How to Feel Safe in Your Body (When Nothing Else Has Worked)
Healing does not mean the damage never existed. It means it no longer controls your life.
Ram Dass, spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now
Safety Can’t Be Forced
If you’re searching for how to feel safe in your body, chances are you’ve already explored many of the standard recommendations.
Therapy, meditation, breathwork, somatic practices, nervous system regulation techniques.
You might even understand the reasons behind why you don’t feel safe.
But your body still contracts.
Your breath still becomes shallow.
Your nervous system still braces itself, as if waiting for something to go wrong.
Here’s what most approaches to how to feel safe in your body don’t state clearly enough:
Safety in your body isn’t something you can force through willpower or practice your way into achieving.
It’s not a technique you master.
Safety is a biological state that emerges when specific internal conditions are finally present.
And for many people, those conditions were never established in the first place.
Why Learning How to Feel Safe in Your Body Is So Difficult
In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into what embodied healing really means by exploring both the concept of embodiment and the essence of healing itself.
Here’s a video I made about the deep subject of embodied healing:
If you prefer to listen to audio podcasts, the BioSoul Integration Podcast and this episode can be found wherever you listen to your audio podcasts:
From your nervous system’s perspective, safety isn’t an intellectual understanding.
It’s a felt, embodied experience.
Long before you developed language or conscious thought, your body was already learning:
Is it safe to relax here?
Is it safe to feel my emotions?
Is it safe to express what’s happening inside me?
Is it safe to have needs?
If the answer to these questions was “no”—even in quiet, subtle ways—your nervous system adapted.
Not because you were broken.
Because survival required it.
Your body learned to:
Remain alert and vigilant.
Suppress emotional expression.
Disconnect from bodily sensation.
Keep energy tightly controlled or locked down.
These patterns aren’t psychological errors.
They’re intelligent survival strategies encoded in your physiology.
Which is why understanding alone doesn’t transform them.
The Real Reason You’re Still Searching for How to Feel Safe in Your Body
Most people assume they don’t feel safe because of anxiety, trauma, chronic stress, or dysregulation.
But underneath all of those experiences is something more specific:
A part of your nervous system doesn’t feel safe being fully present and embodied.
Not safe to soften and let go.
Not safe to release control.
Not safe to allow life energy to flow freely through you.
This isn’t happening because something is wrong with you.
It’s because at some point—often very early in development—being fully in your body felt overwhelming, threatening, or simply unsupported.
So your system did the only thing it could:
It fragmented itself for protection.
Parts of you learned to stay on guard.
Parts of you learned to go numb.
Parts of you learned to live primarily in your thoughts.
Parts of you learned to manage, control, or suppress what was happening internally.
And now, perhaps years later, you’re trying to convince that system to “just relax.”
It won’t.
Not until it feels genuinely safe and met.
Why Forcing Regulation Doesn’t Teach You How to Feel Safe in Your Body
A lot of modern nervous system work unintentionally repeats the original wounding.
We’re instructed to:
Calm ourselves down.
Breathe in specific ways.
Relax our physical tension.
“Regulate” our emotional states.
But from the viewpoint of a guarded nervous system, these can feel like demands.
Like being told your actual experience isn’t acceptable.
That the energy moving through you is wrong.
That you need to be different.
That doesn’t create safety.
It creates more defense mechanisms.
True safety in your body doesn’t come from overriding your natural responses.
It comes from listening to what those responses have been protecting.
How to Feel Safe in Your Body: The Missing Element
If there’s one missing piece in nearly every approach to embodiment, it’s this:
Safety emerges when your nervous system feels seen and witnessed, not managed or controlled.
Before your body can truly relax, it needs to sense:
That it doesn’t have to perform or be “good.”
That it doesn’t have to heal on anyone else’s timeline.
That it doesn’t have to get anywhere or achieve any particular state.
Safety begins when you stop trying to fix what your body is doing and start getting curious about why it learned these patterns.
This isn’t a mental investigation.
It’s a somatic, felt exploration.
A Different Approach to How to Feel Safe in Your Body
Instead of asking yourself:
“How do I feel safe in my body?”
Try orienting toward these questions from the inside:
What part of me is still standing guard?
What is it afraid might happen if it let go?
What does this tension believe it’s protecting me from?
You don’t need verbal answers.
In fact, many of these protective patterns were formed before language developed.
What matters is staying with the sensation long enough for your body to recognize you’re not abandoning it again.
Most people dip briefly into sensation—then quickly retreat back into thinking.
Learning how to feel safe in your body requires something different:
Slowness without rushing.
Presence without agenda.
Willingness to stay, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Not forever.
Just honestly, for as long as feels right.
Why Safety Is a Byproduct, Not a Direct Goal
This distinction matters:
You don’t create safety directly through effort.
Safety is what happens after certain internal relationships shift and change.
It emerges when:
Disowned parts of yourself are welcomed back.
Suppressed energy is finally allowed to move.
Your nervous system no longer has to brace against itself.
In my experience, people often encounter moments of profound safety—not because they aimed for it, but because something deep inside finally felt truly met.
A chronic tension softens unexpectedly.
A breath drops deeper into the belly.
An emotional wave moves completely through instead of getting stuck.
That’s not regulation through technique.
That’s integration through presence.
What “Feeling Safe in Your Body” Actually Feels Like
When safety begins returning to your body, people often describe it not as happiness or excitement, but as:
A sense of ground beneath them.
A feeling of internal spaciousness.
Less urgency to fix or change themselves.
A quiet confidence in their own timing and process.
There’s more genuine choice available.
More flexibility in response.
More capacity to feel without becoming overwhelmed.
And importantly—more access to life-force energy without it automatically converting into anxiety or collapse.
If You’ve Never Known How to Feel Safe in Your Body
Many people tell me:
“I don’t even know what safety feels like.”
That makes complete sense.
If safety was never modeled, reflected, or supported in your early environment, your nervous system doesn’t have a reference point for it.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be learned now.
It means it has to be learned experientially and somatically, not conceptually or intellectually.
Through direct body experience.
Through sensation and presence.
Through a pace that doesn’t rush the organic unfolding.
The Real Beginning of How to Feel Safe in Your Body
If your body doesn’t feel safe yet, it’s not because you’ve done something wrong or failed somehow.
It’s because some part of you is still faithfully doing the job it was assigned long ago.
The question isn’t how to eliminate or override that part.
The question is:
What would it take for that part to trust you now, in the present?
That’s where genuine healing actually begins.
Your body isn’t the problem that needs solving.
It’s been waiting all along for the right kind of relationship with you.
The Ultimate Embodied Awareness Guide
Embodied healing is a process of becoming whole by bringing awareness back to the parts of ourselves that were shaped by survival.
These patterns formed in the nervous system long before we could think our way out of them, and they don’t unwind through insight alone.
They resolve when they are met, felt, and included in awareness.
Life is continually inviting us into this kind of embodied awareness.
When we learn to listen to the body—rather than override it—we create the conditions for integration to occur naturally.
As the nervous system reorganizes, we experience greater stability, clarity, and a sense of being more at home in ourselves.
From this place, we don’t have to force change.
We live and act with more authenticity, because less of our energy is tied up in holding ourselves together.
If these ideas resonate with you, you’ll find a deeper exploration of them in my book, If It Didn’t Hurt: How To Resolve Your Pain And Discover Your Life Purpose.
Click the link above to get a FREE pdf copy of my book.
Exploring the Embodied Path: A Peek Into My Online Course
Here’s a video I made about the importance of embodiment and my embodied path online course:
I be remiss if I didn’t mention my embodied healing online course called “The Embodied Path Online Course: Eight Steps to Expressing Your Soul’s Essence, Purpose, and Calling.”
As the name suggests, there are eight basic exercises that are at the heart of the course.
The structure involves six simple yoga poses.
But these aren’t intense strengthening poses.
While it’s important to build core strength, we often forget the need to also cultivate deep relaxation as part of the process of embodiment.
These poses are based on that idea.
When the nervous system is in defense mode, strengthening exercises can create more protective armor.
Instead, the focus is on gentle movements, promoting ease and relaxation in specific parts of the body that are connected to our survival brain.
Click the link above to check it out.
I look forward to helping you express more life,
Dr. Jay
About the Author Dr. Jay Uecker
Dr. Jay Uecker is the founder of the BioSoul Integration Center near Boulder, Colorado where he's been practicing for over 20 years. He’s an author, chiropractor, healer, and online soul integration coach who weaves Network Spinal Analysis, intuitive Parts Work, Brainspotting, SomatoRespiratory Integration, and body-centered awareness practices into his own technique, which he calls BioSoul Integration. His work helps people release unconscious resistance stored in the nervous system so they can embody their soul’s gifts and express their purpose more fully. Dr. Jay offers group healing sessions and one-on-one care, both in-person and online. He also offers a self-paced online course and a growing collection of transformational books. For a limited time, claim your FREE copy of If It Didn't Hurt: How to Resolve Your Pain and Discover Your Life Purpose.
Related Posts
What Is Embodiment? How the Body Holds the Key to Healing and Wholeness
How to Listen to Your Body: An Invitation to Sacred Presence
What Does It Mean to Be Embodied? A Nervous-System Based Understanding of Embodiment
Embodiment: Living Fully Within Your Physical Form
Somatic Embodiment: When Understanding Isn’t Enough
Embodied Awareness: What It Is—and Why Thinking Your Way Through Healing Doesn’t Work