Can Mindfulness Really Help You Let Your Guard Down?
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How long do we need to practice mindfulness for in order to feel safe? When we can feel like we can let our guard down, where the fear dissipates and the emotions start to settle and we can be ourselves or we can feel like we can really come home to a feeling of true safety. How long do we need to practice mindfulness for to feel a sense of refuge that everyone talks about?

It's a real concern and question that a lot of us have. Like, am I going to find that in one minute of true mindfulness meditation? Am I going to find it in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, 10 years? When will that feeling of safety truly come?

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And for me, this is one of the major benefits of mindfulness meditation practice is that it can help us to feel safer and safer where the fear drops away. I've been practicing mindfulness for quite a while. I was a Buddhist monk for over two years in the Thai Theravada tradition and

I was at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for over five years with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg and all the teachers who go through there. And I'm a mindfulness trainer for the program Born at Google. And I've been teaching executives, CEOs, prison inmates, kids, a lot of different kinds of people on how to practice mindfulness. But I've also been training people on how to teach mindfulness to help others feel safe.

and content and feeling like they can be at home in their own bodies and their own hearts. I've been training a lot of therapists and counselors on how to do this, life coaches and yoga teachers. And it's not easy to help people to feel safe sometimes in this world where there's seemingly threats around every corner.

um, you know, a sense of overwhelm and stress are on the rise for a variety of reasons that we don't need to get into right now. And trauma sensitivity is something that more and more people have on their radar, fortunately. Um, but if you're living with trauma or if you have fear, or if you want to help people who are going through a lot to feel, um, calm, grounded, and

peaceful, you know how hard it is to meet yourself where you are and to open to your experience or to, it can be very intimidating to even broach that subject. How do I be present with my experience if I don't like my experience? If I've been wanting to distract myself and get away from how I actually feel,

I try to distract myself, numb myself, repress how I'm actually feeling because I don't feel safe and I don't know how to meet that. And how do you help others going through that to help them be present? It's a really tricky topic. And so I wanna play a clip for you of an interaction that I had with a new mindfulness and meditation teacher who had this question.

How long do we need to practice mindfulness for it to be effective in feeling safe? And so I share a few thoughts and insights and tools, and I'd love to get your feedback on what you think of that and what's helpful for you in feeling safe or how you help others to feel safe. The main goal is to be sensitive to trauma, not to go too much in the deep end.

So if that's the case for you, please back off and pause if you're feeling overwhelmed. But I hope that you enjoy these thoughts in this video that I clip for you. Love to get your feedback. And if you want further support in your practice or in your mindfulness teaching, check out the links below. We'd be honored to support you.

Thank you and enjoy the clip. Yeah, that can be condensed into a few seconds. Yeah, and it can also be expanded to a whole 10-day retreat where that's all we do is to sense into, you know, are we feeling safe? What conditions are conducive to our sense of safety? What is the feeling of fear? I actually did that

Sunday night through Monday night this week, pretty much nonstop. I don't want to go into too much detail, but I was feeling unsafe for a variety of reasons. And it was a really rich exploration. Like what? And it took me a while to realize I was feeling unsafe. And to me, like, it was such a wonderful recognition. Like, oh, I'm feeling unsafe. Whereas I'm

You know, in my past, I would suppress it or distract myself or quote unquote, like man up to not feel unsafe. And so it was wonderful to really kind of surrender to that sense of vulnerability and a sense into what were the factors involved.

This episode is brought to you by the Mindfulness Teacher Certification Program. To become a certified mindfulness teacher, visit mindfulnessexercises.com slash certify. Involved, that were present, and also conditioned from my past, that were kind of coming up. So I think both were true, like both, there were factors of present, like, there, I was actually unsafe, like in the present, like,

pretty objectively. And there were things from my past that were coming up too that felt unsafe. So even just recognizing that and acknowledging it with self-compassion and sense that, yeah, like, of course I'm not feeling safe right now. There are all these factors. Yeah, I wouldn't blame anyone else for not feeling safe with these same circumstances. You know, for my self-care, I

as well as agency, speaking up, doing what I can to feel safe, both externally and internally, not to suppress fear, to open to it and acknowledge it, to work with it with agency. So yeah, so we can expand this practice of safety, or we can condense it. If

we can you know in an appropriate way and we can do that just with you know just simple just looking around taking stock of where we are maybe taking a few deep breaths you know just kind of sensing the internal landscape so i'm working with a communication coach right now i shared this in our newsletter a few weeks ago but

One of the things that my communication coach shared with me is that there's a big group of people who need to feel safe in order to feel comfortable connecting with others. That safety is sort of the primary need or the initial need. And once we feel safe, then it's far easier to connect with others. There's a lot of other people who are the exact opposite, where they need to feel connected with others

in order to feel safe. I fall into the former camp where I need to feel safe in order to feel connected. I think my wife is the opposite, and it's largely true for couples. But this can be, you know, in friendships, you know, any kind of relationship or just, you know, being around other people. And so part of my work is to sense safety.

or since lack of safety or presence of safety? And how is that related to feelings of connection? And so as mindfulness teachers, I think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of people who are teaching thrive on having and acknowledging a safe environment. And so those people may appreciate ground rules, the voicing of intention, tone of voice, how much we explicitly acknowledge

what they're saying and like listening to their words and asking, do I hear you correctly when you say that? You know, questions like what would help this experience feel more safe for you? You know, would you like to keep your eyes open? You know, bathroom is over there. Please feel free to get some water. Stop me anytime if things feel uncertain or scary. So many things we can do

invite a sense of safety. We can't make anyone feel safe, but we can create conditions that are conducive for safety and we can, you know, listen. How is this feeling? And then, you know, once they're feeling safe, then it's far easier for them to connect with themselves. And then, you

There's also going to be a large amount of people who we teach over the years that are the opposite, or they need a sense of connection first in order to feel safe. So maybe those people appreciate maybe a little bit of small talk.

Kind of a natural body language. Oftentimes as mindfulness teachers, it can be very helpful for us to share our own vulnerabilities in as much of an authentic way as we can, you know, in an appropriate way for whatever that setting is. We can share stories of our own practice, our day. I think that's one of the reasons why I'm drawn to these practices is because

It helps me feel safe and I'm much more readily available to others as a result.