3: How To Cultivate Inner Emotional Safety

This is the first in a 4-part series where I walk you through the four pillars I believe are essential for women to fully flourish: emotional safety, self-intimacy, devotion, and alignment.

In this episode, we’re starting at the root: emotional safety.

I’m not talking about physical safety. I’m talking about the kind of safety that lives inside your body. The kind that lets you relax your shoulders, stop performing, and actually feel what’s going on inside.

Because for so many women I work with, it’s not that they’re unsafe on the outside. It’s that on the inside, there’s tension, disconnection, and a deep sense of not feeling okay, even when everything looks fine.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing:

>>4 Reasons why you may not feel emotionally safe

>>How feeling not-safe may show up in your life

>>The key to cultivating emotional safety

>>A practice to cultivate emotional safety that you can try at home

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Transcript

Hey everyone. And welcome to today's episode. I want to kick off by asking you a question and that is what do you need to feel safe? So think about that for a moment. What is it that you need to feel safe now? Often what happens when we hear the word safety is we tend to think of physical safety. So what do I need in my external environment to feel that I am safe? And obviously we’re  constantly scanning our external environment, whether that's conscious or whether it's unconscious. We're constantly scanning to see whether we are indeed safe. And so often it happens that even though externally we are safe, there's no immediate threat in our environment internally, we are still feeling emotionally unsafe, emotionally, not safe. And this has such a huge impact on the way that we show up. It has an impact on the way that we relate to ourselves. It has an impact on the way that we feel pleasure and that we feel connected to our own life force energy. So that's what I want to unpack in today's episode. I see this as a little bit of training because for the next four episodes. So starting with this one, I'm gonna take you through the four pillars that I believe need to be in place for us as woman to fully flourish, to move from that space of being stuck and numb and feeling unfulfilled to a place where we really have access to everyday pleasure to a place where we feel radiant and we feel connected to our own inner aliveness. And so today we are going to be talking about creating emotional safety and then the next three episodes are gonna be about self intimacy, devotion, and alignment. So let's then look at what is it that we are going to talk about today. And as I say, these are just really short mini trainings to kind of give you an insight into what happens when these four pillars aren't present in our lives. And I'm also gonna be sharing in each of these episodes. I'm also gonna be sharing with you some thoughts and suggestions at how you can begin to bring this into your life. So to kick off, we are going to look at what are some of the reasons that we end up feeling not safe. So these are really the main reasons that I not only experience in my life, but I also see this, um, in the lives of the woman that I work with. So it's really a high level overview of all the, all the things that cause us to feel not safe. I want to look at how this then manifests. So how does this cause us to show up in the world? And then we'll look at how we can begin to change this. How can we find ourselves safe? How can we create emotional safety from within? And I'll also share one practice with you that you can start doing, um, yourself right now. So make sure that you're watch until the end or that you stay on until the end. So let's begin by what are some of the reasons why we don't feel emotionally safe? And this is really, this is a very high level overview. And obviously I'm not presuming that these are the only reasons why we don't feel safe, but really if I look at the focus of my work, which is about moving women from feeling numb and stuck, moving them from this space into a place where they have access to that inner freedom and that self expression, and they can live more fully alive and they get back their  mojo. These are really the things that I see stands in the way of us feeling not safe. And the first thing is big life changes. So this could be anything specifically. What I notice is the, usually it's like a milestone birth, so turning 40 or even hitting midlife. These are usually things that cause us to, to pause and, um, feel into what is really going on in our lives. Also things like maybe getting a baby at a later stage in your life, which is what happened to me, moving, um, countries getting divorced. So going through relationship changes, maybe your children leaving the house. So really anything that is taking your, your world as it is now and turning it on its head, anything that takes you out of your comfort zone and whether this comfort zone was good for you or not, but anything that takes you away from what you are used to is going to cause some internal upheaval. And then the way that we deal with this, um, often tells a lot about how we end up feeling and showing up in the world. So this is then the first thing. So any big lifestyle changes and something that I just wanna throw in here is usually for women from, from mid age, let's say from about the age of 40, this is really the time when your wild woman wakes up and all of the, all of the times that she's been repressed and tucked away in the cupboard and not really been allowed to show up in your life. This is when she says, look, I've had enough, it's your soul that wakes up and, and says, please, by attention to me, look, we need to change things. We can't carry on like this. So I find that this birthday milestone is usually a big, uh, change and a big step into woman starting to ask, what else is there? And even these changes of you starting to question yourself and you starting to wonder, is this what my life has come to, even that can make us feel emotionally unsafe because we are forced to go to go within. So I don't know if you listen to the very first episode of this podcast, where I spoke a little bit about my journey. So, um, and if you didn't, I'm just gonna recap it. What happened is I had moved to a new country and I had just become a new mom. And this is sort of when my world started falling apart, which is what eventually put me on the path that I am today. So in this time when I just had my baby, I can remember distinctly the one day I was lying on the couch. I just had a bath and I was lying in my pajamas on the couch. I was under a blanket and it was raining outside. So now the apartment that we stayed in had a skylight, and you could see the raindrops falling on the skylight and running down. And as I was lying there on the couch, I remembered that I was looking at the skylight, seeing the drops running down, I was hearing the sound of the rain as it fell on the glass. And I was just, as my body was, as I was lying there on the couch, I was feeling completely whole. And I was feeling, I had such a sense of wellbeing and wellness that flooded my system. And I can still remember how in stock contrast. That was to the way that I had been feeling for a while, which was unsettled and uprooted and unsafe. So this was such a powerful sign for me of how my body and how my psyche was lacking. That feeling of safety. The second thing that I wanna share with you that can lead us to feeling emotionally, not safe is that we carry with us unresolved, uh, situations or events of our past. And it doesn't really matter whether the, whether this is a big trauma, big tea trauma, or a small tea trauma. And in fact, I think often what happens is we dismiss the impact that the smaller trauma must have on us. It's almost as if we don't want to allow ourselves to feel affected by this because they weren't serious enough. Okay. Now also, as we G as we reach these milestones that I spoke of earlier often, what this does is it causes us to reflect about where we are in our lives. And often we don't like what we see. So we are at a point where we have to face our past decisions. We feel guilt, or we feel shame for things that we did do, or that we didn't do. So this really is a time also where it's so important to learn how to claim all of ourselves and our entire past, and also to forgive ourselves. But typically because these things are so difficult to feel and to face it's much easier for us. And this is something that we all do. It's much easier to kind of try not to think about it, to push it away and to distract ourselves. So this is a normal coping mechanism that we all do. Okay. Then the third point that I wanna share with you, which I think contributes to us, feeling emotionally not safe is that we live in a hyper-masculine culture that celebrates achievement. So there is like rules that we need to live by. There is a idea of what success means. There's a, a prescribed idea of what one's life should play out and what all the milestones are and what you should have achieved by a certain milestone. And what ends up happening is as women, we get squashed and we feel burnt out trying to play by these rules because it doesn't suit our cyclical nature. It doesn't allow us to be in full expression of our emotions and it makes us feel less than so we have this narrative going on of I'm not worthy. Um, I'm not good enough. And that there is something wrong with me. It's like trying to fit yourself into a space where you simply cannot fit in. And then instead of thinking that the space is the wrong shape, we think there is something wrong with me because I can't fit in to that space. All right. We also deal with very . And I'll say this in a, in a, um, a nice way, if up ideas of what beauty standards are. So again, we are trying to fit ourselves or conform ourselves to something which changes every decade. And most of us don't look like the beauty standards that are being upheld. And then we judge ourselves for that. We find that there is, there must be something wrong with me. I need to change my shape. I need to change my hair. I need to change my, the lines in my face as I'm aging, so that, that I can conform. And I can look like that beauty ideal that's available, or that's, that's being presented to the world and in this as well, what happens is we start diminishing our own worth. Alright. And it causes us to feel emotionally unsafe. It's not safe to be me under scored by that lack of self worth of either being not good enough or being too much. And then the last thing that I wanna talk about when it comes to feeling emotionally, not safe, is I see that it has so much to do with us being afraid of feeling our emotions, right? So just at this point, what I wanna say is that getting vulnerable and honest with yourself takes huge courage. The world makes us belief that our emotions are a liability and that when you feel your emotions, it makes you weak. And the opposite of that is actually true. But because we, we live in a world that makes us believe our emotions are a liability. Any kind of an emotion is a liability. We shy away from that. We grow up in households and you know, I speak for myself here. And maybe some of you can relate to this where we are not allowed to express our anger. Good girls keep quiet and they pay attention. They don't express their anger. They don't express their rage. So we don't feel our emotions. And we are afraid of our own emotions because of this good girl narrative that's been woven in to, to our psyches and the self-help industry. Also doesn't really help so much because there can be a tendency. And again, I fell into this trap, this tendency of positive thinking in order to, to attract only good things in your life, you have to think positive. But the toxic side of that is you can't feel what's really going on. So we don't feel our emotions. We deny them, we swallow them. We eat them. We, you know, shop with them. And then when, no, but nobody's watching you lie on the bathroom floor and you cry your eyes out. Then you pull yourself together and you get up and you get on with it. And in those times where you do explode in rage, you feel so much shame and you feel so much guilt. And you judge yourself for not being in control of emotions for not being more composed and more pulled together. And I see this in so many of the women that I speak to, I see this in myself. So this really is Alive in all of us and how this manifests, how this shows up in the world and in our actions is that, and I spoke about this a little bit before already is we end up distracting ourselves. So we shop or we eat, or we drink too much, or we use drugs, or we use sex. We use all of these things to kind of not feel what is really going on inside and to keep ourselves busy so that we don't have to go into this painful feeling, knowing that is within us, but this is actually where our liberation lies. And I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more. So how this manifests in the first place is we do things to not feel how this looks like is we escape into our mind. So there's a lot of overthinking. There's a lot of overanalyzing. Um, these even self doubt, and again, a lot of judgment about the way that we do end up responding about the way that we do interact. And also a lot of questioning is this worth it? And what has my life come to? And there has to be more to life than this and mixed in with a self judgment and this inability to know that what is right for me, and to be the authority in my own life, what effectively effectively happens is there's a, there's a sense of certainly getting stuck. But also I see it as a feeling of powerlessness. I feel powerless in my own life. So there is not a sense of sovereignty. There's definitely no sense of being the queen in my own queen. And we end up feeling that we are existing instead of living. All right. And then the last thing that I wanna talk about in terms of how this manifests and I'm lumping these two together is as people pleases or perfectionists. And the reason that I'm putting it together is for me, whether you're people pleasing or whether you are behaving like a perfectionist, it's all about control at the end of the day, the reason that we people please, the reason that we are trying to do everything perfect is about control. We're trying to control our own safety. We're trying to control the perception that other people have of us. We're trying to control the outcome. And if we don't feel emotionally safe, we're going to do what we can in order to feel safe, even if it is a false sense of safety, which is what we get when we are just trying to control or being in control of everything around us. So these things that I, that I shared with you now, these three things of, um, numbing yourself or distracting yourself and going into your mind and being filled with self doubt and also, uh, people pleasing and perfectionism. These things are really they're coping mechanisms. Okay? So again, there's no judgment if this is what's happening in your life, but like any type of coping coping mechanism, there is a point where it stops serving you. There's a point where you can break free from that, where it doesn't need to, to rule and control your life anymore. And the question then is how do I break free from these coping mechanisms? How do I find that emotional safety? How do I cultivate that emotional safety within, and the answer lies in our nervous system.So our nervous system is really the messenger of everything that happens in our bodies and in my feminine embodiment coaching training. What I learned is that the data from our mental body, the data from our emotional body, our physical body and our energy body, all the data of this, you can access and you can find in the body. So what this basically means is even something like your thoughts, you can feel the experience of how a thought feels. You can feel that through the feelings and the sensations that are in the body, okay. This is our inner world. We have this beautiful, magical inner world that is alive inside of us. And when we become sensitive to this inner world, and this is like, the core of my work is for us to teach women how to become sensitive. Because when we become sensitive, it means that we move past the numbness and we really get into contact with everything that is alive within the body. And this is where our life force energy resides. It is in the body. And if I'm distracting myself, if I'm spending all my time in my head, self doubting and using all of these survival strategies and coping mechanisms, I am disconnected from the wisdom of my body. I am disconnected from my own authority. So essentially what this means is when we feel numb, we are not sensitive to this inner world, but this is a skill that we can learn. And the doorway into this is through working with the nervous system. So I'm going to just give you a very high-level  simplified explanation of how the, um, how the nervous system plays a role in this. So our nervous system is constantly activated. All right? And as our nervous system gets activated into fight or flight, if you think about this as a circuit, it means that the energy runs in a circuit, it gets activated into fight or flight, and the energy has a chance to complete, but there's another type of response. And this is the freeze response. So again, I'm not gonna get into this very deeply, but if you go back again to the circuit and you think about how in fight or flight, the energy has a, has a chance to complete in the circuit. When we go into freeze mode, which, uh, happens when we distract ourselves. And when we essentially numb ourselves, this energy doesn't have time to complete. It doesn't have time to complete, but it also doesn't have any way to go. So it, it gets stuck in the nervous system and it gets stuck as, and the term that I learned in my feminine embodiment coaching training, what I learned was it gets stuck as frozen tension. It builds up in the circuits, in your nervous system, and it numbs you to feeling what is alive in your inner world. So not only is the numbing happening outside where you purposefully, numb yourself from feeling, but that has an impact on your nervous system, in that your nervous system starts being numbed. So you don't have access to these uncomfortable emotions, but on the other hand, you also don't have access to the emotions on the other side of the scale, which is the more pleasurable emotions. So we could say that you become habitually numb, and it looks like living on autopilot. And again, as I said earlier, existing, instead of living, and the way that we start feeling emotionally safe is by liberating. These blocks of frozen tension that is inside our nervous system that is blocking the flow of our life force energy in the nervous system and feminine embodiment tools is a beautiful tool for that. So any sematic, uh, practice is going to start liberating. The tension that is held in the nervous system. So before I sign for today, what I'd love to do is leave you with a little practice that you can start doing yourself to begin to bold that emotional safety. And I first learned about this practice in the book, waking the tiger by Peter Levine. And I've adapted a little bit for myself. So I'll share it with you. You can try it out and see how it works for you. What I do on most nights before I go to sleep is as I'm lying in bed, I begin by placing my awareness on my breath. So I don't change the way that I'm breathing. I'm just noticing really how my breath travels in the body. And it's just it's to anchor my awareness to something. So anchoring my awareness to my breath. And then as I'm lying there with my eyes closed, I feel how the blankets and the sheets, I feel the weight of them pushing down on my body. I notice the texture. So this is really a sensual experience where you're noticing the, the sensations. And I also notice and feel into the mattress that's beneath me.  I feel the firmness of the mattress, and I find my body where it lies on the mattress. And then once I found my body and I'm, I'm aware of the, the circumference of my body and how my body feels on the mattress, I stop holding my body in place, and I hope this makes sense to you. I stop holding my body in place and I let go. So this means that I relax and I surrender into the mattress. I let myself become heavy. And to me, this is a beautiful practice of showing my nervous system, what it feels like to surrender, to let go and to feel. And by practicing, at least this is how I see it by practicing this consciously. I'm also able to live this out in the 3d world, practice that surrendering and letting go and stop holding myself in place rigid, which I think is also so important for us when it comes to our feminine energy and being able to receive is we need to let go, and we need to soften into receiving. So next week, I'm going to be talking about creating wholeness through self intimacy. I'll share some practice with practices with you in that episode as well. So make sure that you stay tuned for that.