I have this vivid image of my teacher, Karl, standing in front of our Brennan energy class emanating a field of love as one of my classmates punched towards him.
He wasn’t in defense: he wasn’t shutting down his fear and putting on a stoic mask; he wasn’t getting bigger and sending more dominating energy back; he wasn’t collapsing into fear. His entire energy field was coherent, calm, loving, open, and stable.
It was a lesson in how safety lives inside our own internal experience (and, as evidenced by how much I think about this, a really great lesson).
I often find myself getting caught in the trap of thinking that whatever I’m feeling is caused by something ‘out there’. Like, we’re in conversation and you cut me off and I feel sad – and my attention immediately goes to how you cut me off. Or I move into a house that has weird energy, and my focus goes towards the weird energy as the cause of whatever I’m feeling. Sometimes, we can notice that the reaction is in us for some of the smaller experiences (I’m angry, and I know that it’s my own conditioning) but we totally miss places where we’re still sneakily believing that no, this one is actually about the world.
My neat new trick is imagining my teachers in the same situation, and noticing how they would react totally differently to me. It makes it so clear that my reaction is on me, even if the thing in the world is still true.
The experience of safety feels particularly gnarly. We have this collective cultural belief that safety is out there, in the external world. And it’s true, to some degree – the external world can be more or less safe. But the experience of safety is an internal experience, and it can be there whether or not the external world looks like it’s safe.
The world is a bit fucked up right now. And if you reference the external world to feel safety, yeah, it’s a mess. But it’s possible to exist in exactly the same world circumstances and feel a sense of safety. The safety doesn’t come from not believing that something bad will happen (you might lose your job, you might get ill, you might die). It comes from knowing, somewhere in the marrow of your cells, that you’ll be okay. That your essence is eternal, timeless, divine; that you deserve to exist; that you are loved and cherished as you are; that even death cannot take away your divinity.
I’m not sure what happens if you get all the way there. On the bar of divine safety, I’m maybe 30% of the way through.
It’s possible that what we call fear is actually existential terror. Like, when we’re scared to speak up in a group, some part of us is actually saying ‘I am afraid for my very existence right now’. And when we heal the existential terror, what’s leftover may not even feel like fear anymore – it may feel like alertness, or aliveness, or exhilaration. I’m not sure.
I do know that the more I feel, experience, and heal my existential fear, the more my being sighs out into a sense of fundamental safety – that even in circumstances that feel terrifying, some part of me feels trust, okayness, and a resting in the knowing that my true nature cannot die.