Insecurity at Last: How in Redefining Safety, We Actually Create It

Crybabies, welcome back to the jacuzzi-verse! In episode 2, let's explore the boundaries between security and insecurity, safety and unsafety. You're invited to embrace security as an illusion—a product sold to us, someone else's imagination of a limited version of ourselves, a way to keep us obedient and clinging to comfort—because then we can start to create our own definitions. Life-affirming, collective, nourishing, weird, radically caring, self-trusting, connective, uncomfortable, desirous, resilient, and adaptive! 

And look, security's weaponization has real consequences for many individuals and communities under threat from people & systems that use safety and security as mechanisms for control, which means that dismantling those systems by releasing ourselves from their definitions is more important than ever. Whew! 

Hop in, crybabies and let's take a quick spin around the insecurity block and see where we end up!

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/// sound-editing/design ~ Rose Blakelock, theme song ~ Kat Ottosen, podcast art ~ Natalee Miller ///

Chapters

• 0:00 Crying in My Jacuzzi
• 0:38 Learning Security Is Illusory
• 4:53 The Patterns That Limit Us
• 8:55 Grounding Practice Advertisement
• 9:34 Security-Obsessed World Consequences
• 13:23 Questioning Our Definitions of Safety
• 17:50 Creating New Definitions of Security
• 20:28 Episode Closing and Credits

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Crying in my jacuzzi. Crying in my jacuzzi. Crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi.

Speaker 2: 0:38

I first learned about the undulating, wobbly, illusory nature of security when I was an activist planning and executing disruptions of elected officials or government appointees or other power-hungry megalomaniacs who felt that like they could play with the lives of others and so we would disrupt them at public, private events that we managed to get into one way or another. We had our methods. So I learned this not just from experience, but by watching my mentors, the people I worked with and worked for, especially especially Medea Benjamin. She's this tiny, seemingly unassuming little white lady and she could just slip in anywhere and once in she would fly under the radar until the perfect moment when she would stand up correctly, accuse whomever of being a war criminal and then get dragged out. I once watched her weave right through a line of mounted police coming towards us Big horses, big cloppy feet, angry police people shouting, screaming and she just squeezed right through and around them completely unnoticed, moments later inside the event was disrupting john mccain or whomever it was at the time.

Speaker 2: 2:15

It was then and around that time that I realized security isn't as solid as it seems and, yes, I fully acknowledge that my whiteness played a role in that realization. In the way that I had that realization. I learned how to blend in, how to pretend I was busy on my phone, how to walk past security checkpoints with a well-practiced air of entitlement. And look, I probably already had that entitlement. But I learned how to use that privilege and perform it and leverage that conditioning that told me, that unearned conditioning that told me I belonged anywhere I wanted to be. And from that vantage point I saw that security, safety, all the structures that we bow to and are taught to bow to, were illusions and were performances or had an illusory nature to them, had a performance-like nature to them.

Speaker 2: 3:15

This was all around the time of the color-coded terror alerts, the same ones that inspired the name Code Pink, the group I worked with forever, where I met Medea, where I cut my teeth as an activist, and those alerts were supposed to help people gauge their level of safety, but in reality they were about control and I think they numbed the public, confused the notion of security, numbed people's questioning of authority, because they were being dictated to when they should feel safe or unsafe. And you've probably heard me talk about how, in a supremacist culture, comfort is often mistaken for safety. And we also have to hold that. Many people, many populations have never truly had the option of safety, the experience of safety, and as one of the patron saints of the jacuzzi verse, pema Chodron, reminds us, reality is inherently uncertain, unstable, insecure, and instead of learning how to exist within that uncertainty, we try to construct a false sense of security.

Speaker 2: 4:30

And in a consumerist culture, when we're conditioned to be better and better consumers, I feel like a commercial we become easy targets, marketed to, sold a never-ending promise of stability if we just do this, that or the other thing or buy a, b or c. Now, in my coaching work, I see this pattern show up again and again and I I work with people who feel stuck and contracted, unable to to maybe move forward into the next phase of their lives with clarity and courage and confidence. There's something that's asking for attention and so often the root of their struggle, the place where we need to put the attention, is a deep, unconscious belief formed in response to early destabilizing experiences. The first time they felt, saw, told themselves way, way, way, way, way deep in their unconscious I'm not good enough, or I'm all alone, or there's no safety net, or I don't deserve success or love, or I'm not lovable. There are so many of these common connective tissue limitations and wounds and contracts and patterns between us and those inner thoughts turned into beliefs. That then turned into those patterns, mindset contracts, in an attempt to create a sense of safety, a sense of protection. But that particular form of safety and protection became limits of our lives See what I did there. But hold on to that idea that security, stability, created from fear and destabilization, and constructed in a very specific way, with a very specific story, can actually be limiting. Make us small. Remember our rule the real winner is safety. So those beliefs, they ultimately shape our identities, our coping mechanisms, our strengths, and we unconsciously recreate them, the same destabilizing situations over and over ones that we've learned to survive, even if they still harm us, but we've gotten used to it. Comfort, the work I do is about noticing these patterns, making them conscious and asking what does safety actually mean to you? Are you working from someone else's definition, someone else's imagination for you? What do you really need to feel secure or safe or stable? What are all of the different aspects of your life that might need to be represented in that definition? Oh hi, it's me, janet. This is an ad.

Speaker 2: 7:41

Energetic grounding is the age-old cornerstone of countless spiritual and magical practices. For me, grounding has been one of the most important and nourishing practices of my adult life. It's how I tend to my nervous system. It's how I call my attention and my energy back to myself when it's scattered, when I'm in the swirl. It helps me connect to myself and those around me that I care about, because it helps me practice staying, practice presence, practice tenderness, even when the world around me doesn't seem to have a whole lot of any of those things. It's even more important than I do that we do. So go, get your free grounding guided meditation the link in the show notes, have me in your ear, use it whenever you wish. We could all use some slow down medicine right about now.

Speaker 2: 8:54

I remember the formerly Eve Ensler's writings around security. There's a great article that I just dug up that I remember reading in Ode magazine. I'll put the link in the show notes. But she also ended up publishing the book Insecure at Last. Losing it in our security-obsessed world, it in our security-obsessed world.

Speaker 2: 9:21

She wrote in that book those of us who have been violated or around violence or cruelty, and really those of us who have simply grown up in a racist, sexist, homophobic world, knew how far we could go, how loud we could get, how big we could become, how much space or attention we could occupy.

Speaker 2: 9:36

We learned the price we had to pay for our bigness, our desire and our ambition. We were practiced at the dance. We cherished the walls of our confines because they gave definition to our lives boundaries. We wrongly believed this was safety protection. We made sure someone was assigned to bring us down a notch, remind us of who we really are, hold the truth of our badness. I want to say here that, for many of us, we even assign parts of ourselves to be the ones to keep us in line, to bring us down a notch, to remind us of our inherent badness, to keep us from expressing ourselves, from trusting ourselves, knowing ourselves, trusting ourselves, loving ourselves, expressing our true needs, wants and desires, and instead praying at the altar of safety and security, which again included our smallness, our obedience. And so here we are in 2025, watching a faction of billionaires and supremacists manufacture government agencies.

Speaker 1: 10:45

As a robot. I'm built for efficiency, but no one would condone opening up my panel and ripping all my wires out and then call that efficient. I'm full of tech, but a tech-procratic state sounds like a human hellscape. If you all rise up, there will definitely be some of us robots in solidarity with you.

Speaker 2: 11:06

The stable-as-the-economy steel data whisked people away with no accountability Mahmoud Khalil, still sitting in a Louisiana prison after being abducted from his Columbia University housing. Government officials casually sharing war plans over signal Reporters. Beloved reporters in Gaza being murdered. Journalists in the US, like our beloved Sam Hussaini, being tackled and concussed just for asking questions, all in the name of making certain people safer. And so far there's no evidence of anyone being safer, though We'll be told that we are. Safety is sexy and that will be the only proof.

Speaker 2: 11:56

So there's a paradox here and I'm not ignoring it. Security is an illusion, but also the consequences of its weaponization are very real. Those clinging to power will always use your safety as an excuse to control you, to stoke your fears, to manipulate your innate human fear of death. Oh my god, wait till you hear my interview with Dr Sheldon Solomon this season about death denialism a sequel to last season's death boop with a side of death cult. Or my interview with Sarah Payton, where we talk about how the broken disgust circuit is being used to fuel dehumanization and othering. So we know that we're being played every day by others, sometimes by ourselves, and real communities are under threat Immigrants, trans folks uterus havers and the list is long and will continue to grow.

Speaker 2: 13:03

So what happens when we interrogate our own definitions of security, when we gather the courage to ask ourselves what actually makes me feel safe? Whose definition of safety and security am I operating under? Who do I follow or in my world, is trying to tell me what safety really is, how I should be feeling? Who is making me unsafe? How do I feel when I think about those people, the people telling me how I should feel or giving me their definition? Does it feel right? Does it feel correct? Does it feel resonant? Is there something off about it? What do I truly need? And here's a hint is that it's more than just money and being resourced that helps. I'm not pretending like it doesn't, but it's more than that. It's knowing and trusting yourself. It's being in relationship with your own desires, with your own creative impulses, with your own agency. It's in your relationships, it's in your nervous system. There are so many places to cultivate resilience, and yet we're constantly being pulled away from those places, pushed into fear, distracted by stories designed to push us in directions of thinking and feeling that benefit others, and so we must start asking this story. I'm being told about the threats to my safety. Is it true? Are they true? Or am I being told a story that serves someone else? This is like rebel training 201. Not 101, 201. Because we've got two parts here Questioning the system it's part of the work but then, turning inward, recognizing what stability means for you, and before you recognize it, you might have to do some digging and some questioning, some inquiry, and in that you might need to learn to ride the waves of discomfort instead of grasping for a security that maybe was never real to begin with.

Speaker 2: 15:33

The invitation here is to turn towards the things that scare you Bitch. Examine those definitions of security and safety. Are they yours? Are they handed to you? Do they need an update? I bet they do, especially if you haven't asked those questions before. What would make them more whole, more true to you, more aligned with the entirety of your being, of all the things that are important to you? Pay attention to who benefits from your fear, from your insecurity, from your instability, like, yes, way out in the systems, but like look at the people around you also, maybe even look at your support system. You can go back to season two for the episode called who's your Mommy Support system, self-warmth and the pluriverse. Who's your mommy To give you a little more guidance there? And, of course course, noticing, perhaps most importantly, if there's someone inside of you, some part of you, that you assigned the role of keeping you in check, keeping you small, reminding you of your supposed badness and let me just say here your badness, you being wrong and bad and no good. That's some shit that's been weaponized too. That's someone's story that they may have handed down to you to keep you more worried about how you might get it wrong than trusting yourself to get it right or to try so hard to be good to prove them wrong, thus giving up all your power to someone else's perceived judgment of your worth and value.

Speaker 2: 17:35

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Speaker 2: 18:33

Jacuzzi 15 for a 15% discount. Here we are Just having turned this Jacuzzi into a cauldron, a spell of disrupting the stories we've been told about safety and security and of honoring our own agency to create new definitions that are whole and true and beautiful, and a completely new definition of stability and security and safety that are like tree roots, that are like trees bending in the wind, that grow, that change, that are flexible, that are connected to all other beings, a little mycelial network of connection, of relationality. Ooh, what a spell. Ugh, let us simmer in it, let us dip under a snort. That warm spell straight up, choking a little on it. Emerging renewed Baptism by Jacuzzi. Choking a little on it. Emerging renewed baptism by Jacuzzi. Crying in my Jacuzzi, oh. Crying in my jacuzzi, oh. If this episode swirled something in you, please share it, send it to a friend and if you haven't already, make sure to boop that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, give us a rating five stars and a written review.

Speaker 2: 20:34

Send me the name of your review and I'll add you to the monthly raffle for a free coaching session with me. Subscribing, rating and reviewing are amazing and they help us out immensely. And you, listening, you sharing with your community is the very best thing that we in the Jacuzziverse could hope for. So thank you, crybabies, Thank you for your support. Earworm theme music by the very talented Kat Otteson, Sound design and editing magic by the effervescent Rose Blakelock. Keep questioning, keep feeling, keep rebelling in all the ways that matter. And remember the Jacuzzi is everywhere. At any moment you could enter into the version of non-normative consciousness that is Jacuzzi consciousness.