Feel Safe With Your Feelings: Creating Emotional Safety in Your Body (Somatic Meditation)
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Emotional Safety Begins With How We Relate to Our Feelings
What if the reason your healing feels stuck isn’t that you’re doing it wrong… but that your system doesn’t yet feel safe enough to really feel?
We might feel afraid of our shame…. or ashamed of our fear.
We might cover over our pain with anger.
We might judge ourselves as weak because of our anxiety, or bad because of our rage.
One feeling arises, and almost immediately another layer follows: fear, judgment, self-criticism, and an urgency to fix or get rid of what’s there.
Over time, this ties our inner world in knots. Instead of emotions moving through us naturally, their flow is interrupted. What could have been a wave becomes a holding pattern. We experience more tension, more confusion, more self-judgment, and eventually a deep fear of our own feelings.
And yet, our emotions are simply our very real and natural reactions to life. They’re not mistakes. They’re not signs that something is wrong with us. They carry information. They contain pieces of our wisdom.
Our emotions are also inevitable. We all feel angry sometimes. We all feel vulnerable. We all feel sad, afraid, confused, and agitated at different moments in our lives. When we add judgment and fear on top of these normal human experiences, we suffer far more than we need to.
Why Emotional Safety Often Feels So Hard
From a somatic perspective, it makes sense that emotional safety doesn’t come easily.
The body learned, often very early, that certain emotions were dangerous. And this isn’t because the emotions themselves are harmful, but because expressing or even feeling them disrupted connection, safety, or belonging. Maybe anger led to withdrawal or punishment. Maybe sadness was dismissed or minimized. Maybe fear overwhelmed the people around you.
So the nervous system adapted. It learned which emotions felt risky, and it learned to shut them down.
When an emotion begins to surface now, a deep, automatic part of the nervous system asks a simple question: Is it safe to have this feeling?
If the answer is no, the system clamps down. That clamping down can look like judgment, suppression, dissociation, intellectualizing, spiritual bypassing, or frantic attempts to regulate the feeling away before it has even been felt. These are not failures of healing. They are signs of protection.
Emotional Safety Is a Felt Sense, Not a Belief
One of the most important things to understand is that emotional safety is not a belief. It’s a felt sense.
You can’t consciously convince your body that certain feelings are safe if it has learned otherwise. You can’t think your way into safety. Emotional safety is built slowly through repeated experiences of staying present with sensation, affect, and emotion without overwhelm.
This is why somatic work is so powerful. It doesn’t ask your body to agree with a new idea. It offers your body a new lived experience. Over time, those experiences teach the nervous system something new: that it is possible to feel and stay connected at the same time.
How Emotions Move When There Is Emotional Safety
Emotions are movements of energy in the body. They want to move. They want to complete themselves.
When we interrupt them with fear or judgment, they get stuck. When we meet them with enough safety, enough allowance, and enough gentleness, they can complete their natural cycle. And it’s that completion that brings relief.
This is one of the great paradoxes of emotional healing. When you stop trying to get rid of your emotions, they stop running your life. People often assume that allowing feelings will make them bigger, messier, or more dangerous, when the opposite is actually true.
Allowing creates flow.
Flow creates resolution.
Resolution creates steadiness.
What It Means to Truly Feel Safe With Your Feelings
Learning emotional safety does not mean acting emotions out in harmful ways. It doesn’t mean spewing anger at others or belittling someone when fear arises. It simply means allowing yourself to feel what you feel without adding shame or fear on top of it.
There is no wrong thing to feel. And there is no wrong way to feel it.
The full range of emotions will move through us over the course of a lifetime. When we learn to meet them with acceptance rather than judgment, with presence rather than fear, they can move more cleanly. They pass more naturally. They no longer need to burst out at inopportune times because they’ve been given space to exist.
This is the heart of emotional safety. Not eliminating emotions, but changing your relationship to them. Letting your inner world find flow again. Letting balance emerge, not because you forced it, but because you finally stopped fighting what was already there.
Try this Somatic Meditation to Create Emotional Safety in Your Body now!
Episode timing:
00:00 - Why emotional safety is the foundation of healing
04:54 - Somatic Meditation to Create Emotional Safety in Your Body
37:07 - Conclusion and Reflections
Related: More Somatic Emotional Processing Meditations
Learn more about Havening Techniques and the science behind them
Havening Techniques® is a registered trademark of Ronald Ruden, 15 East 91st Street, New York. www.havening.org
If this kind of gentle, body-based healing speaks to you, I’d love to invite you into Somatic Healing Hub - my membership community where we practice this work together.
With live classes, workshops, and coaching you’ll:
Create a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, so you can feel calmer, clearer, and more grounded in daily life
Gently process the emotions held in your body, instead of getting stuck in reactivity, overwhelm, or shutdown
Break free from chronic stress patterns by addressing what’s underneath - not just managing the surface
Reclaim your attention from spiraling thoughts or anxiety, and reconnect with what your body is truly asking for
Feel supported and not alone, inside a community that honors your sensitivity and your pace
BONUS: You’ll also get AD-FREE ACCESS to my entire podcast library! (Somatic Healing Meditations)
How was that Somatic Meditation to Create Emotional Safety for you?
What shifted within? And what do you understand now that you didn’t understand before?
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Thanks so much for joining me today!
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Enjoy more like this: Havening Exercises, Regulation Exercises, Somatic Emotional Processing
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a somatic emotional healing coach here to help you quickly identify and heal the subconscious blocks, old emotional wounds and self-sabotaging core beliefs that are holding you back!
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