This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | May 28, 2025 — From safety to softening

Happy Wednesday 💜

Last week I wrote about the importance of knowing we’re safe, and once we hold that knowledge and belief, we have more capability and bandwidth to work with challenging things within our bodies — things that might be so unfamiliar that we automatically regard them as unsafe and stop exploring. 

For those of us that live in a near (or actual) state of constant tension and activation, softening our bodies can be so far beyond our realm of familiarity that we don’t recognize it as safe for our bodies. It brings a lot of sensations that aren’t the hard, locked muscles we’ve grown accustomed to moving with. Instead it brings things like twitching, shifting, lengthening,  and loosening, and sometimes those things are uncomfortable or even hurt. This is because hard, locked muscles can also mask a lot of sensation.

Because these softening sensations might be so unfamiliar, it can be hard to recognize that they’re supportive for your body. I find it’s helpful to remind myself I’ve already established that I’m in a safe environment, so I can explore and lean into the experience by naming what I feel and taking breaks. The point is to not resist but rather to continue to show yourself it’s safe to soften and that what’s happening is simply a response to releasing muscle activation, and just like working out can make you sore at first and get easier with time, this is a similar journey. 

If that’s hard for you to connect with, it can also be helpful to recognize what softening doesn’t feel like. It might be the absence of hardness, tension, or effort. Observing that absence can be an important gateway to dive deeper into your experience. It gives your observing mind a trailhead to start from on your internal exploration.

When you have a few minutes this week, find a comfy seat or lay down, then tense all your muscles as much as you can for about 30 seconds. Set a timer. Repeat. Then let that go and see what you can sense in your body for 3 minutes. Devoting this time to it can help you establish the connection between safety and softening because it’s on your own terms and there’s a finite container of time around it.

I’d love to hear about your experience with this if you’d like to share with me. My inbox is always open.

With good energy,