The House of Felt Safety that is Our Body
When I listen to Panache Desai’s Call to Calm meditations and pre-talks in the mornings, I’m often drifting in and out of sleep, so my memories of what he says more often than not feel like dreams.
This morning he talked about feeling safe in our own bodies. Our bodies are houses, he was saying, and there are rooms inside the house. He had us look for different emotions, and this is where I may have drifted to sleep because I don’t remember what else he said, but I do remember finding the room of fear in my lower belly. My sense of the world is not safe there, in the area of my navel where I was once connected to a woman who may have fed that message to me from the moment of conception. I am not safe she may well have been thinking, young, in trouble, an embarrassment to her family, hidden away, kept from school, until she was safe again and I was gone.
To not be safe in your own body is like being a snake horrified by its own skin. It can shed it, but there is skin beneath the skin, so the only way to find freedom is to die.
Or to accept what is.
As I listened to Panache today, I thought about pretending to go to graduate school for a sense of felt safety. I thought about writing a thesis that would prove to my mind and body I was safe. I would write to prove something to myself. Look! I am housed, fed. Look! I have friends, a community of like-minded people. Look! I have goals and the will to go after them. Look! I have shoes on my feet and a coat for when it is cold. Look! I have money and running water.
Only I think I am not safe.
The world is trying to tell me that everything is okay. Sure, there’s COVID and global warming, but still, I woke up this morning and had espresso and fed the chickens and jumped in the freezing cold pool so I could experience wakefulness to the nth degree. The birds are singing. The clouds move in and out of view. The trees continue to grow. My body, meanwhile, screams TROUBLE TROUBLE TROUBLE. It screams this when I am relaxing. It screams this when I’m eating lunch or when it hears the phone ring or when there is a letter from someone I don’t recognize or when I have a dark thought I don’t even know I’m thinking and stress hormones wash through my now racing heart.
The turkey vulture that sits on top of the telephone pole, wings open, warming itself, looks at me with confusion. What is your problem? the turkey vulture says with its eyes. If you were really in trouble, I’d be down there pecking out your liver. You aren’t in trouble. You’re on vacation. What you are is an idiot. You’re at a party and you think it’s a death march.
I was thinking today that I would create a curriculum for myself and call it graduate school. In my imagined graduate program, I would have to write I am safe a thousand times on the board each morning. Instead of studying Italian or Japanese, I’d work at getting the language of felt safety into my brain so I could live and speak love.
People try to tell me that I’m wonderful, but that’s not really what my body needs to hear. My body doesn’t care much about wonderful. It cares about safe.
In the old days when I used to go to church, there would be that time when we’d shake the hands of those sitting close by and say “Peace be with you.”
You are safe.
It always felt awkward but well-intended, blessing people I didn’t know. The palms of our hands touching.
So now I ask myself if I’m truly interested in feeling safe or if I am I clinging to a sense of danger because that is what is most familiar to me. The woman who is beaten by her husband returns again and again because where she is with him is home even though it almost kills her.
Until one day she wakes up and realizes she is killing herself, that safety is worth the risk of losing the known.
I am interested in how we get the body to feel safe when it is already in an environment that is safe, when the danger is coming from the inside where nobody, even us, can see what is going on. How can we get someone to help us put out the fire when it is inside of us? Imagine calling the fire department and reporting an emergency, and when they ask for the location of the flames you say, In my guts.
Click.
What happens when I put a phone into the room of my lower abdomen and start calling myself, Hello, Darling. I called to tell you that you are safe. Hello, Sweetheart, just checking in to remind you to look around you and see all the proof that everything is okay. Hello, Sugar. It’s me. How was lunch? You’re safe. Hello, Pumpkin. I love you. Don’t forget to feel your breath, the luxury of long inhales and exhales. Don’t forget: life is short, and you might as well love it all because an open heart can see miracles where a closed heart sees the darkness of its own interior.
You
Are
Safe
Love,
me
