There’s a certain kind of day that is gratefully post-storm, post-flare, post-catharsis, where the world feels like it’s tilting back into place, slowly, unsteadily. 

You know those days that come after you feel like you’ve been through the washing machine… because you’ve just been tumbled around by life, wrung out by some un/seen cycle, and now you’re blinking in the light, disoriented but returned.

Those days are not a return to normal. They’re a return to something. And for me, that something is always a deeper encounter with safety… not the kind that’s engineered or scheduled, but the kind that arrives like spring after a long internal winter.

It’s unfamiliar, so it doesn’t always feel safe, but there’s a sense of a new access to safety that is awaiting me, like a gentle whiff of tacos from the taco truck down the street that I can’t quite see, but anticipate. 🌮

Safety Is Not a Stop on the Map

People often talk about safety (Ventral Vagal) like it’s a destination… something you get to after you’ve done enough work, processed enough trauma, or found the right tools. But for me, safety isn’t a goalpost or end zone. It’s a terrain… a landscape… a whole unfolding world.

Most of the time, I think we live on the outskirts of safety, you know… orbiting around it, craving it, tasting brief glimmers before being pulled back into survival. But once you get a toe in, once even one corner of your system gets to feel safe, you start to realize: this is not a point on a line. This is a whole ass continent.

It’s like in a video game, where a part of the map stays dark until you enter that zone. Then suddenly, the terrain lights up, detailed and alive. Safety is like that for me… a whole bioregion that comes into view only when I can meet myself gently enough to walk there.

But it’s also like trying to grab a handful of air.  Go ahead… try it.  

Did you get it?  

It might feel elusive, because you can’t point to it and say, “There it is!” But at the same time, you totally DID grab it.  

Yeah… safety sometimes feels like that.  It’s actually so familiar (like air) that you almost can’t not grab it…  but it’s also like air in that you can’t always point to it and say, “there it is!” because it’s so much more than that.

The Continuum and the sphere

If I had to draw it, I’d say there’s a continuum: on the left, contraction, fear, performance. On the right, expansion, flow, inspired transmission. And in the middle? Safety. Not as a midpoint, but as a gateway.

But I’d also say the real image isn’t a line, it’s a sphere. And maybe even that’s wrong. Because the truth is, I don’t think safety lives in geometry at all. it lives in relationship.

Safety isn’t about being on the right side of the sphere. It’s about being with… with your sensations, with your stories, with your sacred humanity… wherever you happen to land. And the center of that circle, if there is one, isn’t a place you arrive. It’s a presence you become.

Everywhere Is the Center

There’s a spiritual principle I’ve come to know in my bones… one that echoes through the mystics and through my own body alike: There is no center, because everywhere is the center.

I believe that Love (aka: Divine, Energy, Goddess, Universe, etc.) is the soup: the field that holds and animates all things.  It’s what we’re all made of. It’s Source energy that holds everything, and all of us.  There is nothing that exists separate from Love.  It extends without limits in all directions, and is beyond time.

In this principle of Love, there is no point where we can step outside of it. No exile. No true distance. We may forget it. We may feel cut off from it. But we are never actually outside its embrace.

That means safety – true, relational, spiritual safety – is not a rare event or a reward for “getting it right.” It’s the constant hum beneath all experience. It’s what’s always within reach, even in pain, even in collapse. Not as a forced reframe. But as a quiet truth that remains, unthreatened by our forgetting.  It is what allows and holds and is our nervous system, experienced through our finite minds and bodies.

Love is the experience that happens when power and beauty dissolve the illusion of separation, and we taste the Oneness of all that is.  This is the core of safety.

This truth undoes all our linear stories. There is no forward or backward. No left or right of the center. There is only here. And here. And here.

Love (safety) is always touching you.

Even when you can’t feel it.
Even when your body is saying “run.”
Even when you are grieving or raging or numb.

You are not outside the center.
You are the center… just like everything else.
Which means: there’s no arrival.
Only remembrance.

Love as the Field

So, because I know these are profound perspectives, let me share this in another way, in case it’s helpful.  

My deepest spiritual orientation is this: Love is the soup. The medium. The unnameable force that holds all things. And that Love doesn’t require a purpose. It doesn’t demand performance. It simply is… moving through all things, animating all things, not because anything needs fixing, but because Love can’t help but extend itself.

When I’m in safety… even if I’m feeling just anchored by a thread… I can remember that. I can access expansion, not as a push, but as a natural opening. Creativity returns. Desire becomes clear. Effort drops, but presence remains. That’s the rhythm I long to live inside.

Yet… still… that’s not a destination to arrive to.  It’s a journey… a relationship… a remembrance.

And also, that rhythm… that remembrance… includes the struggle. It includes the part of me on the floor, weeping. It includes the ache, the grumpiness, the disorientation. I used to think those moments were failures, as if I’d fallen out of love’s favor, or as if I was somehow separated from Love / Safety.  But I see it differently now. 

for me, the revelation is this:  just because I’m struggling, or feeling pain, or uncomfortable… or even if I’m unsafe… doesn’t mean love isn’t right here – in, on, around me – permeating every part of my being.

If you hadn’t noticed…. this is why the word LOVE appears at the very center of the ∞actualinfinity Autonomic Nervous System Experiencing Model.  It is the centerless center. There is profound depth in every aspect of the model – symbolic and metaphorical and literal. 

The Struggle Bus Is Not Outside the Divine

There’s this idea that ease and inspiration are “spiritual,” but pain and confusion are “problems.” I don’t buy it anymore. The struggle bus is not exile. It’s simply part of the terrain.

It’s not that I want to live there. I really, really don’t. But I’ve stopped pretending that love only lives in the light. Love is the whole thing: the ache, the awe, the blankness, the bloom.

And on the flipside… I don’t believe that we are meant to live on the “nicer” side of things all the time, either.  I’d love to wake up every morning feeling inspired and whole and fully connected to meaning and purpose.  But most days, I don’t.  Not because it isn’t still available to me… I just am having a different experience.  That’s not a failing, it’s just a happening.  There is no more meaning to it than that.  There’s nothing to get away from and nowhere to escape to.

That shift: from seeking safety as escape to recognizing safety as companionship, is the quiet revolution of my life.

All of It Is Welcome

So where does that leave me? Sometimes, in awe. Sometimes, in resistance. Sometimes, staring out my window at the most absurd thing like a Rolls-Royce SUV parked on my modest Chicago street, wondering how the world makes any sense at all.

But I keep returning to this: I don’t have to make sense of it. 

I just have to stay with it. 

With me.

With the safety that doesn’t always feel safe. 

With the presence that doesn’t always feel present. 

With the love that always holds, even when I can’t feel it.

It’s not about arriving, or even accessing that love and safety. 

It’s about remembering.

nervous system regulation isn’t earned… it’s remembered.

And today, I remember.

Today, I hope you can remember too.