or even scan my Facebook feed without coming across some distressing bit of info that I usually don't need to know. I've learned to limit the amount of news I consume, only reading about the essentials, but it's difficult to avoid the general paranoia that seems to pervade our social consciousness. I began to notice how every time my kid ran around the corner just out of eye sight, my mind immediately turned to worst case scenarios: drunk drivers, psychopaths, aggressive dogs; when in reality it was never any of those things and my child was just a few quick steps away.

Even on vacation I found it difficult. We were in Lunenburg county, a new hotbed for lyme ticks, and something as simple as letting the boys roll in the grass suddenly became a cause for concern. When we weren't in the grass we were in the ocean where Lord only knows how many sharks were just waiting to tear us limb from limb. Or, we were on the road, ever on the lookout for moose and fog, or, the very worst, moose and fog. None of these thoughts were full blown fears. They were simply background noise, part of the incessant chatter of my mind that got a bit louder now and again; but the cumulative effect was one of general dis-ease, and a day to day feeling that something bad was about to happen. So I was at a point where I could at least acknowledge that I have a terrrible habit of traumatizing myself with completely fictional scenarios on a regular basis. There is a narrow line between being vigilent and being paranoid, often thinly veiled with the excuse that being concerned over the hypothetical is being “responsible”.

Knowing that the quality of our thoughts determines our ability to enjoy our lives, I'd say it's high time that I banish the boogie man who wants to wreck my well deserved vacay. On a deeper level, what I truly believe has to be addressed as well. Though it's hard to admit, when I really analyze it, I seem to have this silly belief that as soon as I let down my guard and relax, something bad is going to happen. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have a feeling that it is also quite common. Feeling safe requires an innate trust in life that, when we jump, we will be caught; a trust that we can sleep in peace, though the darkness surrounds us. I think we are all born with this sense of trust and lose it along the way; but I read once that what is lost must inevitably be found again, and I'm inclined to believe that.

There is also a need to limit what goes into our minds. We know very well that what goes into our body affects our physical health, so it is a no-brainer that what goes into our minds affects our mental health. Yet we persist in stuffing our minds with useless and disturbing information that leaves us feeling heavy and weak. Our media is a veritable phantasmagoria of options, the majority of which are shite. We don't allow our children to watch certain things that we understand are not good for them, so why do we persist in not protecting ourselves in the same way? Like our bodies, our minds need healthy imput to thrive.

So, bad as I seem to be at it for the moment, daily I am striving to feel safe by trusting in Life; to breathe deeply and embrace the moment. Ultimately it is my choice to feed my soul good food and to believe that my trials make me stronger. It is my choice to believe, in the words of Khalil Gibran, that “the deeper your suffering carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”. And it is only me who can give myself the permission and space to heal when I am in need of healing. Slowly, slowly I am coming to understand that, when the Great Certainty does come, it will not be a terrifying plummet into the unknown, but a joyous leap into the next phase of the Journey.