Last week I received a present consisting of 3 feathers from one of my clients. The feathers were from an owl, a buzzard and a Vlaamse Gaai (Flemish Jay) all of which came into my client’s life whilst walking in nature and now she has gifted them to me.
I also feel that these feathers are a gift from spirit encouraging me to continue revealing more of myself, my vulnerability and humanness to my clients.
And, in particular, helping my clients to connect to and own the power of feeling unsafe and to integrate this inside themselves to create more wholeness, which has definitely been helping my client who gave me the feathers.
I believe that feeling unsafe is at the core of all our (psychological) pain and vulnerability. Acknowledging and owning this is essential!
Failing to own feeling unsafe sentences us to either:
1) Isolation (fleeing or freezing)
2) Fighting (making someone else feel bad so you can feel better, well actually safer)
3) Peacekeeping (adapting, pleasing, carrying the responsibility/burden, etc.).
In all these options we end up dissociating from our core pain and vulnerability. Owning feeling unsafe is like a Tom-Tom for our central nervous system, every time you get lost, feel tense, uncomfortable, anxious, stuck or afraid you can practice acknowledging ‘I feel unsafe’.
Saying these three simple words, or acknowledging them internally, is a massive and empowering reality check. It allows you to feel and know what your body is experiencing. It strips your internal reality of all of its bullshit and illusions which lead you to isolation, fighting or peacekeeping.
You own your inner truth that you are not at ease, that at some level you actually feel unsafe. Something that you have experienced thousands of times in different ways and have shunned, rejected, avoided, drugged, bypassed, rationalised and even ‘worked on’. And now you stop and own it.
In so doing, you create a major shift from thinking what you should be or what others want or need you to be to what you need yourself. You can acknowledge and embody your humanness, to being you, to having a sensitive, vulnerable, beautiful body with a mind that is inclined to focus on fear.
Personally, I feel that there is so much unconditional love in owning feeling unsafe, being able to recognise this, express it, breathe with it and embody it. To be with this part of yourself without judgment, shame and self-rejection is a beautiful manifestation of self-acceptance.