Safety
Safety is an interesting theme to explore because it's a double-edged sword. While seeking safety is perfectly natural and needed to thrive, it's often our desire to feel safe that hinders us from achieving fulfillment in life. Let me explain.
Your brain is wired to assess your environment for safety. You have a lifetime's worth of lived experience cataloged in your memory ready to chime in at any moment to tell you if that person, place, or thing is or isn't safe for you to explore. While this is a beautiful and efficient way to interpret all your experiences, this behavior can keep you stuck and closed off to new experiences by reinforcing a pattern or belief regardless of whether or not it's in your highest good.
Assumptions, presumptions, and personal biases are all born from the brain's desire to predict outcomes to keep you safe. When it comes to physical safety, this is great because you learn not to repeat harmful behaviors or actions such as touching a hot stove. But, when it comes to your thought patterns, this can keep you stuck in a cycle of expecting similar outcomes in all areas of life.
Depending on the outcome of your past experiences, you'll come to expect a new experience or opportunity to either be a positive or a negative one. When most of your experiences are overwhelmingly negative, this can lead you to avoid new experiences, opportunities, or people out of fear of repeating a past negative experience. On the other hand, if most of your experiences have positive outcomes, your feedback loop tells you to remain open and not fear the new.
Neither of these defaults is wrong, it's just what is and is helpful to be aware of so you can override your programming if necessary. Being too closed off to the new keeps out both the lessons and blessings while being too open allows everything and everyone into your world whether it's aligned or not.
When it comes to our emotional space, walking that fine line between making choices based on what we expect an outcome to be, and how it could be different is a delicate balance between seeking or maintaining internal safety while remaining open to possibility.
Whenever you're looking to break away from your default programming your mind will put on an Oscar-worthy performance trying to prove to you that it's an unsafe and therefore terrible idea. You'll be reminded of that one time you were embarrassed in 5th Grade, a past heartbreak (or several), or the failures of others as evidence as to why it's a bad idea to engage. Your brain begs you to avoid potential pain and disappointment by avoiding the situation altogether. Deep wounds around self-worth, abandonment, rejection, lovability, and trust will all chime in and come out to play, ultimately coloring your perception of reality.
While this helps keep you safe from future failure, heartbreak, or other discomfort, it also keeps you from achieving true fulfillment. If you choose to not put yourself out there, you're automatically rejecting yourself from your happiness by staying or playing small and your safety then becomes a cage.
While your cage may be beautiful, warm, and inviting, it's still unfulfilling and you'll remain in that cage until the discomfort of not having what you truly desire becomes so unbearable that it forces you to change. This cage is also known as self-isolation and is a trauma response from being deeply hurt repetitively and succumbing to the negative belief that the outcome will never be different.
For some, the cage is being stuck in the loop of seeking external social or family expectations at the expense of personal fulfillment. This can look like staying in a career that is overwhelmingly stressful and unbearable just because of the ego's desire for status, power, or money. For others, this can also look like staying in a relationship or marriage well beyond the expiration date because they don't want to disappoint family or feel like they've failed. In either instance, there's a pattern of trading safety for freedom and alignment.
Whatever your cage represents, you have the power to step out of it at any time. Maybe you start by opening the door and peaking out to test the waters of the unknown. Perhaps you decide that sitting under a nearby tree is okay. Or maybe you choose to fully step into the unknown and take a leap of faith toward the opportunity you desire.
No matter what you decide, you can always go back to the false sense of security that is your cage if desired. But ask yourself if that's truly serving your highest good or not.
So will you decide to allow yourself to fly and fully experience life, or will you choose to stay stuck in a self-imposed imprisonment of false security? One of the greatest powers you possess is the power of choice. What's beautiful about the power of your choice is that you can choose to exercise it at a moment's notice. It's never too late to make a new or different choice. Even if you feel an opportunity has passed, you can always turn around and see if it's still available. The outcome of life is truly a sum of our choices and the risks we're willing to take.
You will never truly know what will happen unless you decide to fly and go for what you want. Life is too precious and too short to be wasted, so I say live fearlessly and boldly.
