Many people in the world are struggling to feel safe right now given that we are living in a global climate where danger is ever-present and looming and we are constantly being bombarded by this warning and that warning about all the plethora of dangers that exist. But even in times that do not pose as much danger to the people of the world as this one, many people struggle to feel safe. Feeling unsafe all the time is corrosive. It is not a state of being that a person can maintain long term. Feeling chronically unsafe implies that your body is being constantly flooded with stress chemicals and that you are living in chronic psychological distress. This takes a toll on your wellbeing big time. For this reason, I’m going to give you some tricks for how to feel safer. 

It is really important if you feel unsafe to know that your being needs to be able to tell you when you are actually in an unsafe situation so you can take actions accordingly. The goal of feeling safer should not be to ignore important cues your being is sending to you. The goal isn’t to make it feel better to stay in an unsafe situation. For example, imagine a woman who is in an abusive relationship using techniques to feel safer in that situation, rather than taking the action on that feeling of unsafety to get out of the situation. Your first go-to when you feel unsafe should be to get out of any immediate danger that may exists and get into a safer situation. The problem in today’s world is that in the modern world, we are dealing with unsafety’s that are not immediate. They are more complex and chronic. They look less like being unsafe because a sabretooth tiger is chasing us in the moment and more like the ongoing unsafety of censorship that is going on in the world and what this means for our sense of safety within society. On top of this, many people who have experienced trauma, have a very hard time feeling safe, despite being in immediate situations where they are objectively safe. When this is the case, it is important to help yourself to feel safer and doing so, will in fact help you to better navigate the types of unsafety’s that may exist in your life. 

Some of us are so accustomed to feeling unsafe that we don’t even consciously recognize that feeling unsafe is what is happening. In order to feel safer, you have to first notice and name that what is happening is that you are feeling unsafe. That what has been triggered is your danger response. From there, you need to identify what you are seeing as dangerous. And from there, you have three basic approaches. I think it is best to do all three, rather than to choose between them. These three approaches to feeling unsafe are: To take action to make the situation safer, to change your perception of the situation to a perception that makes you feel safer. And to change the way your body is reacting i.e. calm down your nervous system. Let’s look at some of the best tools for doing this.              

1. Turn your attention inside and witness the unsafety itself. Unsafety shows up inside of you as sensations, feelings, internal dialogue thoughts, images, and for some people even sounds and smells too. Close your eyes and feel and witness these, like a meditation. This is going to be hard at first because the sensations associated with unsafety do not feel good and they either paralyze you as if you are frozen or make you want to do something, like run or hide or fight. Allow the feelings and sensations to echo through your whole body. Hear the internal dialogue thoughts and watch the images as they arise and dissipate. You can mentally name the things you are feeling and hearing and seeing as they occur, just to keep yourself in this witness perspective. Doing this, keeps you from dissociating from yourself in response to fear. If you dissociate from yourself when you feel fear, you abandon yourself when you feel afraid. Obviously being abandoned when you are afraid, makes your fear much worse. Instead, it brings unconditional presence to yourself, which decreases the fear. It also gives you valuable information about your fear, that helps you to know yourself better and make informed decisions for yourself. It also activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the fear response and promotes a sense of calm. This exercise signals your brain and body that if you are focused inside yourself like this rather than focused externally, you are not currently in immediate danger. If you would like to dive deeper on this exercise, you can watch my video titled: The Emotional Experiencing Process. Just remember that when it comes to experiencing unsafety, it really helps to name what you are seeing and hearing and feeling because doing so prevents you from being taken out of the exercise and down a “worry wormhole” where an aspect of the exercise takes you off purely into the mental field where you are engaged only with a negative visualization chain of possible bad things that have happened or could happen and where you are no longer even noticing how you feel in your body in the here and now.”
2. Become consciously proactive about whatever it is that is making you feel unsafe. To do this, first write down something you are afraid of. From there, identify what you can control about this and what you cannot control about it. Accept that you cannot control those things you cannot control. With the things you can control, create an actual plan for empowered actions to take and do those. If you don’t know what you can do about it, put energy into doing research about it. Often, our sense of unsafety is extreme because we passively worry about things, and by doing so, slip into the feeling of powerlessness without taking any kind of proactive approach to the unsafety we feel. For example, Roger felt really unsafe about the danger of potentially losing his 401K retirement money. When he did this exercise, he realized that he does not have control over the US Economy collapsing or not. He does not have any control over whether the industry he is in stands the test of time. He does not have control over what the CEO of his company decides to do with the company. On the other hand, he does have control over taking money out of his 401K account. He does have control over whether he stays working in his industry or finds a backup industry. He does have control over finding different methods of building a retirement for himself. He does have control over moving to another country where his industry is booming. He does have control over investing money in different things, rather than putting all of his money into one basket. He does have control over shifting his perspective about retirement in general. With this, he goes to work researching and making plans and back up plans and taking actions that cause him to feel safer about the future of his finances.
3.  Identify your fearful thought and write down any thought that soothes that thought. For this exercise, it is best to get to the root or core thought. The way you do this, is by asking “Why Would That Be So bad?” or/and What Would That Mean for Me? And then answering as vulnerably as possible. For example, let’s say that you had a thought like I’m going to be fired. You would then ask: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: Because then I wouldn’t have any money. To that thought, you would then ask yourself: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: Because I would lose my home. To that you would ask yourself: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: I would have to move back in with my parents. To that you would ask: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: I would be seen as a failure. To that you would ask: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: I would rejected. To that you would ask: Why would that be so bad and/or what would that mean for me? Your answer may be: I’d feel alone and bad about myself. You could technically keep going with this train of questioning to each thought even longer. But we have defined the root of what it is that is truly feared: Feeling alone and feeling bad about oneself. This thought will come with a lot of vulnerable emotional intensity. Along the way to getting to this root thought, we also discovered that there is a fear of being seen as a failure, being rejected, moving back in with the parents. What this person needs to do, is to come up with thoughts and perspectives and evidence that soothes or better yet, disproves these thoughts… That I might lose my job. That I would have to move back in with by parents. That I would be a failure. That I will be rejected. And most especially, the core fearful thought. In this case, it would be: I would feel alone and bad about myself. Some thoughts that might soothe the fear would be: I have an aunt that would let me move in with her and I have a cousin who would be thrilled to move in somewhere together and plenty of people don’t even have parents to move in with and they find a way to make it. So, I don’t have to move in with my parents. I have friends who don’t care at all how much money I make or if I have a job. So, technically I won’t be alone or feel alone if I lose my job. I don’t want my self-esteem to ride on how my parents see me, which obviously based on this exercise, I can see it still does. Nor do I want it to ride on whether I have a job. This has motivated me to place my self-esteem in different things that are way more in my own control. That sounds kind of empowering actually. Other people really don’t care if I fail or succeed. They are too overwhelmed trying to deal with their own lives to spend their time focusing on me failing or not. I feel bad about myself, even with this job I have. So, really losing my job wouldn’t suddenly cause me to lose something. And there are better ways to work on that than trying to prove my worth through a stupid job. I am acting like the only job I could get, is this one job. If I lost my job, I could get another job. This world is very large and lots of people need my skillset. I can see my poor self-esteem even in this scarcity attitude I have towards it not even crossing my mind that I have enough value to be in demand by other companies. I have enough money to look for a job without getting income and still afford everything for three months. That is enough time to find something new. I don’t know that I am getting fired. I am assuming this based off of rumors about layoffs in the company. I can even see my poor self-esteem in this assumption. This really isn’t that I am unsafe. This is a self-esteem issue. 
   You get the point. This exercise would continue until you feel significant relief regarding your sense of safety. When we experience chronic unsafety, our mind is usually doing the opposite of this. Our mind automatically comes up with all the thoughts that could possibly make us more scared and more convinced of our unsafety. With this exercise, we are consciously practicing doing the opposite. It is hard at first because you are so, so not used to it. And because you might have a part of you that is convinced that looking for proof that you are safe, may just make you more unsafe. As if it is choosing denial and putting you at risk of being blindsided. But we are not doing this exercise to turn a blind eye to dangers. In fact, this exercise helps to clearly identify them, so that you can clarify the situation and respond in a more conscious way than you would if your danger centers were triggered into emergency mode.
4. Create a list of things that help you specifically to feel safe. Everyone’s list will be different. After all, one person may feel safer around a specific animal or in a specific environment and one person will feel unsafe around that animal or in that environment. One person may have a negative association with something that another person finds deeply soothing and has a positive association with. To give you an example of this list, here is a list done by a friend of mine:  
   Listening to 128 Hz, 528 Hz or 396 Hz music on YouTube 
   Writing in my positive focus journal
   Listening to guided meditations
   Watching cooking shows
   Swimming in a pool with goggles on
   Looking at my collection of feel-good images that I put together 
   Listening to my collection of feel-good sounds I put together 
   Hiking to a lookout spot with a big view
   Taking a hot bath with Epsom salts and a bath bomb that is either pink or purple  
   Walking on the beach and digging my feet into the sand
   Petting cats
   Buying gifts for people and wrapping them up beautifully
   Watching legally blonde
   The flavor of a quesadilla made with mayonnaise, melted cheddar and fresh tomato and also mashed potatoes.
   Going to my favorite tea shop for a sweet tea latte
   The smell of lilac 
   The smell of foam mattresses
   My weighted blanket
   Weddings
   Talking to one of my two best friends, Leila
   Reading in haybales
   Watching puppies and other cute animals on Instagram
   Sticking my fingers in uncooked rice
   Aquariums
   Grandfather clock noises
   Watching people be kind to each other
   Making treasure hunts for children
   Popping tar bubbles in old roads
   Christmas and anything to do with Christmas
   Walking in aspen forests
   Listening to Jim Gaffigan, my favorite comedian
   You get the idea. Once you’ve created your list, get into the habit of going to that list to pick out either one or a few things on that list to do. 
5. Recognize the safety in the here and now by coming into the here and now. When we feel unsafe, we are actually living in the past or the future. We are mentally living in the negative experience of what did happen before or what could or will happen later. Your mind does this so you can try to resolve what happened or pre-respond to what might happen, because it thinks that by doing so, you can prevent it from actually happening. Your mind is telling you that the bad thing is happening now. To counteract this, get into the practice of deliberately placing all of your attention on where you are right here and now with all of your senses. And as you do this, ask yourself, am I unsafe right now? If your mind says yes, invite it to tell you why. It will then give reasons like: There is a war happening or I might die of a sickness or my job is unstable or the people I love might die or I’m in the middle of a lawsuit or anything else. Then, ask yourself with each worry item, but what is happening right now? It can help to name what is happening. Such as: Right now, I am sitting in a room. The couch is bouncy. I can hear road noise outside. The cat is in the corner asleep. The sunshine is coming in the window. I smell the breakfast I made still in the air. There are white curtains. And keep doing this, noticing that your body is now starting to register that you are actually safe right now. For a person who feels chronic anxiety (which is about the future) or who has experienced trauma (which is about the past), it is hard to actually be in the present moment. It’s like another dimension that you don’t spend much time in. You have to deliberately train yourself as a practice. But it can do wonders for your nervous system.
6. Create a collection of safety sounds, safety images and safety smells. Use them as safety triggers. It would shock you to know just how much influence sounds have on your feeling of safety. The sounds that cause one person to feel safe are going to be different than another. These could be anything from ocean sounds to bird sounds to city sounds to ASMR sounds to certain songs. As a little tip, human beings are particularly affected by birdsong. We have been programmed for millions of years that when birds are chirping, we are not in danger because they go silent when a predator is near or when there is a storm or when other bad things are happening. And it is particularly effective to listen to the birdsong from the place where your mother gestated you, the place where you grew up, familiar places you associate with positive experiences and don’t forget, the lands of your ancestors. For example, if I knew that my ancestors were from Dorset England, I would find birdsong from Dorset England. Seek out and create a collection of the sounds that make you feel safe and then play them when you want to feel safer. 
   Do the same with safety images. These could be anything from images of people you love or who make you feel safer in the world to photos that remind you of good memories to artistic photographs that cause you to feel safe to images of cute animals to images of cartoon or comic book scenes to newspaper cut outs to images of angels to quotes that cause you to feel safer to places that make you feel safe to colors that make you feel safe etc. Look through this collection of images when you want to feel safer. 
   Do the same with safety smells. Seek out and collect smells that you know make you feel safe. These could be smells from your childhood that evoke a sense of safety, specific candles, the smell of your partner’s clothes, the smell of a pet, specific incense, certain spices, baking cookies or bread specifically for the smell, doing laundry specifically for the smell, going to the ocean specifically for the smell etc. As a special hint, these tools are particularly effective when you do them at the same time. Look through your safety images at the same time as you listen to your safety sounds. And at the same time as you smell one or more safety smells. What you are doing with this exercise is creating safety triggers. This is the positive version of a traditional trigger, which is negative. And you know how powerful those are. These can be especially powerful too.   
7.  Use 2 different breathing pattern exercises. You can pick whichever feels best to you at a given time. The first is the 4-6-8 breath. For this breathing pattern, you breathe in for the count of four seconds, hold your breath at the top of that inhale for six seconds, and breathe out for the count of eight seconds. And the second breathing pattern is the box breath. For this breathing pattern, you breathe in for the count of four seconds, hold at the top of the inhale for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds and hold again at the end of the exhale for four seconds. With these breathing patterns, do them for whatever duration feels comfortable and effective for you. Some people like 3 minutes. Some people like 5 minutes. Some people like ten to 15 minutes. Others will use them much longer. These breathing patterns are incredibly effective for quickly decreasing stress levels, giving your mind something to focus on instead of fixating on danger and promoting a sense of physiological safety. You can think of them like built in medicine for feeling unsafe.
8. Create an internal safe space and go there when you need to feel safer. This is a safe place that you have total control over and that you can mentally go to at any time. Many of us have never had the ability to create a safe place for ourselves. That has been an area of powerlessness in our life. So, the ability to actually create a safe place and utilize it, is a deeply healing thing in and of itself. By creating this safe space in our minds, we’re able to bend the physical rules that govern and restrict us in our physical life. For example, a cut on our arm might usually take two weeks to heal in physical life, but in our safe space, we can put a special salve on it, and it can heal before our eyes. This kind of “magical thinking” is actually a critical ingredient when we are healing from states of powerlessness. When you are creating an internal safe space, keep in mind that this will be an intensely individual place; therefore, there’s no right or wrong way to create it. Allow your mind to reveal to you what would feel best. Just think for a moment about a place that gave you the closest feeling to safety in this life. For example, it could have been a mossy forest. Or Santa’s workshop in the North Pole. Or a coral reef. Or the inside of a protective animal. Or the bread cave inside of the bubbles in a pizza crust. Or it may be up in the billowing clouds. Or your grandmother’s house. Or the inside of a fairy house. Or a place from a comic book or video game. Or outer space. Or a school. Or the inside of a purple geode. Or snow-covered mountains. Or the inside of a snow-globe. There is literally no limit. Just try to identify a place that feels or sounds the safest to you and imagine this place existing inside of you. When you want to feel safer, go there and be in it, walk around it, lay in it, bathe in it, play with and engage with the things in it. Each time you go there, you will be adding details. For example, say your safe place is a beach. One day you may go there and realize that having beach beds with canopies would feel even safer and so, you add them. The next, you decide that you want to have your pet dog or a pet unicorn there and to sit on the beach petting it. The next day, you may decide that adding a tunnel from the beach space to an aspen forest feels even safer. 
   If anything unsafe appears in your safe space, this simply means that your mind does not feel you have any control over being safe because someone or something was against your safety before in your life. What is healing for you if this occurs, is to become really creative and trouble shoot the unsafety. For example, you can have protectors, such as angels or Vikings or super heroes or mythical animals come in and deal with the unsafety. Or you can go look at what the unsafety is specifically and deal with it directly. Or you can have it rain some substance that burns and dissolves anything it touches that isn’t supposed to be there. Or you can demolish the old safe space and create a new one. This place will feel more and more real to you and therefore will become more effective as time goes on. The point is to go there, like you would with a meditative visualization and really be in it with all of your senses. Resourcing the effect that being there is having on the way you feel and letting that spread through your whole body. 
9. Root into the deeper security of the formless self. There is absolutely nothing wrong with setting up your life experience so that externally you have the experience of security. To the degree that it does not in and of itself diminish your wellbeing or life experience. And to the degree that it is possible. It is healthy to do so and more than that, this is part of personal expansion. A big part of universal expansion is inherent in creating safety in this physical dimension, especially for each other. At the same time, there is a point to which safety is not actually possible in the world of form because it is so fluctuating and temporary. Yet, the world of form is where most of us look for solidness in order to guarantee ourselves safety. The world of form is currently the leading edge of expansion. This means it is ever changing. The structures you depend on, your job, laws, the people, places and things in it, your relationships, your health or life insurance, your body etc. can always change. They are always changing. You cannot be sure they will always be the same or that going forward they will be there at all. This makes basing your safety entirely on their solidness, such as them staying the same or always existing, a bit like building a sand castle where the waves break. Accepting this, I mean really accepting this, will actually re-direct you to anchor your sense of safety into something deeper than the world of form. You will be consciously existing in two dimensions. Not losing awareness of nor the truth of one dimension as you focus entirely into one or the other. That is a main element of the mastery of a conscious life.


10.  

In a time-space reality of contrast, which means you experience both the wanted and the unwanted, you are going to experience both wanted and unwanted things. Both danger and safety. Both pleasure and pain. It is the challenge of unwanted things that brings about your personal expansion and an increase in your consciousness. This temporal world, including this one life you are living right now, is playing out within the context of the bigger picture of the evolution of consciousness itself. What it is, is the energetic essence coming into the dimension of form. The timeless coming into the dimension of time. The constant coming into the dimension of change. And this dimension of existence, most especially this dimension of you, can offer real security. Because in this, you will anchor into what is timeless, what cannot be damaged and what is beyond death. Continuing to come back to an awareness of that which is beyond this life, including that aspect of you that is beyond this life, will put you in the bigger picture and this will make things that make you feel unsafe, seem smaller and also temporary. So, the very temporariness that causes you to feel unsafe, can potentially in this way, also be the very thing that makes you feel safer. Remember that while building safety for yourself and others is perfectly fine, ultimately being safe was not your purpose for coming into this life. If you obsess over trying to make your life secure and safe, all that will happen is that you will arrive at death…safely. Any practice that helps you to remember or become conscious of this formless dimension, of that which is beyond this temporary form you are currently experiencing the world of form through, will help you to feel safer. 

As an additional note to this list, never underestimate the power of co-regulation when it comes to unsafety. You are a human. Humans are a socially dependent species. Humans need each other to be safe and to feel safe. This means, seek other people out and be in connection. Let other people help you out of whatever unsafety you are facing. The feeling of safety is a fundamental need. It is a cornerstone of the quality of life that you are experiencing. So, put some conscious energy into these practices and watch your quality of life improve.