Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow Morning Is About Finding Safety
Join me for a meditation and community conversation from 9-10:15am EST on ZOOM
Dear Friends,
The theme surfacing for me this week is finding and having a deep sense of safety within ourselves.
My daughter and I have been listening to this podcast, Otherworld, as a spooky Halloween treat. It’s been fun and has stimulated some good conversations between us about the afterlife, ghosts, and why unexplainable phenomena are so scary to people.
I’ve also been reflecting on the demons of money, status, and power and how they hijack people by attaching to wounds of scarcity, vulnerability, and fear.
Many of us do not have a fundamental sense of safety within ourselves. Developmental trauma, poor attachment, ancestral trauma, the collective trauma of our uprooted and dissociative culture…there are many things that stand in the way of our feeling settled and at home in the body and in our lives. Here are some symptoms of a lack a of strong base:
chronic low-level anxiety, worry, and stress
reactivity or emotionality
paranoia and fear
a sense of skating along the surface of life and not really feeling other people or nature or oneself
scarcity issues, a feeling that there won’t be enough for us
It’s funny—or not so funny—that as I make this list I can hear a kind of overseer voice saying something like, “Well, these are very common conditions…This is simply the result of modernity…Who doesn’t have these feelings?…It makes sense given the state of the world…” That’s all true and…
It doesn’t have to be like this for us. It really doesn’t. And in fact, we have to begin to see these conditions as symptoms of an illness that needs to be treated immediately and urgently. When we accept these states a “normal” we succumb to the malaise and maladies of modernity. I think we give up because we don’t know how to work with these feelings or what to do about them.
The way back to ourselves and to sanity is through the body…literally, through the ground of being and grounding our being through the energetic root of the body. Our roots are mostly uprooted. We can heal here. We can restore the connection to source, to earth, and to the state of feeling cared for, provided for, and safe. We can feel secure no matter what the outer circumstances.
This seems more important than ever. According to my teachers…if you think things are challenging now…just wait. Recently Thomas Hübl said in a talk, “We are going into more and more uncertainty. There will be more and more disruptions.” If I put on my futurist hat, I also see the writing on the wall. We’re headed for more chaos and if you’re smart, you’re beginning to wonder how you can fortify yourself.
I’m not saying a healthy root chakra is the answer to all of our problems, but I am saying it’s part of the solution. And it definitely helps on the personal and interpersonal levels. We were meant to be at home here on earth, in our bodies, in community. We were meant to feel like we belong here, because we do. And that we matter, because we do. And we have agency and authority in our lives, because we do.
When a culture or an individual has no root, they look for safety in all the wrong places: money, sex/relationship, power, status. These are not the source of our safety—never were and never will be. These are outcomes of having a strong feeling of connection to life and this planet. When we are rooted and grounded, we are provided for, we attract loving and trustworthy partners, we have access to deeper and more refined aspects of real empowerment, and we don’t really care about who knows it!
Come practice with me tomorrow as we root into our being and expand our capacity to hold what’s happening. Let’s find the root of the issue, together.
As always Coming Home weekly meditation practice is a pay-what-you-feel event. Recommended contribution is between $10-20, but you can pay whatever you feel including $0. Your presence is a gift. Here is the way: Venmo to @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown or Paypal to schuyler@artofemergence.com. All donations are appreciated!