Practice Ease and Safety
from Aranya
How much happiness can you get by struggling? Very little. Struggle is struggle, period. You equate it with pain. And yet, pain is pain, and it is not important for gain. Pain and gain are two separate words. They are not connected by the laws of cause and effect. You can do as much pain as you want, and you can do as much gain as you want, but it is not a given that you will gain if you have a lot of pain. Talk to the people who live on the streets. Talk to the people upstairs. Talk to the people in the burn unit. Talk to the people with AIDS. Pain does not equal gain. Struggle does not equal gain.
Relax.
Breathe.
Practice feeling safe.
Practice feeling ease.
What an odd concept!
Remember that when you focus on how tough the times are and how much pain you are in and how overwhelmed you feel, you are spending your time feeling what you then will manifest. That’s the old “Be it and you’ll get it.” Like produces like. You practice pain, you get pain. You practice worry, you get more to worry about. It works that way. So, if you want to not be overwhelmed or in pain, if you want ease, don’t sit around thinking about how wretched yesterday was. Stop worrying “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! How might it go wrong? Where is the pain going to be?”
Instead, practice safety. Some of you ask, “Huh? What is safety? I haven’t felt safe in years.” Some of you practiced safety when you were kids. When you felt really scared you would insert your thumb into your mouth, wrap your hair around your fingers, and take a deep breath.
Safety doesn’t mean you have to become a thumb sucker again. It doesn’t mean you always have to carry a teddy bear or a blanket with you. Instead, remember how that safety felt when teddy was there, when mom and dad were sleeping down the hall, and when you knew that the world was a safe place.
One of the suggestions we like to give to people who didn’t have pleasant childhoods or who can’t remember them to practice safety is this. Think of yourself on a rainy winter night. You are home and no one is coming over. There is a fire crackling in the fireplace. There is something absolutely luscious on the stove, stew or soup, chocolate cake, or bread—that makes the whole house smell like home. You’re warm, you have your favorite chair, and you don’t have a care in the world. Safety. Comfort. And what is the noise that goes with that? Hmmmm.
Every morning when you get up, before you get out of the bed and sneer at yourself in the mirror, before you begin to think about all that you have to do today or don’t have to do today, practice safety and say, “Hmmmmmmm.” And then think about who you want to be. Hold safety in your body, going “Hmmmmmm.” and bring in the picture of who you want to be in six months—not five years from now, not next year’s goal. Just be a little bit more self‑aware about being able to cope and deal with changes in your life. You can become bigger than you are right now. Practice this every day. It has two benefits:
1) You start to be safe as you remind yourself, “Oh, yes, I know about safety.” It also associates where you are going with safety. Either you can lie in bed thinking about all the things that you have to do and all the struggle and the pain that you have to go through to get to where you have to go in six months: ‘Well, I have to deal with this, and I have to fill out these forms, and I have to decide whether or not I can really cope with that, and I have to do this, and I have to get bigger, and oh God.” Or you can do safety and say, “Hmmmmm.” And then pull that picture in—not the getting there, but the feeling of being there. It takes much less time.
2) If you have the presence of mind when something scary does come along, you can “Hmmmm” in its face and discover that most of what is scary in the world is not materially scary, it’s psychologically scary.
After you practice safety—please, not before— draw a picture in your mind of something that is easy for you. Maybe it is summertime and you are laying in a hammock with nothing to worry about. You are relaxing and are in the flow of your own life. Some of you have had the experience of being in the flow, where it’s just “Yes.” So create an example or remember one and practice being there. And then, once again, visualize who you are going to be in six months with your expanding ease in life. Allow the idea of getting there to just creep in softly. Don’t think about the details. Just think of getting there and having it be easy and safe.
If you are a master of safety and ease, where is “tough” in the picture? Could be pretty cool, huh? You can have suffering if you like. You can forget all about ease, and you can have struggle as long as you want. You can be terrified as long as you want. It’s your choice. You can value suffering and pain, and you can go after as much pain and struggle as you want. But please, don’t whine at me about it. I will say, “Have you been practicing safety?”
And you will admit, “No.”
“Well, try it—you might like it. Have you been practicing ease?”
“No. It’s scary.”
“I told you to do safety. Safety first, followed by ease.”