How you do perceive life?
From your perceptual filters, what are your daily experiences?
Do you experience life as a weight to carry forth or some mystery unfolding to support you?
How do you view people around you?
What do you belief about your parents, your lover, children and fellow humans?
What do you belief about life?
Do you look for the next hurdles or do you seek the openings for growth?
Where does your attention go easily?
Experiences are intersections of our thoughts, our emotions and the scanning result of our reptilian brain or brain stem. Experiences are much more complex that what I just penned. Experiences reinforce what we believe in this now. Yet what we believe in, is not pure at its finest, we are contaminated by distorted memories, cognitive distortions and so much.
For many of us, we have been reinforcing our beliefs of fear, danger and unsafe for years and more intensely these past months.
What experiences have you been reinforcing?
What beliefs have you been reinforcing about life , about people, about work, about the world, about politics?
Our experiences are chemical (emotional), physiological (connected to our brainstem) , physical, mental ( connected to our thinking, our frontal lobes), energetic, and biological in nature. Yet we have little awareness of this.
I have struggled with anxiety a huge part of my life. I am still learning to navigate through. I am gently emerging through another series of high shot angst. It’s a path that I embrace with deep vulnerability and humility.
I believe and I know that I am not the only whose body scans for danger. This scanning is beyond my mental and emotive control. My nervous system has been in diligent service of my life, ensuring that I would be protected against all possible, potential and real external dangers, from the high pitch tone of someone, from the unsafety cues of someone’s face, from the monotone of someone, to not hearing from people I love and care most and so much more.
I have been in search for safety cues for as early as I remember. Our humans’ drive to survive and our longing to connect are ongoingly in a dance to include all of us, the safety and the unsafety.
Are you aware that you have been equally in search for safety cues for all of your life?
Neuroception, (term coined by Stephen Porges, father of the Polyvagal Theory) information collected by our nervous system inside us, outside us and between our nervous system and those of others, will determine whether we open up to connect or we drive to survive.
While we may have little control over our reptilian brain or brain stem, nature has beautifully equipped us with powers to discern, to question and to self-regulate.
When anxiety shows up, my sense of fear, of something “about to go wrong”, I pause and ask myself
Is this danger real?
Is my life in danger?
Am I 100% safe right here right now?
As I walk myself through these questions, whether the danger is real or not, I have been slowly moving into self-regulating.
My invitation to you if you have reached so far, may you ask yourself these questions and act accordingly.
Is this danger real?
Is my life in danger?
Am I 100% safe right here right now?
To own our power, our emotions, our inner sense of safety, it begins by spending time with people, in situation, in instances that support us in experiencing safety, in building our resilience and in strengthening our sense of connection. Safety is embodied. It is not in the mind but in the body. Unless until, we we find safety within, Earth will never be safe.
My deepest wishes for each one of us as we transit from uncertainly to uncertainty is
May we be safe to connect
May we be safe to feel unsafe
May we be safe to close off
May we be safe to open up
May we be safe to experience what is
May we be tender and willing to reach out and surrender to a greater love and greater conscience.
Love from my heart to yours
Graphic Works @ NyameDua 2021
Post © Megha Venketasamy, 2021. All rights reserved.
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