What does safety feel like to you?

For some people, the answer is 'I don't know'. Particularly for people living with a lot of trauma, or for those under a lot of stress or going through challenging times. The idea of feeling safe seems a bit abstract and unknowable in a real world sense.

Sometimes it's hard to know what safe feels like in our increasingly complex and fast paced world.

One way to begin to find a sense of safety is by starting with your imagination…

There's a concept in Somatic Experiencing (the gentle nervous system regulation and trauma healing work I offer) called 'coherence'. Coherence in this context is a measure of wholeness, as the various physiological systems in the body function together to create a feeling of wellbeing, where we are self regulating in an optimal way. Our bodies are doing what they're supposed to be doing, working as they should.

Sometimes, to oversimplify, I explain it by saying it boils down to 'what's working'. For nervous systems that are chronically under a lot of stress or holding a lot of trauma, there are so many spot fires that focussing on putting out fires really just creates more fire, more dysregulation.

I love the sound of humming bees. For a while, I lived in a house with a flowering citrus in the yard. Not quite an orange, not quite a grapefruit. When it flowered, all the bees would come. At those times, I called it the humming tree. I would go sit under it and listen. I'd hum back to the bees and I think the bees liked that. After a while, it made me feel like the hum was under my skin, like I was made of hum, and the humming felt like happiness.

There's a reason why humming feels like happiness.

Here's one of my favourite somatic (body based) tools in my own magic stress-relieving toolbox.

This is also a tool that I regularly use with and teach to clients for easing stress and regulating their nervous systems so they feel more calm, present, easeful and able to see more creative solutions to the challenges they're dealing with (because sometimes it's hard to see the creative way out when you're stressed out in survival mode).

This particular tool is known as orienting.

You might've heard the phrase: what we resist persists.

And it's true, but why does it happen?

'What we resist persists' is one facet of a deeper truth: what we place our attention on grows.

Here’s today’s experiment - zoom right in.

It’s a kind of antidote to the vague dissociation a lot of us live in, focussed on scrolling screens and distractions.

Zoom right into right now.

Give this experiment a try, and see what you notice.

What does ‘good’ feel like in your body?

Many of my clients are very familiar with this question!

When someone asks us how we are, it’s easy to say ‘good’, but how often do we stop and think about (or feel into) what ‘good’ actually means as we say it?

What’s it like to work with me?

This is a question I get a bit, given all the different things I offer, so here’s an idea of the different things we might focus on together if you were a client of mine.

Right now I’m feeling…

This is a little but powerful prompt I use to check in with myself whenever I think of it throughout the day. I make a game of it to find the exact words to describe how I’m feeling, and I know when I have it right because part of me lights up and I feel seen when I get it exactly spot on.

Calm is the eye of the storm.

Calm is safe harbour.

Calm is a regulated nervous system that has the capacity to handle the challenges of life with grace.

Calm is a super power when holding space for others - like the doctor, other people’s nervous systems pick up on the calm of mine, and they start to feel that things are okay. They start to feel that nothing’s wrong here. They start to feel like THEY’RE ok, exactly as they are.

Trees (and the rest of nature) have no concept of progress. They grow because the conditions are right.

What if we did the same? Instead of trying to force progress, instead of frantically reading more self help books and beating ourselves up for not healing fast enough, what if we recognised that perhaps right now the conditions aren’t right for us to be where we’d like to be?

And instead of forcing ourselves, we started creating the right conditions for us to heal, grow and thrive?

Have you ever tried to read the story of your own life? Our life stories are written in our bodies - the tension we carry, our smile lines, our gestures and the ways that we move.

It’s a different kind of language than the one we’re used to hearing. It speaks in sensations - in tightness and ease, in tingles of energy, in freezy feeling states, in warmth. As we become more and more fluent, deeper and deeper subtleties arise. It’s endlessly fascinating! At least, it is to me - I love what happens when we learn to attune to ourselves so deeply.

This simple tool is a way of attuning to yourself more deeply in a way that feels really good. Taking the time to check in shows you you’re listening to yourself. Taking the time to find the right words shows you that you care. And as you learn the subtle nuances of how you feel, moment to moment, you’re validating your own experience (which is a powerful way, over time, of dismantling unworthiness and not-enoughness).

Give it a try!