The family that lived below me had just gotten an absurdly fluffy cotton ball of a puppy. He was too much. One could hardly bear it. He nipped you excitedly with jagged little fangs and the pom-pom of his head was barely distinguishable from the pom-pom of his tail. They named the creature “Tiger” in English, despite the fact that only the cousin’s husband spoke a word of English and the rest of the extended clan only communicated in Hindi. I had lived in this apartment for something like four seasons and came to regard them as my own extended tribe. Grandfather’s house sat perched above the two-story sprawl that we all shared, directly on the top of a hill. Behind Grandfather’s house was a road, the kind with cars on it.
One day on my way back from the river I saw Tiger alone, snuffling around the back of Grandfather’s house. He was maybe eight weeks old and clearly not versed in either cars or monkeys, the language the street spoke. He looked lost, I felt worried. I walked across the lawn and down the two flights of stairs in the middle of our shared building to the matriarch, sitting in the doorway. “Tiger” I told her. “Tiger is at Grandfather’s house”. Because who knows, maybe its some doggy rite of passage and they meant to leave him there. So, I figured that I would let them know what was happening and either they would think that I was being ridic, and Tiger was clearly old enough for exploration, or they’d realize where he was and go get him.
Her brow knotted; “Tiger?” she asked. “Yes, yes, Tiger” I responded. The clan mobilized quickly, and everyone ran up behind the matriarch, stringy little boys with legs like newborn colts and muddy faced girls spotted with sequins. Wow, they are really concerned about Tiger, I thought. When we got to Grandfather’s house and I pointed out the tiny figure, absorbed in the chase of an insect in the garden the whole family palpably relaxed and started to laugh. “Tiger!”, and they laughed more. And it took me some moments to piece together that in the jungle right outside the town, the very jungle that borders the land that Grandfather’s house is on, there are for real, swear to God, and actual tigers running around. The peskier of the tiger lot has been known to, on occasion, waltz into the village and eat a fellow or two. And while I was huffing and puffing about a renegade puppy, the family thought that there was an actual situation with an actual orange stripey and for real tiger.
It made me reflect on how recently we have stabilized into a predator-free existence. How recent it was that we had to deal with the persistent presence of tigers, and bears, and warring tribes, and how in terms of evolution that measure of time is half the blink of an eye. Our neurology hasn’t had time to adjust to this relative safety; to this conspicuous lack of deadly threats.
Half a year later I sit in a classroom on the southern edge of Brazil and the teacher asks us a question; “How do you know when you feel safe?”
It was a damn good question. One I don’t think I’ve really asked myself. My body relaxes, I guess. My borders soften. I can feel my contours and extremities. It feels ok to have other people come close to me. The answers started to come. Safety is not something which absorbs a lot of our conscious thought. Safe is not even a word that often forms inside of me. Safety. Am I safe? But in our unconscious, it’s a very different story. Mostly we don’t think about tigers. About predators. Not unless we are somewhere dangerous; upstairs alone in the dark when we hear distinct movement in the kitchen below, or on a plane that feels like its lost control in turbulence. In these moments the animal in us is easy to track. It gets ready to run or to fight, or it starts to enter into panic. Although our experience is of one with a light dusting of tigers, the hard wiring of our mechanism is one which was designed for a tiger heavy experience.
If we aren’t able to identify how we feel in the body when we feel safe, we won’t know how to identify when we don’t. If we don’t know when we don’t feel safe, and how to create safety for ourselves, we’ll experience a low-grade anxiety which we are unsure the source and meaning of. When we have this chronic ‘activation’; we sleep poorly, we try to numb ourselves out to not feel this charge, we don’t relax. Sound familiar?
What I am learning is that for any experience to be, well, experienced fully, for us to be present, relaxed, curious, interested, we need to feel safe. And us feeling safe is our responsibility. If we figure out what that feels like inside of us, we can learn what we need to feel that way. When we feel safe, we are open to connection, to relaxation, to pleasure and ultimately to orgasm. It’s a big deal. I’ve just finished up the first year of a Somatic Experiencing training which studies the art of self-regulation. When you are able to regulate your own nervous system, to understand the signals of danger that your subtle system is responding to, and to change your environment or change the way you are perceiving it you have taken a huge step toward empowerment.
So, how do you know when you feel safe? And what do you need to feel that way? And how are you going to give that to yourself?