Chapter 2
Safety, Love and Curiosity in Action
Alright, let's get to what this book is about.
To be able to talk at all, we need some words to start with. Here are three that we will work with:
Safety is not safe. It means standing guard, patient watchfulness in which nothing happens until you need to react. It is not relaxation. It is readiness.
Love is listening to the inner voice. It is arranging within yourself a set of your own, individual values. It is trust in the world and in what our voice says, in everything, even when it is uncomfortable. Full trust, including trust in moments when trust is missing, when you have to trust the very act of trusting before any proof comes that it is worth it.
Curiosity is receiving, not understanding. It is an attitude of receiving new experiences through excitement. Joy, not pleasure. This receiving is the difference between looking at something with a ready-made drawer to put it in, and looking with open hands, without knowing what we will get.
And beneath these three words lies what I call the voice of the essence of self: a vibration in the body, a physical, tangible sensation that directs energy and the body in a specific direction. Not a metaphor. Not a decoration. A concrete vibration that you can feel if you look for it patiently enough.
These three words, Safety, Love, Curiosity, and the fourth, invisible word beneath them, Energy, will return throughout this book like the refrain of a song that is sung in many verses, but always to the same melody.
I chose them because they describe the natural order in which a person can return to themselves. First, you have to feel that you will survive: that you are safe, and that you have the power and strength to stand against energy from the outside. Then, having that feeling, you can start getting to know yourself and giving yourself what you need. That is love. And having safety and love, you can finally, out of pure joy rather than fear, start discovering who you are and discovering yourself in the world outside. That is curiosity. Without the first, the second and third are only a façade.
And so it is important to be close to yourself: to give love to yourself, that is, to your values, and to stand guard over them. To stand guard, you need inner safety. To create inner safety, you need a conscious body, which means using the inner energy in the body. If that energy is not preserved and maintained, the ego hijacks our mind, and we follow the fears and obligations installed in us.
Essence and Form – Three Words, One Energy
Let's start with something that changes the way we look at everything: naming things does not take time into account. When we give something a name, whether an emotion, a person or a situation, we lock a moment from the past into that name, as if it were permanent. Every second we change. Everything changes. Alongside feedback, this is another universal law of the universe.
Everything is constantly changing. Imagine an apple that rots and turns into fertilizer for the next tree. The form changes. The essence remains. Is the tree the apple, or is the tree the tree? Just like energy. We do not need to understand how energy affects us if it leads us to ourselves. It can destroy us and we will become fertilizer. But we will remain.
Inner energy leads to discovering oneself. If I look calmly at my emotions, I can give myself a chance to understand why they appear. We often discover a contradiction with the installed systems of thinking. Emotions appear to inform me whether I am doing something right or wrong. We often follow positive emotions and want to do certain things more often. This leads to compulsion. Noticing what lies beneath emotions, what is close to me and what is not, allows me to look at reality calmly. I stop identifying with positive emotions. When negative situations arise, I do not judge other people through the prism of my negative feelings, and so I do not identify with the opposite of negative emotions either. I do not need confirmation that my existence has meaning. I can experience emotions and let them pass.
The essence of what we name does not change with time. Its form changes. This distinction, between unchanging essence and changing form, accompanies us from the first page to the last: a choice about looking deeper at experience. What has happened to us has its purpose, which we often do not understand.
Understanding the essence of what hides beneath labels is a task for curiosity, not for the intellect. This is one of the reasons why this whole book is built around experience, not around definitions.
Safety, love and curiosity are different spaces in the body, which I modulate by directing my energy appropriately.
What I call energy is like a trembling of the muscles, as if the brain were picking up the movement of tendons, the fascial system and muscles. The second key element is present awareness. Through awareness we identify vibrations in the body that create emotions in the mind. That is why, with greater presence (closeness to oneself), we direct more attention to the body and therefore experience far more pain. Our mind realizes that it is no longer in charge. Then a wave of pain comes.
Then we have an opportunity to integrate our experience in the body.
We not only feel energies, we can also modulate them.
For this we use focus and muscle tension.
To modulate muscle tension, we use the breath and the conscious tensing of the appropriate muscles.
There are many things here that are connected with one another. But let's start by getting to know this energy more closely. I think it was easier for me to feel it, because it has accompanied me since childhood.
