I'm still on the trail but all I can do is keep going. As I walk, something approaching a sense of calm settles over me. Maybe I'm too exhausted to be afraid – by now I've been on my feet for more than five hours. It's not that I've given up but that somehow the voice in my head has changed. It's become quieter and steadier. It tells me to keep walking, just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My focus seems to have shifted from looking out there and trying to find the way to ‘in here'… I seem to be tuning in to an inner satellite navigation system that I didn't even know I had. As I do so, a deep sense of safety spreads through my body and I know without a doubt that I'm going to be absolutely fine. An hour later and I find myself on a wide road that takes me back to the retreat. I've found my way home.
Over to You …
Dear Reader, have you ever been so lost, so stuck in a situation that you've wondered how you might leave it or even survive? You've felt overwhelmed, fearful, sick with worry. But somehow you came through it? Or maybe you haven't. Maybe you're in there right now, feeling afraid and alone.
I know this feeling only too well as I've felt unsafe and lost so many times in my life. Until I learned how to find my way back. What happened to me in the mountains was terrifying – sure I screamed and hollered, panicked and bargained – but I found within me a deep state of trust and inner safety. At some point, I knew I'd find my way back and this happened even before I'd arrived back at the retreat …
It hasn't always been this way. I've travelled a magical journey and learnt a great deal. I've learnt how to find safety even in the messiest and most traumatic of circumstances. Throughout grief, loss, and devastation … I've learnt how to find deep safety within myself and then move from this place of trust and inner knowing. I eventually found this place when I was lost in the mountains and, from this inner compass, I found my way back home.
At the heart of it, this is what I talk about when I talk about feeling safe. It is about finding within a place of profound inner stillness from which you can deal with whatever turmoil is around you. It is an inner place from which you relate to life especially when it is tough, confusing, heart-breaking.
We need this in today's world which has become so fast-paced and chaotic. Sometimes there's so much sensory input coming at us and we just don't know which way to turn – all around us are clamouring voices saying ‘This way! That way!’
How do we discern in such uncertainty? How do we choose from a place of grounded steadiness and calm? Not from a place of adrenalized fear and panic? We find within us a place of inner safety – it's in all of us, not just me. It really does reside in all of us and I don't mean this in a fluffy, esoteric way; each one of us is wired physiologically with access to this place of inner deep knowing and safety. Many people go through their lives never finding it but I'm going to show you how to find it in this book.
The thing about feeling safe is that when we've found it, truly found it, we can respond to life differently. We can take risks, open our hearts to love, leave toxic relationships, stop doing work that is burning us out day after day. We can truly thrive.
What I have learnt is amazing but at the same time so simple and I have been privileged to be able to share these learnings or ‘tools’ in my books, workshops, on stage, TV, and radio for over 20 years and in a way that has made a profound difference for thousands of people.
I am looking forward to sharing with you too.
Nerina Ramlakhan, May 2021
Introduction: Why Feeling Safe Matters
To feel safe is one of our greatest and most primal drives.
We come into this life on an ongoing quest to find inner safety from the moment of birth until the moment of death. When a baby is born it leaves the warm, dark, safe cocoon of its mother's womb and arrives into a harsh, bright, noisy environment which probably feels profoundly unsafe. In those first moments after the birth, in both mother and child, levels of oxytocin (the love and trust-building hormone) and endorphins are at peak levels to maximize bonding between the baby and mother. To enable the baby to feel safe. Skin-to-skin contact between mother and child deepens the feeling of safety. Once the baby has an embodied experience of safety, it moves to suckle and breastfeed and an even deeper connection between mother and child is formed.
Feeling safe is essential to our ability to both survive and thrive. As Deb Dana, leading trauma therapist says, ‘With our first breath, we embark on a lifelong quest to feel safe in our bodies, in our environments, and in our relationship with others.’
But why is a ‘sleep expert’ writing about feeling safe?
I started writing this book 15 years ago and ended up writing three books on sleep in the meantime. The world needed books on sleep; technology had well and truly landed on the scene, the speed of life ramped up, and we struggled to slow down … and sleep. Globally, the sleep industry is now worth billions of pounds with our state-of-the-art mattresses, pillows, blackout blinds, aromatherapy candles, meditation apps … We've come a long way since the hunter-gatherer lying on a mat of leaves in a cave.
I never set out to be a sleep expert. I discovered a knack for helping people to sleep (largely driven by my own long-standing issues with insomnia), wrote my first book Tired but Wired and boom! Now, I'm called a sleep expert.
‘We sleep when we feel safe’ was what I started saying in presentations and people took notice. They wrote this sentence down.
I knew that the real key to helping people to sleep was to help them to feel safe.
And I knew the key to helping people to thrive was to help them to feel safe.
Our nervous system is designed along the premise of:
Is the world safe or unsafe?
We're constantly, subconsciously, scanning our environment, relating to the world around us. Our nervous system judges whether we're safe or unsafe, whether we're free to thrive or we need to fight to survive.
This neurophysiological judgement – safe or unsafe? – affects everything. The way we live and relate to others. The way our bodies behave – our health and wellbeing. The choices we make.
Is it safe to cross the road now?
Is it safe to leave this job?
Is it safe to stay in this relationship?
And more recently, with the Covid-19 pandemic:
Is it safe to hug this person?
Is it safe for me to leave my house?
Is it safe for me to have this vaccine/not have this vaccine?
The Covid-19 pandemic has well and truly placed the issue of feeling safe on the agenda. But in reality, it has been there for a while; for too long, people have been walking around in survival mode – I've been observing and measuring this for the last 20-odd years. The speed of life ramping up, becoming so chaotic that our nervous systems have collectively, subconsciously habituated to survival, to feeling unsafe.
In other words, we've got used to living in the wrong part of our nervous system. We've got used to feeling on edge, over-stimulated, unable to stop, afraid to stop, sick when we stop. We're constantly running away from hidden threat. We don't feel safe and we don't even realize that.
I began to see and measure this decade ago and the desire to write this book began to take form. But then I didn't have all of my answers. And, at the end of the day, it's all about timing. At the time, publishers didn't want it – they thought no one would understand or want to buy a book about feeling safe. Or at least, the ordinary man on the street might not want to buy a book on feeling safe, but in another world, the scientific and trauma therapy community,