How to Risk Feeling Safe: Beginnings, Claiming, and Endings

By Tuesday Rivera

To make the most of this article, please first read The Risk of Feeling Safe. There I explored how "not feeling safe" has become a habit for many of us—a psychological and spiritual pattern that keeps us from real, deep transformation, our own and the world's.

Now let's consider what it looks like when we risk feeling safe. When might we face this choice? What might be happening for us as we take this risk? And what words might help us make the leap?

Of course, we might take the risk to feel safe at any moment. But I want to talk about three particular times when it comes up: at a beginning, when it's time to claim a truth, and in endings.

Allowing a Beginning

When something new is happening in our lives - a burgeoning relationship, a new client or fresh project, any kind of door opening - we can feel especially at risk. And since we're going to feel at risk anyway, I suggest that we consider taking the risk of feeling safe.

To risk feeling safe as we place our foot on a new path really changes what we're able to walk into, what we're able to accept, and how much newness we'll allow. It changes both the scale of what we do and the felt experience of the new beginning coming our way.
​
Let me give a personal example. I read the Akashic Records, but that hasn't always been the case. In fact, it's not even something I ever expected to say in my life! But at some point several years ago, there was an opening. A beginning. A choice to study and learn how to read the Records. A choice to offer them to others.

As I felt pulled to the Records, I wondered what others in my professional world would think. After all, I've built a whole career out of supporting very serious people do very serious things in the world. But here I was, considering diving into this very arcane and far-out world of guides, teachers, and sacred support. I worried my hard-won reputation and credibility were at risk. And here's where the risk to feel safe came in.

I was going to read the Records, and I wasn't going to limit myself to personal readings for just family and friends. No, I was going to risk feeling safe so that I could offer readings to others—those outside of my intimate circle, colleagues and strangers. An entirely different scale than I would have offered if I'd chosen to focus on my well-worn anxiety and habit of feeling unsafe to keep myself safe.

This, for me, was a going-way-out-on-a-limb beginning, and the risk to feel safe was turning towards myself with trust in my own integrity and efforts. I could risk feeling safe because I could trust that I would read those Records fully and honestly. I risked feeling safe to get started, and then I began to know I was safe. I could offer this at a larger scale than I had ever imagined because I knew I would bring it fully and honestly to those who asked.
​
Fundamentally, though, I had to risk feeling safe to make this offering to the world. And that is often so in our beginnings. We must risk feeling safe before we can truly allow something new to begin. We can't demand that the external world lines up to tell us that we're safe, and then we'll start. No, we must know, with a deep internal knowing, that we are safe, and then we must begin.

But this doesn't have to be a "close my eyes and leap" kind of moment. It can be considered. It can be deliberate. It is the intentional turning to yourself as a sacred being—and to the divine intelligence that moves through you—to find the safety that can only be sourced from within. That doesn't wait for the external world to provide what you must claim in partnership with the sacred.

The risk of feeling safe, then, is a spiritual practice of internal sovereignty in relationship with something larger—a practice that allows transformation even while acknowledging real vulnerability.

When I risked feeling safe, I could begin down a path that has been completely wild, wholly intuitive, and, ultimately, Grace-filled.

A Prayer for Beginnings
Dear God/Goddess/Mystery/Love, let me know I'm held in your care as I make this leap. Show me how to turn toward my own sovereignty as I step onto this new path. Help me remember my sacredness and trust the divine intelligence that moves through me. Help me bet on myself and on You as I open this door. I am safe, so I will...

Claiming Your Truth

To risk feeling safe helps us claim what is already true.

Sometimes we have difficulty catching up with ourselves: we may have already moved into a new phase of life or morphed into an identity that feels big and scary. We may be living part of our life's dream or purpose that we don't want to name because we don't want to jinx it. Or we may be so invested in our belief that we can't do something that we don't notice that we already have.

This tendency goes in both directions: We deny the good stuff in our lives and we also close our eyes to the challenges. Both in service of continuing our pattern of not feeling safe.

We have a tendency to deny the abundance in our lives. We may have a strong love, a great job, a safe place to live, or be really kickass at something. I don't think we deny these things because we don't appreciate what we have. I think it's because we're scared we're going to lose them. It's like we never open our hand fully around what we hold, afraid the breeze will steal it.

But there is power in claiming what's true. And to take up that power, we must risk feeling safe. We must dare to believe that we could be something or have something or do something. That it is safe for us to do so. We must open up that hand and let the breeze caress the reality of what is true in the present, even if exposure to the air changes it.

And when it's a truth that is hard to bear, we don't claim it as if claiming it is what makes it true. It is already true. To risk feeling safe means we believe ourselves to be able to handle that truth.

It is scary to open up to this kind of vulnerability, so instead we retreat into the well-worn belief that we are not safe. We are not safe, so we can't claim the present truth—whether it's positive or negative. When we cling to the feeling of not being safe, we can't fully step into what is present in our lives.

Let me share another personal example.

I received a spontaneous initiation from the Goddess in 2018, which changed my entire life. Since then, I have studied extensively and received a mantra from my teacher, gotten a mentor, crafted offerings around the divine feminine, and built my entire private life around a daily devotional practice of surrender and seeking guidance.

And yet.

I haven't said publicly: my life is devoted to Goddess, and it is my purpose to bring others into an active, living relationship with Goddess. I have known this to be true, but, because I have not felt safe, I haven't claimed it too loudly or too publicly.

Until now.

Right now, presently, I am safe to say this. I am safe to do this. I can't know how others will respond, but I am risking feeling safe so that I can claim what is true for me now. Nothing outside of me has changed, but I have decided that I will risk feeling safe because I have it in me.

And because I'm on a roll, let me just keep claiming! I've taken a big step recently, where I've claimed myself as a spiritual teacher and guide. This was, of course, divinely led. (See above—I'm asking Her for guidance all the time!) But the shift was that I felt ready to risk feeling safe even though everything in me felt like this was a very unsafe thing to do. Believe me, there were all sorts of voices in my head saying, "What? Why would you call yourself a teacher? Why? Like, who do you think you are? It's not safe. Keep your head down. You know, do it for the people you love and the people who love you, and don't make a push out."

But the reality is that I am actually safe. I'm actually safe. I am actually safe. In this moment, and in the foreseeable future, I am safe.

And because that is true, I can listen to the messages and guidance I was getting to make a claim that is shifting my work yet again.

Though it feels risky for me to settle into that safety, for me to believe that safety, for me to say: I am a spiritual teacher and guide. No matter how that is received, it is actually so and I am safe.

I wonder what each of us would claim if we just risked feeling safe.

Right now, let's practice saying:

• If I were safe, I would tell you...
• If I were safe, I would see...
• ​If I were safe, I would claim...

But the challenge here, the stance of sovereignty says: I am safe, so I will...

Try those again:

• I am safe, so I am saying...
• I am safe, and I can see...
• I am safe, and I claim...

Do you see how powerful that shift is? Even if you are only saying, seeing, and claiming these things to yourself right now, it makes a huge difference.

I don't want to negate that we have a history of women claiming their power and being punished, persecuted, and sometimes executed for it. Many of us can claim an ancestral experience that tells us we are not safe when we claim our spiritual gifts. But again, for many of us, that is not true in the present. It is an ancestral wound, and why our daring to risk feeling safe now is a genuinely revolutionary act. It is healing the past pain of our ancestors and creating a different future for our descendants.

A Prayer for Claiming
Dear God/Goddess/Mystery/Love, give me courage to speak what I know. Help me stand in my truth even when I tremble. Show me that claiming what's real is an act of devotion—to myself and to You. Remind me that my truth serves something larger than my comfort. Let me feel the ground beneath my feet as I say what must be said. I am safe, so I will...

Allowing an End

What happens in one area of our life affects all others. When we risk feeling safe to make the leap of new beginnings or to stand proudly in claiming what is ours, we are much more able to face endings. When we stay in our habit of denying our safety, we also reject healthy closures and clear-eyed seeing of what needs to be let go in our lives.

Maybe you even feel a little nervous now, as I make this point. Maybe you have an inkling of what must end for you to step into your next phase of life. Maybe even now you are shaking your head internally, listing all the reasons you can't even have the thought of what is ending. It's too painful. It's irrational. It makes no sense. Instead, we tell ourselves that we are not safe so that we do not have to face endings, partings, and the shifts that come from releasing an old version of ourselves or our lives.

Instead, we cling to the habit. The thought says:

• It is not safe to, so I can't possibly...
• I could never...
• ​Who am I to leave this beautiful thing?
  ​
  

Admittedly, the above feels awful, but let's admit that it is fundamentally less risky than risking feeling safe enough to:

• Consider that thought
• Imagine that ending
• ​Move toward letting that go
  
  

This is so human! We have all stayed too long in a job, a relationship, a situation that is not good for us. And, often, when we left it wasn't that suddenly everything was safer, it's that our feeling of safety became secondary to what we knew must happen. In other words, we risked feeling safe enough to end what wasn't working.

Sometimes, endings come involuntarily. This is also true. They have nothing to do with feeling safe or making choices. But, when we are lucky, we can turn toward an ending with a dignified stance. One that says: I will risk feeling safe in this ending and that will change everything about how it unfolds.

This is coming up for me in my life right now, because my daughter has chosen to combine her junior and senior year of high school, which means she will graduate next spring and leave for college next fall. This really is a great decision, and I'm so proud of her!

But...

I've lost a year with my beloved girl at home. An important phase of our lives together is ending, and I have feelings.

Feelings that I am sitting with. I've been working with my anticipatory grief and allowing myself to feel the sadness and shock at this fast change happening in our lives.

Naturally, I've been thinking ahead and making plans. We've set college visits and she is ready to start her applications. But I've felt a strange reluctance. An inability to step fully behind her and help her set sail toward this new adventure.

A simple way to understand my reluctance is to imagine that I don't want to face an empty nest or find an identity outside of parenting. While this may be partially true, I have just kept feeling that there is something different and deeper here. And I think the different and deeper has to do with my own feelings of safety. With my unwillingness to risk feeling safe as I parent her in this final year she is at home.

Stay with me. I have built some of my feeling of safety around my ability to parent: This is the thing I do. I care about it. I work hard at it. Because I do this thing, I am safe. It gives reason, structure, and predictability to my world. But what if I'm actually safe, and I do this thing? What if they are not connected in the way I have imagined them to be?

It's time now. Time for me to actually know that I am safe. To feel safe in my parenting of this child, and to allow this ending to unfold so that she has a parent whose identity is not built around doing for her.

When I risk feeling safe, what I do in this particular shift in our relationship—how I support her, how I love her, how I help her look forward without me—is really different. When I risk feeling safe, I can actually put her needs at the center of our relationship instead of my need to feel safe. I can allow the ending of this phase of our life together and face it forthrightly.

When I risk feeling safe, how I nurture this child as she launches looks really different than if I am afraid and fearful for my own safety as I shift identity and role.

We are all facing some kind of ending—whether we are ready to own it or not. To risk feeling safe helps us turn toward these endings well. It brings us into a dignified stance that has us facing the loss that is inevitable with being a living, breathing human being. The deeply cherished pattern of not feeling safe keeps us from turning towards our endings cleanly. Instead we linger in places we've outgrown and remain in circumstances that have become too small for who we're becoming.

Let's try this again:

I am safe, so I will...

• Consider that thought
• Imagine that ending
• ​Move toward letting that go

A Prayer for Endings
Dear God/Goddess/Mystery/Love, I am safe in your care, and so I will let go. Hold me as I allow this unraveling—thread by thread, breath by breath. Show me that release is sacred—an offering to what was and what will be. Help me be unafraid of what moves away from me, what I must release, what needs to shift now. Let me trust that what completes makes room for what's coming. I am safe, so I will...

The Spiritual Practice

To risk feeling safe is a spiritual practice of internal sovereignty that allows transformation, even while acknowledging real vulnerability.

If we took the risk of feeling safe, if we committed to it, everything would change. I am not propping up the old self-sufficiency/bootstrap model here. Nor am I nodding to the heroic "have courage in the face of fear." No, our safety is because of our relationship with the divine. It is not entirely self-generated. It is sacred. It must be known internally but it is a gift of our connection with the Mystery that holds all of us—whatever you call that Mystery.
​
We are held by the divine even in our actual precariousness.

To risk feeling safe, then, is a spiritual initiation. It is the risk to claim our power, our gifts, our very transformation. It is to say yes to beginnings, truth, and endings. This is deeply threatening to systems (internal and external) that benefit from our self-doubt. Not feeling safe actually keeps those systems in place.

So my invitation to you is to risk feeling safe, to know yourself safe. And I don't mean that in an insulting way. There might be ways that you're truly at risk. I'm not saying to put yourself at risk or to ignore those risks. What I am saying is that many of us are way safer than we imagine. And the idea that we are safe is so disconcerting—so far from our habitual way of thinking—that we can't even imagine it. And if we can't imagine that, then we can't imagine new realities.

And we need new realities.

Consider this, then, your permission to stop the exhausting vigilance of feeling not safe and to take up the riskier feeling of safety and get to transforming those systems - internal and external - that would keep us from the world we seek.

​
This teaching continues to unfold in my work—I'll be exploring it further in this week's podcast episode. And if you're ready to practice this together, to discover where you're denying your own safety and what becomes possible when you risk feeling safe, join me for a live webinar on November 11th. In this webinar, we'll practice what it means to risk feeling safe in three crucial moments: when you begin something new, when you claim what's true right now, and when you allow necessary endings. Through guided reflection and inquiry, you'll discover where chronic unsafety is keeping you from your own transformation—and you'll practice choosing internal sovereignty instead. This is participatory, transformative work we'll do together. Register here.