#24 Discover How To Feel Safe Within Yourself, feel secure in yourself + live as your authentic self

In this episode, I share with you exactly how to feel more secure in yourself. When we feel unsafe within, it affects every area of our lives, we seek external validation and our relationships suffer.   When you feel safe enough to be yourself, you can live as your authentic self in full self-expression, with pleasure and joy.

In this episode, you will discover:

• the paradox of feeling safe, 
• the 2 conditions for cultivating inner safety
• an embodiment practice to give insight into those areas of your life that you are trying to control.  

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About Tertia

I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.

In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.

I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.

Transcript

So I believe the only way for us to be fully self-actualize and to move through the world in such a way where we are confident we can hold space for ourselves and for those in our lives, we can have deep, intimate, and healthy relationships. We honor our internal guidance and our internal knowing. We can only do that if we feel safe enough to be ourselves. What happens when we don't feel safe is, that we tend to hide ourselves behind masks, right? We pretend to be someone that we are not. We keep quiet about the things that really disturb us, and we tend to people please, and we tend to do things that will make other people more loving and accepting of us. Now, often we only come to realize that we are not feeling safe later on in our life when things don't work out anymore.
And when it feels like it's really an uphill struggle and a battle, you might even experience feelings of being disillusioned with where your life is or feeling sad or empty or flat. And I'm here to tell you that it is totally possible for us to move from this space of disillusionment and emptiness into a space of fulfilment, into a space where you are really grounded and rooted in your own truth and a space where pleasure and joy and satisfaction is available to you. And so I'm assuming that if you are watching this video, you already have a knowing or an inkling that there's something inside that needs to shift. There's something that needs to transform or change so that you can begin to feel safer within yourself, and this will then in turn spread out into your life. So this is what we are going to unpack in the episode today.
And the two topics that I specifically want to get into is what feeling safe within actually means. And then I have two conditions that I want to share with you. There are many things that we can do to start cultivating that safety, but these are the two conditions that I chose specifically for this episode because in my life, they have been a very big part of how I reclaimed my own internal safety. So let's begin by unpacking what does internal safety mean? What does it mean to feel safe within? Being safe means that in my external environment right now, there's no immediate threat. And hopefully, as you are following along in this episode, I can say the same of you. There's no immediate threat in your environment right now. So you are in fact quite safe where you are right now. And this is the tricky thing with internal safety.
In my experience, often because we are safe in our external world, we mistake that to say because things are all right outside, I should be feeling better. I should not feel unsafe, I should not feel uncertain. There's no reason for me to feel like this because look, everything in my outside world is okay. What we then tend to do is we learn to live with it. From a somatic lens, what I see this internal feeling of unsafety does is it constricts and tenses up our entire being. And so you can imagine for yourself if you are moving through the world in this tense, constricted way, and it might be physically that you're feeling tense or constricted, for example, I used to always have like a hard ball on the pit of my stomach. So it could be that, but it could also be energetically you are constricted.
And so imagine how is it possible for us to even begin to cultivate confidence, to even feel good about our achievements, to celebrate the things that we've done? If we are always coming back to this tense, tight experience of not safe, it's not possible for us in this space to cultivate healthy relationships. Where, in the definition of a relationship, what it requires of us is to be able to be intimate with that other person. It's to show our hearts and to open ourselves. And this is not only in romantic relationships, but in any kind of relationship, there's a need for vulnerability and honesty with ourselves and with others. And so not feeling safe has got a tremendous effect on how you live your life. When we are in this constricted state, actually what it means is that our nervous system is on high alert, right?
So you might be feeling overwhelmed, you might be very easily triggered. You might have this knot of anxiety on your stomach, which is what I used to have. What I said earlier in terms of we learn to live with it. If this has been a part of your life for such a long time, it's very difficult to even think that it's possible to have anything else. It's very hard if your pain is so big front and centre to see beyond that and to know that there is a different kind of being that is available to you. And so it's my hope that the information that I'm sharing with you in this episode is going to help you see and feel into that possibility. So I wanna move on to the two conditions that I believe will be really instrumental and so, so supportive for you to embark on this journey of cultivating this inner safety.
The very first one is quite paradoxical, because in order for us to feel safe within, we don't work on feeling safe. Because what happens is if our nervous system is already in a state of high alert, if there are already all these triggers and layers of frozen tension inside of us, if you are only focusing on feeling safe, you could suppress or avoid whatever it is that you're feeling. And it's those feelings, those undesirable and those uncomfortable feelings that we don't want to feel that contribute to us feeling not safe. So the first step, if there is a step in this process, is not to make yourself feel safe, but it is instead to learn how to be with those uncomfortable and those undesirable feelings, I always think of this as an action movie. So in an action movie, if someone is going to throw a ball or they're going to land a punch or kick something, if you pause right on the action, that can stay frozen in time forever.
And so when we learn how to get into contact with these feelings and sensations, we allow ourselves to really get to know how this unsafe or disillusion or sad or empty or flat makes itself known in our bodies. Then it's the same as pushing play. The action allows itself to be completed. And this is really then the intention of learning how to tap into that bodily sensations and body feelings. All of the data of our different bodies, like our energy body, our mental body, our emotional body, and our physical body, all of that data is available for us to tap into. But in order for us to tap into the data, we have to go into the feelings and sensations. We have to discover what all of these different planes of our body has to say and to share and what they are holding in our internal world.
And so I'm not saying this to tell you that you've been doing it wrong, I'm sharing this with you so that you can begin to see the importance of really becoming vulnerable and intimate with what it is that you're feelng. So there are many reasons why we avoid feeling our feelings, right? It might be that as a child, you've never been given the space or even the permission to express your feelings. Perhaps your caregivers never had the capacity themselves to help you regulate and help you move through whatever uncomfortable and scary emotions you are going through. That's why it's so important for us to learn how to be with our internal world. And what I also wanna say at this point is it's very, very important that you don't go right to the epicentre of whatever it is that is going on in here. Whenever we are doing work where we want to make ourselves feel safe, where we want to reclaim all parts of ourselves, like our inner child that's not feeling safe, it's very important for us to go slowly.
If we learn to be with ourselves, the safety comes as a result. One of the ways in which avoiding feeling our feelings and really tapping into our internal world manifests is through our desire to, or our attempt to control our surroundings, to control our environment, and even to control the people in our lives. And this could look like expecting people to do certain things or behave in certain ways. And then when they don't do that, we feel disappointed. Often these expectations that we have are unexpressed. So we keep that within. And when those needs that we have aren't met, then we respond in a passive aggressive way and we end up just feeling worse about ourselves and about our lives. So this attempt to control everything can be really, really exhausting. And often what lies at the centre of this needing to control is that we've given away our power. The way back to yourself, this is a job that only you can do. This is a job that is your precious responsibility and your privilege to find that way back to yourself. And so I have a practice that I'd like to share with you now, and I find this is a, this is a very small part of a practice that I share with my clients, but it can be quite helpful for you to see what is your orientation in terms of how controlling of things or people you are. And so I find that it's helpful often in cases like this to work with an archetype. And the two archetypes that I use for this practice is the immature maiden archetype or the immature child archetype, and then the mature feminine. And it doesn't matter if these labels don't resonate with you, you can use other names. In essence, the immature, maiden, or inner child is the one who has given away responsibility.
She's always looking for an external authority or someone outside of herself to give her guidance and to give her advice, and she really feels helpless and that she doesn't have a say. She's not in the driver's seat of her own life. And then the mature feminine, this is an archetype that really represents our own inner confidence, our own sovereignty. I see the mature feminine as an archetype who really holds healthy boundaries, and she is very strong and sovereign into herself, but she also has a very big capacity to love, for compassion and for nurturing. And what I'm gonna invite you to do now is if you go ahead and if it's safe for you to do so, if you're driving don't, but if you are in a place where it's safe for you externally to close your eyes, then go ahead and do that. And this is just really to take away the external distraction so that it's easier for you to connect with your internal world.
And I'd invite you to bring to mind a situation, so a person or an event that right now you are trying to control, or in the past you've tried to control and just take your time, see if you can bring anything like that to mind. And then once you have that, I invite you to really feel into that and notice just how are you feeling? Notice, how does your energy feel? How big or small are you feeling? How close to yourself or how far away from yourself? How open, how closed? Just really become curious. There's, there's not a specific thing that you're supposed to feel. How is your inner world's experience of trying to control this situation? And then once you've landed on that, I'd invite you to orient yourself and shift your focus for a little bit into the mature feminine archetype, the sovereign, confident, grounded in your self-worth, feeling safe within yourself, archetype.
And notice how does it feel for you to embody that? Notice what happens internally. Notice what happens in your body. You might notice some different kind of self-talk that comes up. You might notice some different words, feelings, sensations, images. So just be with that and then notice what is different. And then when you're ready, you can open your eyes and I'd love to hear what your experience was of this. So let us know in the comments, did you notice a difference? And if you did, what was different? And so this is such a helpful little practice for us to begin to notice how does our own perception of our lives, our own perception of ourselves, how does this kind of affect the way that we move through the world? As we begin to deepen this relationship with ourselves and get a closer connection to how we are feeling and what our sensations in our internal world has to share and communicate with us at any point in time, internal magic happens through the release of this frozen tension and constriction that we hold in our nervous system, we begin to release that.
So we are pushing play on that video and the action can complete itself. And as the action completes itself, our life force energy can begin to flow through us again. And so I'd love to move on now to the second condition that needs to be in place for us to really cultivate that inner safety. And this is, to borrow from Brene Brown, this is to build our own self-trust bank. As we, in an effort to stay safe, we're trying to create the safety on the external plane so that we can experience the safety in our internal plane. In the process, we often abandon ourselves. So we don't speak up for our needs, we ignore our own inner voice when something doesn't feel right. We're afraid of the repercussions if we're going to speak our mind. Even though this comes from a good place, we are trying to do this so that we can stay safe.
Every time that we abandon ourselves, we also break a little bit of trust in ourselves. By building our self trust then, it also supports us to break this stronghold that the habit of self abandonment could have on us. And this is how we begin to reframe our belief systems about self-trust and our own worth, what we stand for in the world. Instead of being in the space of I'm not trusting myself and my experiences, I'm gonna invite you to start looking in your life for instances where you can trust yourself, where you could trust your experiences, where you have trusted yourself, where you've spoken up for yourself, where you held your own boundaries. Every time that you see one of those things, we're depositing little bits of self-trust coins into our self-trust bank. Another important aspect of building your self trust bank and make it a really fat piggy bank is to heal the relationship with yourself.
And I see that there are two critical points that are part of healing the relationship with yourself. And the first thing is the way that you speak to yourself. And the second is the compassion that you hold for yourself. Again, this is an invitation for you to go on an internal exploration and really start becoming honest with yourself in terms of how do you speak to yourself? What are the kinds of things that you say to yourself when you make a mistake or when you do something really well, or when you've achieved something, or when you don't feel like doing something. What's the type of conversation that you have with yourself? So often our negative self-talk and that very toxic inner critic can really contribute to us feeling so bad about who we are. And it really squashes down our life force energy. It squashes down our confidence and our belief in our ability to thrive and really be as, as I love to call it, the fullest expression of ourselves.
And so by slowly teaching yourself to start speaking to yourself in a different way with more love and more compassion, you'll start noticing the shifts. When we begin to release the grip of shame and guilt and resentment, and all the things about ourselves that we believe are not good, or that we believe are wrong with us, and I'm putting those in air quotes as well. When we begin to release that self-compassion has space to flower. So now all of a sudden, the way that you feel about yourself, the way that you relate to yourself and the space that you can hold for yourself, there are these incremental small changes that happen. And you might not notice it immediately, but if you really apply yourself to taking care of the way that you speak to yourself, to being in contact with your inner feelings and your sensations and being compassionate towards yourself, you'll find that one day you wake up and you notice everything is different, things have changed, and you might not be able to say, this is the exact date.
It's a gradual journey and a process when we are in integrity with ourself in this way, it builds our self trust and it also builds our capacity to be with more. So it builds our capacity to hold more, and as we can hold more, as we can feel more as we can meet ourselves where we are, it leads to us feeling safe enough to show ourselves.