Cultivating inner security in the abyss

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In uncertainty there can be a pain so deep inside you that you don’t know what to do with, that comes in so fast that you start to wonder why every tool you have been working so hard to put in your tool box has completely disappeared.

It’s this feeling different than anxiety, it’s the extreme desire to feel safe, in control,  and able to avoid anything going wrong. It’s an attachment wound, an imprinted story, an invitation to earn security.

For me this happens when I am in the midst of a new pivot, a structural change in my relationship to a person, job, group, or thing. I talk about pivoting a lot but I often talk about how great and beautiful and strong it is. This is after a lot of practice in being extremely uncomfortable while pivoting and doing it anyways. The proof of the practice is coming out on the other side with evidence that it was worth the experiment and curiosity, even if it didn’t go the way I originally planned.

Often the way I originally planned for it to go was actually shit and the new plan the universe had in mind was much much better than I could have imagined.

In the midst of structural pivots I sometimes notice how much I have given my source away. Instead of turning inwards or to Spirit to find source energy I am in a pattern of turning to my partner, the internet, friends, my job, outside validation, etc. I’ll first say I believe validation and reflections of our worth are amazing. This is why we choose the people we do. To mirror back to us who we are - both our amazing strengths and what there is to work on. Reflections should be different than source. If these people’s cups are empty there won’t be much for anyone to drink out of.

The dark before the dawn of this awareness is illuminated when something threatens my security. This is where I pause to evaluate if it’s a real threat or perceived threat due to my attachment style. It is almost never a real threat, in fact it’s often something I intuitively trust, want, and am excited about. But the attachment wound overrides and says : this is not safe, this is where you will lose yourself.

And the only way to lose yourself is if you handed the source of your worth, hope, happiness, and delight over to someone else that wasn’t you or god. We can have any structure in place we want to create an illusion of safety. We get married, buy a house with someone, get the dream job with the dream salary, invest in the stock market, fence in the yard for the dog.

We all know that structures crumble, get rebuilt, get repainted, and continue on in all their glory. As Jessica Fern says in her book Poly Secure, it is not the structures that provide us real security, it is the quality of our experiences. Marriages end, the stock market crashes, there’s a hole in the fence, the company collapses, so on and so on. So if we are only relying on the fact the structure exists to provide our secure attachment, when the structure is removed we will have two options : to feel the feelings in steadiness and internal security, or to be certain nothing is safe anymore. When I look at the essence of what is true, it is good. It is maybe better than what I am willing to believe.

They say in the rooms “Figure it out is not a slogan.” and I pray to god somedays that maybe I could just take a break from NOT trying to figure it out and be a detective for a day and solve the mystery before the whole thing even starts. Where my life is headed, if I’ll land the deal, if my relationships will last for 2 months or 20 years, if my dog will live to be 90 (this can happen right?) Pretending to be Harriet the Spy as a child really makes its way into adulthood. But I cannot. I choose not to. Choice making, it’s own act of trust and patience and reverent willingness.

If I knew what a quilt was going to look like and feel like once it was done I would absolutely never sit down to make a quilt. I don’t make quilts to have a perfect finished object I make quilts to rearrange what is inside of me, to pivot as I wish, to learn to trust myself, to mess up and start again. And then at the end I hold something complete but it’s really not complete. It is used to redistribute wealth, as a gift, as a bed cover, as a vessel of hope. But the point was never for any of that to happen it was just to sit down and start. The only way to know what the quilt will ever look like it to lower the lever and start sewing.

The last thing I do before complete surrender at the bottom of a tree in a sub division in rural PA is to run through every possible scenario good and bad and rehearse the outcomes to make sure I can’t get knocked off my center. But the secret always is it’s not about protecting myself from the outside, it’s about cultivating the most intimate, brightest, powerful, accepting relationship with myself. Flaws included, no no grandiose visions, just that right relationship of knowing myself.

Again and again it is clear that if I am delighted by my own company, steady in my own worth, flooded with hope, in abundance, connected to something bigger than myself, and know that there is not a finite amount to be divided, but so much to be shared - it’s pretty fucking hard to knock me off the beam.

photo by Chloe Sells

1. Put on your hottest outfit. Then you put on headphones (noise cancelling are recommended) Turn on PARAD(w/m)E by Sylvan Esso (I recommend the live version from WITH) Then dance in a way where one who can delight you to the ultimate maximum space of highest good. And by no one is watching I mean actually do it alone. Mirrors help. That’s not narcissism or navel gazing. It’s raising your frequency for the good of all.

2. If you need more instruction read me sharing about How to Dance Alone in The New York Times Magazine

3. I miss teaching dance class so much, maybe we have a how to dance alone / how to dance with others class on zoom? Zoom feels very zoomy these days

4. Reading : Polysecure : Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy by Jessica Fern - I recommend this for people in all relationship styles, most attachment books are really straight and really monogamous and I feel like this book just blows everything out of the water with it’s spaciousness and focus on the self

5. Good fitting jeans

6. The intricacies of home, where home is, how home is

7. Jackie’s new haircut that makes me wild inside

8. Taking healthy risks every day

9. MLK/FBI documentary : I watched this on a plane last week next to a boy named Justice whose Mom dates his ex girlfriend and we watched it together and had movie club. MLK says : “This core fear and aggression towards African Americans I think has to do with white peoples own conception of themselves and the danger of Black people forcing a reckoning of violence of the American past.” I highly recommend this as a nuanced and comprehensive view of how the FBI murdered such a transformative and layered leader of the Civil Rights Movement, of people power, of truth.

10. Which reminds me how truth scares power, but it doesn’t have to - truth expands us. Nothing gets me in my truth body like getting in my body, more dancing is almost always the answer

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