The Magic of Safe Enough

The lake at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center

In September I got to attend the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Association's biennial Breath of Life conference. I lucked out that this year it was just a two-hour drive away, at the lovely Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Western Connecticut, where we were fed nourishing meals fresh from their garden and walked the beautiful grounds between really fascinating talks. In the afternoons we did session exchanges — 24 massage tables in the large wood-paneled library, with its generous windows opening right into the trees and the pond beyond. I felt soothed, supported, and — as I'd hoped — inspired for communicating more clearly about this healing practice, at once so simple and so deep.

Over the past year, I've really focused on talking and teaching about the very direct ways that biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST) helps to settle and support the autonomic nervous system, and that will certainly continue — my next one-day nervous system healing workshop is scheduled for Sunday, November 16 at Sisu Wellness. But the practice goes much deeper in ways that I've so far found hard to put into words.

As I listened to the conference presentations — on themes as diverse as the 21 diaphragms of the body, the role of BCST in supporting the menopause transition, and working with babies in the neonatal intensive care unit — I began to listen for common themes in how I and these incredibly experienced practitioners approach the practice. What is it that we are all doing in common?

A big a-ha came during Zia Nath's presentation on the Biodynamics of Craniosacral Orthodontia. Zia works in Mumbai with a team of orthodontists, physical therapists, myofascial therapists, and other practitioners to support patients struggling with dysfunctions of the mouth and jaw. She helps patients in preparing for and integrating orthodontic treatment or, in some cases, avoiding more invasive treatment altogether.

As she began describing the various jaw misalignments that orthodontists work to correct, and the many impacts they have on breathing, digestion, sleeping, and overall health, I felt a tingle of activation arising. I endured years of heroic orthodonture as a child — multiple teeth pulled, a demonic device with a little key to crank my palette wider, and, of course, braces. I've also had multiple mouth injuries in both childhood and adulthood. My mouth has been through a lot!

Something in this talk is probably going to trigger an emotional response, I thought. But I didn't know what it might be.

She began showing us quite remarkable before-and after-images of children and adults whose heads were visibly different shapes after just a few gentle treatments. Heads sat on necks easier, faces were relaxed, eyes were brighter. Often the clients looked remarkably more grounded, vivid, and open in the "after" photos.

Then she began describing the case of an eighteen year-old boy with severely misaligned teeth. He desperately needed orthodontic treatment. But he was also autistic and highly sensitive, and he absolutely could not tolerate having appliances in his mouth. He could barely stand to be touched at all, and he was, understandably, very self-protective.

She began by working with him to establish a sense of safety and some trust in each other's presence. She proposed at first that she just make contact with his feet through a sheet. He agreed, and they spent two sessions just settling together like this. By the third session, she was able to hold his shoulders, his neck, and later his head, and begin to relieve some of the extreme tension in his head and face. After a few sessions his face and mouth had relaxed quite a bit, and he was able to start orthodontic treatment. She continued to work with him throughout his treatment to help him integrate the realignments.

Listening to her, I thought, "Imagine if someone had worked with me on a sense of safety as a teenager." Imagine if someone had helped me — had helped any of us! — develop a sense of safety and readiness as a basis for moving forward, instead of teaching me to grimly tolerate whatever invasions and impacts came my way.

The notion of experiencing that level of grounded compassion and being helped to learn the difference between becoming ready for something challenging and just literally gritting my teeth and bearing whatever the world was imposing on me made me nearly burst into tears. What a contrast with my experience.

I don't know that I ever learned what a sense of safety felt like as teenager — let alone during orthodontic treatment! In fact, I don't know that most of the adults around me really had a strong enough sense themselves of what feeling safe felt like to share it with me. Instead, I think, I pieced together what safety felt like — and what people and settings felt safe — through a process of often painful trial and error through my 20s and 30s.

Now I know that one of the most basic things our nervous systems do for us is to monitor our environments for safety and threat and ready us to respond. Often, our systems get stuck on alert, and a felt of safety becomes the precious exception, rather than the baseline.

We live in a culture that demands that we constantly override our sense that something isn't right. We're taught to push on ahead regardless of anxiety, pain, exhaustion, and fear. Even for those of us with so-called "normal" childhoods, our schooling experience is marked with competition, shaming, and ongoing lessons in conformity. And of course many of us experience much deeper impacts in our early years.

We generally don't get to begin — as Zia did with that young man — from having someone help us establish a foundation in knowing, "This is what it feels like to be basically ok. Take that in. Appreciate it. Let your system fully absorb it. And then tell me when you're ready for more."

That's what we do in biodynamic craniosacral therapy. It's fundamental to the method. My teacher once said, "What we're really doing in a session is giving the body a chance to feel safe enough to make different choices."

Over time, we learn to recognize that feeling of "safe enough" in our everyday lives. As we do so, our expectations begin to shift, so that relative safety becomes the baseline we expect, and we develop some confidence that we will return to it, whenever we find ourselves jolted out. It slowly becomes our "new normal", and we start to reorient our choices around it.

Later, walking around the pond, I realized that this is also what we do in Gateless Writing salons. The container of safety and support we co-create seems to turn on the creative taps, freeing us up to experiment and play in ways that felt inaccessible before.

This summer I asked two participants in our previous salon series to help me get the word out about the upcoming fall series by writing a little note about their experiences, and I was delighted to see that they both used the word "magic" in their descriptions. It is!

When we feel safe and supported, magic happens. Held places soften on their own, memory and imagination gently open up, creativity flows forth, and transformation is sometimes suddenly effortless.

It feels magical, but it's really just our systems being released from the habitual work of guarding and freed up to be responsive, creative, and engaged — to be our full, magical selves. (You can read what else they said and learn more about the Gateless process here.)

I'm grateful for my craniosacral therapy training finally helping me to appreciate how fundamental this is, and helping me to finally expect safety as the baseline condition for my life, rather than the miraculous exception that I get to enjoy only in a few special settings.

Try this: Ask your body, "Am I safe enough right now?"

There are a few keywords in the simple suggestion.

First: ask. Sometimes we try to tell ourselves, "I am safe". Sometimes this simple affirmation can work. But it's our bodies' job to discern whether we are fundamentally safe or not. So asking rather than telling — and opening up a dialogue with the body based on curiosity — can often better create space for a shift in our usual baseline patterns of vigilance or dissociation.

Second: safe enough. Looking for an absolute standard of "safe" versus "not safe" can become a real rabbit hole of confusion. Is anything ever really 100% safe? Asking instead about being "safe enough" opens up the space for the body to reconsider what might really be enough.

Finally: right now. When our nervous systems feel stuck on hyper-alert or tune-out because of past trauma, very likely we are engaged with times other than right now, often in deep and unconscious ways. Adding that phrase "right now" can help bring us into the present moment and separate the past from the present.

You don't have to try hard or strive to find an answer. Just ask yourself the question and then wait for a couple of breaths and see what arises. Most often for me, I just feel a subtle shift and softening in my awareness. But sometimes I realize that I have been holding onto guarding that I just don't need right now, and a bigger shift opens up.

Try it and see for yourself.