I am Safe, I am Loved

Healing is often found in those unassuming moments, when we meet the parts of us we’ve learned to avoid.

I am sure reading these words can bring up many different responses. Especially if your experience of “love” hasn’t always felt safe. Or if you’ve done a lot of inner work and are still wondering why you feel stuck, or in the same cycles.

I know I was.

And yet, I’ve come to discover that the embodied experience of them, not the idea of them, is such a significant, healing force. Not love as a concept, or safety as a belief. But love and safety as something my body can actually feel.

This journey has brought me to my knees more times than I can count. I went the spiritual route, believing I just needed to pray harder or trust more deeply. I tried mindfulness, hypnotherapy, meditation. I sought help from naturopaths, kinesiologists, chiropractors, and medical doctors. I focused on health and fitness, and eventually found myself on a restrictive histamine and oxalate avoidant diet.

Despite all of my effort, my health continued to decline, especially as I found myself ill-equipped to process an ocean of grief.

What I couldn’t see at the time was that my system wasn’t failing me. It was asking something very specific. Beneath the symptoms, the strategies, and the searching, my nervous system wanted to know:

Am I safe?
Am I loved?

When we are in fight, flight, fawn or freeze, these questions are often unresolved, circling below the surface.

In shutdown, they are usually painfully answered, sometimes consciously, often not, but always felt: I am not safe. I am not loved. Not as loud or obvious answers, but as sensations, tendencies, and relational reflexes that live in the body.

But when the system finds its way into rest and digest, those same questions receive a different response.

I am safe.
I am loved.

This is why the fruit of healing is not just symptom relief, but openness. Capacity. A greater ability to love, forgive, stay curious, and soften toward ourselves and others. The path there, I’ve learned, cannot come through logic or mental processing alone. It must come through the body. Through a felt-sense of the very thing the system has been searching for all along.

Healing began for me when I learned how to re-parent myself into experiences of safety and love. Slowly. Gently. By first acknowledging where I actually was, and what my system believed to be true. Then by meeting the parts of me that learned to doubt worth, safety, or belonging, not with correction, but with presence. As unmet needs were tended to and somatic loops were allowed to complete, something began to reorganize. Safety became tangible and love became experiential.

Over time, the steady embodied sense of I am safe and I am loved began to reshape my system. Connection became more prioritized than protection. Relational skills like empathy, forgiveness, gratitude, and vulnerability stopped feeling like practices I had to perform and started becoming natural responses that arose from within.

This is the power of embodied love. Not forcing change, or striving to be better. But allowing the system to receive what it has been asking for all along, and to rest there.