You don’t have to feel safe all the time—but you can create small pockets of safety. In this video I talk about the idea of “micro-safety,” simple practices that remind your body you’re okay right now. Over time, these little drops of safety add up to real change.
When people say creating safety in your body, what does that mean? Hi, my name is Rachel Haveecost. I'm a writer and a health advocate. And this month on cadre, we are talking all about safety. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how to actually create safety in your body. So I first want you to think about how many times in your life, myself included, you're living outside of your body, whether that 's raising thoughts, scrolling endlessly, running on autopilot, not paying attention to bodily cues like hunger or if you have to go to the bathroom.
And if your body has felt unsafe in the past , it makes sense that you would want to escape it. These are all ways for us to dissociate or get out of our body because being in our body doesn't actually feel safe. Unfortunately, in order to create a sense of safety psychologically, we have to create a sense of safety inside of our bodies. We have to come home to ourselves, but very, very gently. Creating safety in your body is actually about giving it signals of calm and starting to teach it from the outside, what it feels like to feel safe before it actually naturally feels that way.
That can look like breathing techniques to reduce your heart rate. That can look like grounding techniques, which can be as simple as putting your bare feet on grass or in the dirt. This can be taking moments throughout the day, like little micro moments to pause, you roll your shoulders back, close your eyes, and literally say to yourself, I'm right here, checking in with your body, asking how you feel, doing things like body scans, asking yourself how you feel physically. Touch can be really wonderful too.
You can press your palms together. You can do a little butterfly hug like this, wrap yourself in a blanket, ways to experience touch against your skin. So you're actually feeling your body in space. And at first, these practices will feel awkward. They'll feel silly. It'll feel like this is such a small thing, like how is this going to be effective? And that is totally normal. Oftentimes, when we don't feel safety in our bodies, we also have a tendency to seek really big experiences to feel something.
And the goal with creating safety in our bodies is to actually go really, really small. So we can start to notice really, really small, quiet ways that we are safe and that we exist. By doing this, you're teaching your body that being here right now is not dangerous. So the more you practice these tiny little rituals, the more your nervous system will begin to believe it. And safety will start to not just be become something that you look for, it will be something that you feel. And when your body starts to feel safe, everything shifts.
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