Inviting Safety into Your Life

In our first session we will talk about safety and how our nervous system is wired to “protect” us as well as “connect” us. Neuroception, a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges will be explained and the three realms of where we look for safety will be described. Our practice today is “orienting”, a trauma informed skill that brings us right back to the present moment where we can more accurately assess our level of safety in the moment.

Learning the language of our body through the experience of sensation is vital to our experience of safety. Interoception, or the ability to perceive sensations inside our body, is often called our 6th sense. We will explore a variety of sensations in our interoception practice today.

Our nervous system is wired to pay more attention to experiences that are painful or threatening. This is a survival strategy that helps us stay alive. However, when we don’t pay attention to safe and positive experiences in our lives, we over-focus on danger. Today’s Anchoring Safety practice (inspired by Deb Dana, LCSW) helps us focus on people, places, activities and events that were safe or positive for us. Focusing on these remembered experiences helps us build stronger neural pathways to notice and grow safety.

A resource is any activity, person or practice that brings us to a state of greater calm and restfulness. To empower a resource to build new neural pathways requires that we actually ‘embody’ the experience of a resource. In the last class of this course, we will build on our skills of orienting and tracking sensations and deepen our anchor practice to experience the felt sense of our resources. Then we will track what happens in our body as we stay with the sensations of our resource. With practice, resourcing can be a powerful tool to ground and settle your body, mind and heart.