In healing spaces or in all of these wellness communities and in the way that society has built itself; it is all about safety. And safety, under the dominant structures is rooted in our proximity to power.

Those that have more power, are safer. This paradigm of thinking forces us to see safety as a competition, rather than a holding for all. If ‘safety’ is rooted in our proximity to power, we want to be more powerful than others.

So where are you in your social location? Do you have housing? Do you have citizenship? Do you have access to wealth, and so on, and so on? All those things create safety. Do you have power? Do you have influence? Those of us who are furthest away from power often have to negotiate safety on a daily basis - and unfortunately it often takes someone from the dominant location to slip into a marginalised community to understand that society has never been ‘safe’.

This is a piece I wrote in the winter of last year on safety, breaking down two assumptions in the wellness space:

“This is a safe place”

The term “safe place” is used and I often get stumped when I hear it, like, what do you mean?  What does it mean that this place is safe? Safe for whom and safe for what? Having been in a wellness space for over a decade now, I know that these spaces aren't necessarily designed for a body of colour or a body of culture. 

There have been moments where I've had to ignore appropriation, micro-aggressions, or uninformed and privileged language within a space that I've actually felt my body recoil at some of the things that somebody has said or done. And in most cases, I've had to brush those away in order to benefit from the experience, which I'm very good at now.  

So what do I mean when I say moving beyond colonial safety?

When we think about society, trauma and safety, we talk about the way our nervous systems have been broken or disrupted by trauma.  And it is our responsibility to re-regulate ourselves so that we can feel safe again in society.  

It assumes that our reactions to society are wrong and that we need to train ourselves again to learn that society is safe.  And there are a couple of assumptions in this that I would like to unpack. 

Assumption #1: Society is Safe

In most of the healing spaces I've been in, I've been told that my nervous system is designed to respond to life-threatening sabre-toothed tigers, that our bodies have well-adapted systems for life-threatening moments and we no longer need these responses anymore.  It is shared ubiquitously that our nervous systems are now overreacting inappropriately and that is an adaptation that we have to train ourselves out of. 

This perspective of society reveals that the people that are writing and leading this work, psychologists, leaders in trauma, have little to no experience of some of the hardships that a lot of people face. 

It may no longer be a sabre-toothed tiger, but it is rent.

It may no longer be a pact of wolves, but it is sickness, illness, it may be loneliness, it may be bills, it may be a dangerous partner or family member. 

This lens and perspective reveals to us that the somatic theories and education have no relationship to what is life-threatening now in our modern day cultural context.  And then this is made further worse when we think of those who are most marginalised in society, those who are on the frontiers of societal oppressions. It tells us that our responses are inappropriate and it is our problem and that we need to deal with it. 

Somatics emphasises the mind-body connection. It focuses on how our physical sensations and experiences influence our thoughts and emotions, and how our thoughts and emotions can be felt in our bodies. 

Assumption #2: Neutrality is the Goal

Somatics and modern psychology and all of our education seems to be rooted in training our body to regulate. 

The system is afraid of any charge, they are so afraid of any reaction, of any emotion, that they deem that charge as a system over-reaction, that we must always be still and stoic and calm. This perspective puts the responsibility on the individual to dampen down their reaction, their visceral body sensations to atrocities. This teaches people that we need to numb down just a little bit so that we can tolerate the pain, so we can tolerate atrocities, tolerate injustice, and return quietly back to work, or quietly back to our dysfunctional families or dysfunctional partnerships.  

Neutrality is the death of all revolution.

Neutrality is the death of all movement and momentum. I've started to think about these frameworks as colonial frameworks, and that modern somatics and modern psychology are colonial.  But in this case, what I mean, or what it seems to represent for me is that these systems that are in place are there to ensure and maintain the status quo, whether it's capitalism or misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, whatever.  

With these two points, it reveals itself that the way somatics and modern psychology share their frameworks often supports a colonial narrative, one that will help us tolerate pain and return us back to work without creating too much trouble. 

Decolonial Lens on Somatics

So a decolonial lens of somatics invites us to remember that our bodies are working perfectly well. They are reacting appropriately to the stimuli around us.  The way your body is acting is a direct and appropriate way to respond. Oppressed and marginalised people are responding accurately.  The precise nuance that we perceive danger is what has kept us alive, here, present, and surviving. Our nervous systems are responding appropriately to the environment that we are in.

Dissociation, numbing, fawning, appeasing, this is what allowed us to be breathing today, and it is important for us to be grateful for them. Treating our bodies as if there was something wrong with them, and that we must learn to hack the networks, is a manifestation of colonial thought, control, power and manipulation. There are so many frameworks of domination within the Western wellness industry. However, we need to be careful not to perpetuate those onto our bodies. 

Safety is never ever guaranteed.

When someone says that a space is safe, they have not actively interrogated what it means to be safe.

You cannot guarantee safety, not in a wellness space, not in a breathwork space, not on a bus.  We cannot say that there is no one there to threaten your existence, because we don't know everybody.

We don't know what their politics are.

We don't know what they've been conditioned to believe.

For most people of the global majority, it is highly likely that there are people in that space who have not worked on embodied anti-racism or people who have been taught to hate people like you.  And those who have traumatised bodies know that there will be people in the space that are unconscious to the ways that they can cause harm through structures around gender, race , ability, etc.  Trauma is caused by people, mostly hurt people. And there could be some of those in the room. 

To tell somebody that a space is safe is a disservice to their healing. 

Note: as a practitioner, it is important to acknowledge that you are also not a safe person for everyone. We know that safety is built, it's cultivated, it's practiced, it's developed. It's developed by the individual within the confines of their own body. 

As communities and space holders, there are ways in which we can reduce harm and offer ways that our breathwork spaces can serve those who need this healing modality. Traumatised people have the right to be angry, to feel rage, to grieve, to want spaces of reprieve, to demand a space where whiteness does not infiltrate their body.  As practitioners and healers within the modern context, we know better and conserve them for a necessary healing that is to come within this new earth of healing and consciousness. 

So moving beyond creating safe spaces is an acknowledgement that we are not in a safe space. We need spaces that are not sterilised by the idea of neutrality. 

We invite people into their charge, we are not afraid of their charge, allowing them to feel and share their passion and anger. 

We need to prepare our bodies for an accurate observation of society. We are preparing the body not for safety, because that's not the environment we live in.  

We need to prepare the body for struggle, for pain, to learn how to maintain strength and peace while the waters rise, to remember our body's inherited wisdom of survival and tap into their power, to know their history and to know and acknowledge our cultural context.  

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I’ll give more words to this decolonial lens on safety; it's like moving beyond, is actually really hard, potentially, for a lot of white bodied people, they get really mad when I say this isn't a safe space. Because they've inherently grown up in places that are safe for them. And it's wild because the majority of people who are historically oppressed or marginalised, obviously know it's not safe.  And so two worlds are existing. One person in a white bodied predominantly thinks the world is safe, and another person predominantly thinks the world is unsafe.  And so when people are like, it's safe, it's safe, you're obviously just speaking to white bodied folks in that way. Or to those in the dominant demographic.

Safety is Cultivated in the body

Safety is built and cultivated within the body. It is something that comes from within. We have historically learnt to dissociate and to disengage and be disembodied. So oftentimes, when you are in states of unsafety, you actually leave your body and leave your body behind, right? You may have experienced this in states of freeze, or disassociation. And so that creates a further sense of unsafety; you’re not there fully present in all your wisdom, but a body left behind relying on trauma responses which may date back to how you survived as a child, teen, or previous version of yourself.

And to cultivate safety is actually to learn to stay.

And so cultivating safety means learning to stay here in the moment and in the present.  

The other thing I mentioned and want to talk into is about attending to the wounds of our society with accuracy.

People don't want to accept that society is unsafe, because that's not the reality that they want to live in.  So there's a state of denial in this. For us to actually look at the statistics and history, future years, decades. Let's say, gender-based violence, but we could take anything like LGBTQ+, Islamophobia, racism etc; but gender-based violence is just one example.

It is so dangerous for a woman to be with a man. It is historically dangerous. It is statistically dangerous. It is the most dangerous thing that a woman can do.  It's not go out. It's not being alone. It's actually being in partnership with a man. But that's not really a reality that people want to live in.  And so sometimes it's hard for us to actually accurately look at the reality that we are in. However, that denial is that feeling of, knowing that somebody is behind you, but you're just not ready to look there.

And so that's why in my embodiment pieces, I invite you to look all the way behind you in the space you’re in. Looking at all the corners of the room.  Twisting your neck, shoulders, body, so that you really look behind your body as well, so that you know that you've got your own back. It’s noticing if the door is a little open, or unlocked, and if you want to change that. It’s being aware of what sounds come into and leave the room. In group spaces, I invite you to move to a space that feels safer for you as more people enter the room and the environment changes. And that's a practice for us to look at the things that we are actively conditioned not to look at. And so it's this kind of spectre of, or the ghost of patriarchy, it's the ghost of domestic abuse, of violence, of the histories of what it means to be in a historically oppressed body. 

Workshop

One of the pieces that I do in workshops around safety, is that we imagine a circle around us, and we invite people to imagine different people come towards the circle. into it. Let's say danger is a continuum, and we might not go to the ten, might just go to the six, we don't want to get too activated.  But the invitation of the visualisation is to invite level one onto the edge of the circle and see how your body reacts.  And then let them turn around and walk away. Next one, see how your body reacts, they turn around, walk away.  The most scary one, see how your body reacts and turn around and walk away. We go through this embodiment where you go through that embodied exploration.  

Let's say one is someone warm and loving and lovable and supportive, somebody that makes you smile and cares about you, the second one is like somebody who like just generally dislikes you, it's just like you don't have a huge problem with them, but you might just grate each other a little bit and there's a little bit of discord between you. Maybe they're the kind of person who chats  behind your back or it seems like they wish for your downfall and they'd like to see you trip up and stumble and that kind of thing.  It may be family member, work person, an old friend. And then the third one is somebody that actually wishes you harm, somebody who is actively careless.  

One of the most revealing things is actually the acknowledgement that a lot of people in our lives are sitting on that middle level of safety. Their general sense of normal tends to be that middle state of slightly unsafe. 

Many many people are actually spending a lot of their time with people who are higher up on the danger continuum that they would like to admit. Even though they might be like, oh, I'm really chill, or “I’ll just ignore them”; their bodies are just sitting in that space.  Kind of heightened state. Consistently. And so, it's learning what our sense of safety feels like, and allowing ourselves to pendulate from that into an internal sense of safety. Or an internal sense of strength and peace. It is a first step in people embodying that.

This is also a grounding practice in acknowledging your baseline of safety, or what your body does to rise to the occasion and it's a really good one to take away. Because it means that you can practice being in the presence of someone without there being actual real life consequences.  

So let's say you need to have a conflict with, or need to have a conversation with your boss or teacher or parent and so on. And so you can imagine that person coming to your circle, noticing how your body naturally reacts, allowing yourself to come back into your sense of safety, step into your strength and peace, and then have a conflict. So noticing how your body reacts and choosing to respond. So that's also the piece here, moving from reaction to response. Choosing a response where you are present and resourced, where you don’t default to leaving your body, leaving your vulnerable inner child to deal with these obstacles in daily life. It's really great. I love it. But it's also a really sad reality for people in historically oppressed bodies sometimes their dissociation and numbing are the tools to allow them to enjoy life, and then you give them this exercise and they're quite struck by it, but it can be a foundational observation for themselves and how they are. 

So the key thing here is understanding safety in our bodies.

For some people, their perceived sense of safety means they’re on edge all the time, or stressed all the time, which of course affects emotions and general wellbeing. I called it Safety and Inner strength because with this knowledge or awareness you can tap into your inner strength. This is also a great foundation because when we look at Fear of Conflict, this strength of being able to remain present in your body in the face of unsafety is powerful.