As I was preparing for my safety class in KOR Berlin, one perspective came up that I would like to share with you today. It’s about anchoring in the present moment vs. anticipating the “danger”.
Many of us have these mental dialogs in ropes… thinking about that futomomo and how much it will hurt when your full weight is on it… checking your Gote whether it will be ok later in suspension… isn’t this handcuff going to be too tight?
In life, we worry all the same. We worry about decisions other people make and what effect they might have on our lives. We worry about the coming BVG strike. We worry about the weather. We worry about elections this weekend…
It’s a normal thing – we humans worry about the future. It is in fact the main function of our brain, to anticipate danger.
Here is the thing though: when we are in our thoughts about the future, we are not in the present. The anticipation gives us an illusion of control by narrowing our future to one possibility… at the cost of ignoring all the other possibilities, isn’t that so? To be able to anticipate, we have to deselect, so we end up having a tunnel vision of the world, we are more rigid and we are even compelled to protect our vision, insisting we did the right thing.
And we are the most unsafe, as we live in an illusion, not in the present moment.
In my recent Strozzi Somatics workshop, we did Jo exercises – it’s a part of the methodology of this institute. There is a hit – extension forward with the stick – and common pitfall coming together with it, when people are overextending, almost falling over in this movement, losing their center, losing the connection to their legs, losing their ground.
I thought of it as a physical manifestation of what happens when we “anticipate danger” – we are overextended in the future (or some narrow version of it) and we are not in the present. We lose connection to the present moment, to our center, and to our ground.
Is there a different way to safety?
I found my answer by coming into the body. When we feel our bodies, we are in the present moment. Thoughts can take us all over the place. We might be dragged into our past, into the faraway future. The body is always present. Our heartbeat will let us know that we are excited about what we see. Our palms get sweaty when we are nervous. The uneasy feeling in the stomach will demand us to take a pause and check in with ourselves before agreeing to the proposal. It’s an immediate internal feedback – about the world around us. How beautiful and resourceful is that?
We can ground ourselves in it. We can connect to the universal life energy that flows through you and me… and all of us. There is no promise to be safe, but there is guidance.
In sexological bodywork, during a bodywork session, we practice gently bringing the person back by asking “What did you notice in your body happening just now?.. Where did you just go?” – whenever we see the person drifting away in their thoughts. It’s very habitual, for many of us. Like a piece of rubber, it snaps back whenever you let go. It takes constant exercise and commitment to stay in now.
But there is something we can do, every day, every moment, whenever we notice that we are drifting away with our worrisome mind, by asking yourself the same question: “What did you notice in your body right now?”, bringing your attention gently back to the living reality of this moment…
We can choose to be present. We can drop our shoulders and untense muscles and let ourselves join the flow of the moment, letting the universe play with all of us, to drop the illusion of control, to trust ourselves into someone’s hands – in ropes we do that literally.
There is no promise to be safe, but there is guidance – in the here and now.
*** Picture by Brandon Betterrugged