Your footnote here helped me better understand my own assertion in a comment on your other post where I asked whether “falling in love” doesn’t preclude disintegration in order to be “loving.”
For me, yes you said it right and it's really helpful. So thank you.
I'll need to keep reading this and living it... until it sinks in... not just intellectually....but by allowing myself to feel the pain and the discomfort again and again... and recognizing that everything's actually OK. Over time, I hope I can then develop the faith you talk about... to feel progressively more and more accepted by the universe... and live with progressively less and less fear. I think that's going to take time. But I look forward to it ! Thank you for your guidance.
Really well written, as always. I'll add that in my own journey of healing and transformation, there's been times when even the felt sense of safety itself needed to be surrendered. It's paradoxical, I sense, that when enough safety has been established we can also move into edges that dissolve that very sense of safety, even on an existential level.
I was also reflecting on child birth, which historically and even today has often been a deeply unsafe experience for both the child and the mother, yet is the foundation for human life. Or the Big Bang, in which the cosmos exploded itself into infinite forms. Or Experience itself, in which God created the sense of separation and duality, which creates immense suffering and a lack of safety for many beings (who are also God).
I also think of the person who risks everything by running into the burning building to try saving the child. There's an experience of sacrificing one's safety for perhaps the safety of acting from/as the deepest depths of love, even when one's not consciously aware of that in the moment.
To me it feels like safety is always already here, and that there's moments when we can seemingly lose/forget/dissolve all sense of safety, and a larger safety holds us, even and sometimes especially if it doesn't feel so in the moment. A transpersonal safety that is both here, not here, sometimes here, always here, and never here, all simultaneously.
I thought of childbirth too, reading this essay, but from a different angle. When I was pregnant it frustrated me to no end that every pregnancy in the US is treated as high-risk when actually only 6-8% are. I was enjoying my body as powerful for the first time (it was creating a HUMAN with NO conscious effort)—while being treated as a specimen and a liability, as something weak and in need of constant professional intervention.
I’m grateful to modern medicine for many things, but helping me connect to my innate safety or power has never been one of them.
But the paradoxes you’re pointing to are very beautiful and profound. I think there is a great mystery in them.
This article definitely resonates from the place of having experienced profound healing and the compassion that motivates sharing it with others, thank you for finding the words to describe this truth.
I'm wondering how you address the paradox that is also inherently true: that when we habitually react to phenomena in ways that make us feel unsafe, based on trauma and the protective coping mechanisms that developed to prevent future trauma, we create a loop of self fulfilling prophecy. Our reality actually responds with those energies that make us feel unsafe because we're emanating/attracting it unconsciously. While it is true that being lovingly attuned to these uncomfortable parts is the path to healing them, there is also a very particular to the individual set of circumstances that create the safe container for that healing to happen, and simply going straight for externalizing vulnerability is not necessarily going to create that safe container. In other words, how can we help people intuitively navigate with their introspective awareness towards spaces that are safe for them to consistently show up with vulnerability and have that be attuned to as needed?
When seeing awakening as described in Buddhism as a haven to realize, as something I want to experience in this being, I’m struggling to understand if I need to create safety for awakening to occur and deepen or to even know what exactly to practice to make the possibility of fundamental safety realizable.
I appreciated the footnote the most! It’s a distinction I’ve been trying to articulate myself. That you can “get there” but blow past a lot of the healing/integration work, leading to an imbalance and more bypassing. Healing and awakening can happen together, but one can certainly be more prioritized at times. It almost feels like the focus on spiritual acceleration is a hijack of the left brain, hammering things without taking a more holistic view.
Profound and (eerily) personally relevant as always.
RE "Safety as Path" practices: Daniel - I would love to read about your experiences with community building in adulthood. Especially in the transition period between an insecure and a secure IWM. I'm there, and in my late twenties.
P.s. I find your articles tremendously attuning :)
What a wonderful article, full of pointers to be carefully considered. I love this one! Thank you.
Your footnote here helped me better understand my own assertion in a comment on your other post where I asked whether “falling in love” doesn’t preclude disintegration in order to be “loving.”
Thanks for this, Daniel. Your words have met me in a moment of deep, painful upwelling — which is to say: just at the right time.
🙏
Thank you for speaking from the ongoing mess of being human! You put a lot of things I’ve recently learned into words.
For me, yes you said it right and it's really helpful. So thank you.
I'll need to keep reading this and living it... until it sinks in... not just intellectually....but by allowing myself to feel the pain and the discomfort again and again... and recognizing that everything's actually OK. Over time, I hope I can then develop the faith you talk about... to feel progressively more and more accepted by the universe... and live with progressively less and less fear. I think that's going to take time. But I look forward to it ! Thank you for your guidance.
Really well written, as always. I'll add that in my own journey of healing and transformation, there's been times when even the felt sense of safety itself needed to be surrendered. It's paradoxical, I sense, that when enough safety has been established we can also move into edges that dissolve that very sense of safety, even on an existential level.
I was also reflecting on child birth, which historically and even today has often been a deeply unsafe experience for both the child and the mother, yet is the foundation for human life. Or the Big Bang, in which the cosmos exploded itself into infinite forms. Or Experience itself, in which God created the sense of separation and duality, which creates immense suffering and a lack of safety for many beings (who are also God).
I also think of the person who risks everything by running into the burning building to try saving the child. There's an experience of sacrificing one's safety for perhaps the safety of acting from/as the deepest depths of love, even when one's not consciously aware of that in the moment.
To me it feels like safety is always already here, and that there's moments when we can seemingly lose/forget/dissolve all sense of safety, and a larger safety holds us, even and sometimes especially if it doesn't feel so in the moment. A transpersonal safety that is both here, not here, sometimes here, always here, and never here, all simultaneously.
I thought of childbirth too, reading this essay, but from a different angle. When I was pregnant it frustrated me to no end that every pregnancy in the US is treated as high-risk when actually only 6-8% are. I was enjoying my body as powerful for the first time (it was creating a HUMAN with NO conscious effort)—while being treated as a specimen and a liability, as something weak and in need of constant professional intervention.
I’m grateful to modern medicine for many things, but helping me connect to my innate safety or power has never been one of them.
But the paradoxes you’re pointing to are very beautiful and profound. I think there is a great mystery in them.
This article definitely resonates from the place of having experienced profound healing and the compassion that motivates sharing it with others, thank you for finding the words to describe this truth.
I'm wondering how you address the paradox that is also inherently true: that when we habitually react to phenomena in ways that make us feel unsafe, based on trauma and the protective coping mechanisms that developed to prevent future trauma, we create a loop of self fulfilling prophecy. Our reality actually responds with those energies that make us feel unsafe because we're emanating/attracting it unconsciously. While it is true that being lovingly attuned to these uncomfortable parts is the path to healing them, there is also a very particular to the individual set of circumstances that create the safe container for that healing to happen, and simply going straight for externalizing vulnerability is not necessarily going to create that safe container. In other words, how can we help people intuitively navigate with their introspective awareness towards spaces that are safe for them to consistently show up with vulnerability and have that be attuned to as needed?
Your future article offers some answers to my question 😄 https://open.substack.com/pub/intimatemirror/p/the-alchemy-of-attunement?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2x2tkg
My experience is similar. 🙏🏻❤️🔥
When seeing awakening as described in Buddhism as a haven to realize, as something I want to experience in this being, I’m struggling to understand if I need to create safety for awakening to occur and deepen or to even know what exactly to practice to make the possibility of fundamental safety realizable.
I appreciated the footnote the most! It’s a distinction I’ve been trying to articulate myself. That you can “get there” but blow past a lot of the healing/integration work, leading to an imbalance and more bypassing. Healing and awakening can happen together, but one can certainly be more prioritized at times. It almost feels like the focus on spiritual acceleration is a hijack of the left brain, hammering things without taking a more holistic view.
Profound and (eerily) personally relevant as always.
RE "Safety as Path" practices: Daniel - I would love to read about your experiences with community building in adulthood. Especially in the transition period between an insecure and a secure IWM. I'm there, and in my late twenties.
P.s. I find your articles tremendously attuning :)