Here I am again, outside with my laptop soaking in the sweet smell of lugustrum and basking in the sun like a lizard. Unfortunately, as I get older, my skin is looking like one’s, but as long as they don’t start flirting with me with that big pink gross little bag they puff up, I’m good. Bella is, as always, hunting for squirrels, all of which are twice her size. I don’t understand why she doesn’t give up because they’re fast and, damn, Bella, they can climb! High! And what would she do with a squirrel if she caught one, skin, de-gut, filet it, then slam it down on the grill? Convince it to be her BFF? Try to bamboozle it into becoming a fellow dog through intense and merciless proselytizing? I take it back. She did catch one once. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wrestling with one she had pinned on its back. Knowing how razor sharp their little claws are, I jumped up and screamed, breaking up the little furry skirmish just in the nick of time. Nick. Haha. She does have one little squirrel friend who taunts her by circling the trunk of a big oak just outside of her reach. You can tell they’re both having fun. Okay. Enough about squirrels. I frankly didn’t have anything else intelligent to say. Today, Erik talks about our sense of safety. Enjoy.

Me: A sense of safety. A lot of people just feel like they’re not safe.

Erik: I can relate to that. I felt that way myself sometimes.

Me: In what way?

Erik: Well everybody does. When I first crossed over, even, I wondered when the other shoe was going to drop. Everybody here didn’t judge me, and I thought that couldn’t last forever. I felt that same thing when I was alive, too. What was going to happen next? It’s about not accepting change. I’ve mentioned that before. When you keep experiencing things that people might label as hardships or danger, the ego side of you will react. I’m empathic to those. Who would want to feel like that, feel like they were in a box? PTSD is one big example. You have that, Mom, from my death and from seeing me after I shot myself.

Me (with sadness): It wasn’t pretty.

Erik pauses.

Erik: The ego just gets fucked up and twisted and shit. How do you find safety? With people I’ve helped since I’ve been here in the spiritual world and other spirits that I’ve talked to, even listening to spiritual people in the physical world—I listen to them too–I learn from both sides of the fence. I learned that you have to stop and get in touch with what you’re feeling, emotionally. Ground yourself into what’s going on at that very second. You only live in the present moment. The Now moment, the Now moment, the Now moment, one after the other. It’s perpetual. It’s never ending. It never stops. Realize what’s going on right now. Stop thinking about what happened in the past and worrying that it might happen in the future. That’s what people do. They worry about what happened in the past, but you have to let go of the past.

Me: Well how do you do that? That’s easier said than done!

Erik: That’s what I’m trying to say. You have to get in that moment of Now. If the past starts creeping into the present moment, then you’re focusing on the past. If you’re worrying what’s going to happen in the future, it’s because you’re still focusing on the past and worrying that it’s going to happen in the future. Get yourself into the moment of Now, and the way you do that is you start focusing on—well first you have to ground yourself into what you’re feeling and recognize that how you’re feeling unsafe really doesn’t make sense for where you are in the present moment. If you’re in your house alone, and all of a sudden you feel panicky, you don’t feel safe, but there’s no one around you that could hurt you. You’re safe. You’re not going to be harmed. The only thing that can harm you is your emotional reaction to it. So first get into contact with that. Take a deep breath. Take a fucking chill pill, whatever you need to do, take a warm bath—whatever will help you relax. Or you can connect to what’s going on in your environment.

Me: For example?

Erik: If you’re in the house and you’re freaking out because you feel like the walls are closing in, you could do a couple of things. You could get out of the fucking house and go to the backyard for a walk, or you can look at the walls and think, “They’re not closing in. I’m safe. I’m okay.”

Me: Let’s take the example of somebody who’s been raped, and they’re afraid it’s going to happen again. She or he could think, “Well, there’s no one in my life that would rape me now” or—walk me through it.

Erik: You could do that, but what I’m talking about is someone who has a lot of obligations in life that overwhelm them.

Me: What does that have to do with safety?

Erik: It can start making you feel unsafe because you’re senses are overwhelmed. Then you go into the fight or flight mode.

Me: Okay.

Erik: From a spiritual perspective, well, even in the physical perspective, everything is subjective. A person can be raped and go through tremendous trauma like, for instance someone going through the holocaust without being broken. Maybe another person would be broken. Everyone will react a different way whether they’ve been through the Holocaust or whether they’ve been raped. For some people, sometimes the best therapy is to first really get in contact with what you’re feeling. You know, Mom, you’ve brought this up before how some people, in order to survive a situation, they dissociate from it, but this doesn’t allow them to feel.

That’s what I did. In fact, when I saw Erik sitting in his chair, dead, I saw the whole thing from the perspective as if I was standing at the door, looking at this woman wailing, head in her son’s lap. Since then, it still feels surreal, and I still feel disassociated.

Erik: Sometimes you do.

Me: Well that’s pretty painful.

Erik: But you have to feel the sheer terror sometimes in order for it to be released. You can hold onto it and release it a little bit at a time, which might take an entire lifetime, or you can release it all at once. You have to figure that out for yourself. Everyone’s different. There’s no universal answer. Everybody’s unique.

Me: Of course.

Erik: Then for other people, you need to not block yourself off from intimacy. You need to start to rebuild that trust again.

Me: Are you talking about the example of rape?

Erik: Yes, rape.

Damn that boy can turn on a dime at warp speed!

Erik: You need to start to realize that not everyone out there is a predator. That’s another whole ball of yarn because first you need to understand what was it that you didn’t know before that you now know about the person that raped you? What did you not see in that person if it’s a person you knew? Say you were in a scenario where you were walking down a street, and you didn’t see it coming.

Me: Right.

Erik: Or maybe you did see it coming. It’s situational awareness—being aware of your surroundings and things like that. This is where the ego can be good because it’s there to protect you while you’re in the physical body, to keep you out of harmful situations.

Me: Okay.

Erik: So learning how to be aware of your surroundings and everything in it, including people, that’s one thing. I’m not talking about being aware in a paranoid, suspicious way. I’m just talking about objective awareness. But—I’m trying to not make this to complicated because it can be and this is where therapists are so important. You need a professional to help you walk through that or you can get yourself into the situation where you’re hyper vigilant all the time.

Me: Oh, yeah.

Erik: In order for you not to stay that way, you have to find people you can trust again and that you feel safe around. Let me just stop there and say that it’s all about trust, reestablishing trust and there are so many ways you can go about doing that. I just gave you some examples.

Me: So a lot of this is basically dissecting what you missed in an unsafe situation so that, in a way, you can get control of it. If you know what you missed, then you can control that situation in the future. Are we talking about a specific case or in general?

Erik: Sometimes people in spiritual circles say pay attention to the signs, so I would word it that way. If you put it in the terms of being aware of what you missed, you’ll tell yourself, “I gotta be vigilant. I gotta be vigilant!” I don’t want people to do that. I don’t want people to feel fucking afraid all the time. That’s exhausting anyway. Like I said, get into touch with your emotional center. Listen to your intuition, and if something doesn’t feel right, then pay attention to it. Don’t go around feeling, “Oh, there’s something that’s about to happen.” So to sum it up, learn to be aware of how you feel in every moment and see if it makes sense in terms of what you’re experiencing in your surroundings, and be objectively aware of those surroundings, letting your feelings be the ultimate judge.

Me: Nice, Erik. Nice. I’m not ditching the pepper spray, though.

Here are some cute cartoons about safety. I couldn’t pick just one.