I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about this publicly but in early 2020 I decided to disengage from almost all contact with my mom.

 

At present, July 13th 2022, I realize it’s been exactly 2 years since the last time we exchanged emails privately and since Christmas of 2019 since the last time I called her.

 

There is a lot to unpack like the whys, the background, etc. but that’s not what I wanted to share today.

The core pieces I’ve been sitting with – in all of their expressions – of Safety, Security, and Home speak directly to the context of the situation.

Right now, in the present midst of life, I am asking myself exactly what and how do I root into safety?

Where does my sense of security come from?

What is home?

And what are all of these things in the face of the unravelling of and sorting through of what is real and what was illusionary survival strategies.

 

Most of us are aware that our core fundamental experiences in infancy and childhood shape our experiences of relationships and how we live as adults. We are in fact babies, toddlers, and adolescents living out our experience in an adult body.

Of course, logically speaking, through education, we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise, but the truth of the matter is that 90% of the time our animal/child/teen inner subconscious beings are really running the show.

 

As a social creature, two things: a sense of belonging (home) and connection (home) are vital to our sense of survival.

Safety and security are our survival and they are so much more than food, water, and shelter.

Because we are social animals, we have evolved to rely on each other and our social constructs to survive.

That means there is no food, water, or shelter without the tribe.

Losing home means certain death.

 

In the modern context, we of course pretend like none of this matters, while our body, nervous system, and weird habits we are constantly trying to manipulate and control into submission run our lives.

 

I’m going to talk about my current experience from this context – from the context of an animal who has lost her core foundation of safety, security, and a sense of home.

I’m going to talk about my experience of being with my animal being – socially dependant wild creature – and the experience of experimentation and finding my way through the Wilderness, working to find my way to a newer, more solid, and more honest sense of safety, security, and HOME.

 

 

Over the last 8 years, what I thought was home, what I had built around security slowly unravelled layer by layer.

At the same time, through my deepest embodiment work, and moving through the initiation process of biodynamic craniosacral therapy studies gave me the range and the support required to be able to unravel.

 

And unravel I did.

As I mentioned I ended communication with my mom (and with it, a deep healing process of a lifetime of toxic relationship patterns), I moved countries, I moved into my first home that was mine and mine alone (something I’d longed for for so long – and something deeply needed after cutting the proverbial umbilicus with my earth bound mother), I changed careers, I started a business (something I had no idea how to do), and moved through healing some really heavy and deep emotionally abusive patterns. I went into deep debt for the first time in my whole life and moved through one of the hardest financial situations I’ve had to deal with thus far.

 

It has been a lot.

 

This year – 2022 – started with more catharsis and clearing.

My health.

My finances.

Being held in deep healing.

 

Never has it been more clear to me the interconnectivity of everything in my life than in these last years where the old roots of my safety, security, and sense of home have disintegrated.

I’ve always had a deep and unshakable faith since childhood that I would somehow always be taken care of and be ok and I can honestly say that never before have I come to question this faith than I have over the last couple of years.

I’m talking about so much more than physical security.

I’m talking about our fundamental sense that we will be ok.

This is the thing that we actually rely on when we create our physical state of safety and security – whether that be our capacity to earn an income to pay the rent and provide for ourselves, or whether it’s our capacity to live in a safe home and community.

It all starts with what our nervous system learned as children.

 

Events like losing a parent, or losing what we know to be home is a fundamental hit to our ability to stabilize ourselves.

It’s not a permanent state, but it’s something that I am realizing that if we do not engage in the healing and rebuilding of our fundamentals can leave deeply troubling patterns.

If we don’t address and tend to our roots, we will cope however we can.

We will engage in self destructive behaviour.

We will sabotage our finances and resources.

We will destroy our relationships.

 

Without a healthy, nourished inner sense of security, without a solid foundation, we are creatures of addiction.

We are vulnerable to manipulation.

We are victimized.

We commodify.

We become perpetrators of the innocence we deeply want to protect.

 

If you’ve read my posts about my recent money experiment and my thoughts about the online coaching industry, you’ve heard me talk about my own experience with my relationship to money and my finances and how that’s evolved over the last couple of years.

 

Our beliefs and habits around money and our financial situation as a whole (in all of it’s nuances and layers that I won’t get into in this particular post) is directly related to security and our capacity as sovereign beings to provide for ourselves.

 

This is one of the core places for me recently that has taught me about where I had previously been anchored into in terms of safety, and security.

It’s the place where I’ve deeply felt desperation, deep grasping, helplessness, and victimization.

The deepest and darkest most shadowy places of my being lurk here.

There is the deeply rooted cycle of over-giving in exchange for love and acceptance and being a “good person”.

There is the survival instinct trigger fear of needing money from others or to rely on others to provide for me because of the trauma for being manipulated in this way for so long.

There is the lack of language and communication skills in the boundaries and agreements in relationships involving money.

 

There is a lot of deep unveiling of stuff here that is frankly hard to look at and leaves me with a sense of childlike helplessness and overwhelm.

There is another part of me that has cultivated a certain level of range and deep relationship with my own animal Wilderness being that has faith and trust in this deeply spiralic and organic process.

At some deep soul cellular level, I have committed to this process.

I have committed to myself and the following through of rebuilding, nourishing, and growing a new, healthy, root system.

 

It’s fucking hard.

 

But it also feels and tastes like the first hints of true freedom I’ve ever known.

 

cover photo image credit britishcolumbia.com