Can Mindfulness Really Help You Let Your Guard Down?

How long do we need to practice mindfulness for in order to feel safe? When we can feel like we can let our guard down, where the fear dissipates, the emotions start to settle, and we can be ourselves, or we can feel like we can really come home to a feeling of true safety. How long do we need to practice mindfulness for to feel the sense of refuge that everyone talks about? It's a real concern and question that a lot of us have. Like, am I going to find that in one minute of true mindfulness meditation? Am I going to find it in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, 10 years? When will that feeling of safety truly come? And for me, this is one of the major benefits of mindfulness meditation practice is that it can help us to feel safer and safer where the fear drops away. I've been practicing mindfulness for quite a while. I was a Buddhist monk for over two years in the Thai Theravada tradition. I was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for over five years with Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salzberg and all the teachers who go through there. And I'm a mindfulness trainer for the program Born at Google. And I've been teaching executives, CEOs, prison inmates, kids, a lot of different kinds of people on how to practice mindfulness, but I've also been training people on how to teach mindfulness to help others feel safe and content and feeling like they can be at home in their own bodies and their own hearts. I've been training a lot of therapists and counselors on how to do this, life coaches and yoga teachers. And it's not easy to help people to feel safe sometimes in this world where there's seemingly threats around every corner. You know, a sense of overwhelm and stress are on the rise for a variety of reasons that we don't need to get into right now. And trauma sensitivity is something that more and more people have on their radar, fortunately. But if you're living with trauma, or if you have fear, or if you want to help people who are going through a lot to feel um calm, grounded and peaceful, you know how hard it is to meet yourself where you are, to open to your experience, or to um it can be very intimidating to even broach that subject. How do I be present with my experience if I don't like my experience? If I if I've been wanting to distract myself and get away from how I actually feel. Um for it to be effective in feeling safe? And so I share a few thoughts and insights and tools. And I'd love to get your feedback on what you think of that and what's helpful for you in feeling safe, um, or how you help others to feel safe. Uh the main goal is to be sensitive to trauma, not to go too uh much in the deep end. Um so if that's the case for you, please back off and pause if you're feeling overwhelmed. But I hope that you enjoy uh these thoughts and this video that I uh clip for you. Love to get your feedback. And if you want further support in your practice or in your mindfulness teaching, check out the links below and we'd be honored to support you. Thank you and enjoy the clip. Yeah, that can be condensed into a few seconds. Yeah, and it can also be expanded to a whole 10-day retreat, like where that's all we do is to sense into, you know, are we feeling safe? What conditions are conducive to our sense of safety? What is the feeling of fear? I I I actually did that Sunday night through Monday night this week pretty much nonstop. I don't want to go into too much detail, but I was feeling unsafe for a variety of reasons. And it was a really rich exploration. Like, what and it took me a while to realize I was feeling unsafe. And to me, like it was such a wonderful recognition. Like, oh, I'm feeling unsafe. Whereas, you know, in my past, I would suppress it or distract myself or quote unquote, like man up to not feel unsafe. And so it was wonderful to really kind of surrender to that sense of vulnerability and a sense into what were the factors involved that were present, and also a condition from my past that were kind of coming up. Because I think both were true, like both there were factors of present, like there I was actually unsafe, like in the present, like pretty objectively, and there were things from my past that were coming up too that felt unsafe. So even just recognizing that and acknowledging it with self-compassion in the sense that, yeah, like of course I'm not feeling safe right now. There are all these factors, yeah. I wouldn't blame anyone else for not feeling safe with these same circumstances, you know, for my self-care as well as agency, speaking up, doing what I can to feel safe, both externally and internally. Not to suppress fear, but to open to it and acknowledge it and to work with it with agency. So yeah, so we can expand this practice of safety, or we can condense it if we can't, you know, in an appropriate way. We can do that just with you know, just simple just looking around, taking stock of where we are, maybe taking a few deep breaths, you know, just kind of sensing the internal landscape. So I'm working with a communication coach right now. I I shared this in our newsletter a few weeks ago. But one of the things that my communication coach shared with me is that there's a big group of people who need to feel safe in order to feel comfortable connecting with others. That safety is sort of the primary need or the initial need. And once we feel safe, then it's far easier to connect with others. There's a lot of other people who are the exact opposite, where they need to feel connected with others in order to feel safe. I fall into the former camp where I need to feel safe in order to feel connected. I think I think my wife is the opposite, and it's largely true for couples. But this can be, you know, in friendships, you know, any kind of relationship, or just you know, being around other people. And so part of my work is to sense safety or sense lack of safety or presence of safety, and how is that related to feelings of connection? And so, as mindfulness teachers, I think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of people who are teaching thrive on having and acknowledging a safe environment, you know, and so those people may appreciate ground rules, the voicing of intention, tone of voice, how much we explicitly like acknowledge what they're saying, and like listening to their words and asking, Do I hear you correctly when you say this? You know, questions like what would help this experience feel more safe for you? Would you like to keep your eyes open? Bathroom is over there. Please feel free to get some water, stop me anytime if things feel uncertain or scary. There's so many things we can do to invite a sense of safety. We can't make anyone feel safe, but we can create conditions that are conducive for safety, and we can, you know, listen. How is this feeling? And then, you know, once they're feeling safe, then it's far easier for them to connect with themselves. And then there's also gonna be a large amount of people who we teach over the years that are the opposite, or they need a sense of connection first in order to feel safe. So maybe those people appreciate maybe a little bit of small talk, kind of a natural body language, oftentimes as mindfulness teachers, it can be very helpful for us to share our own vulnerabilities in as much of an authentic way as we can. You know, in an appropriate way for whatever that setting is. Can share stories of our own practice our day. I think that's one of the reasons why I'm drawn to this these practices is because it helps me feel safe and I'm much more readily available to others as a result.