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Show Notes

In this episode, I share a nervous system breakthrough that emerged from time on glacial ice - a shift from managing risk with urgency to trusting what felt safe enough. Recorded on a winter walk in Anchorage, this conversation explores how learning to read nuance in safety can transform not only our experiences in wild places, but also how we move through everyday life.

I reflect on skating around icebergs, noticing real versus perceived threat, and the relief of being able to stay present inside an experience that once felt overwhelmingly stressful. Through stories and somatic insight, I explore how our nervous systems learn to orient toward danger - and how, with practice, they can also learn to recognize cues of safety, stability, and support.

This episode is an invitation to rethink what safety means, to move beyond the illusion of certainty, and to cultivate a deeper trust in both the environment and the body’s capacity to respond. Rather than waiting for perfect safety, we practice sensing what is safe enough - and allowing that to be a place of genuine settling and joy.

Timestamps

00:00 — Welcome & winter walking reflections
03:00 — Introducing the idea of “trusting safe enough”
06:30 — Icebergs, risk & the familiar hum of anxiety
10:00 — When conditions feel stable enough to stay
13:30 — Differentiating real threat from perceived threat
17:00 — Why “safe enough” matters more than perfect safety
20:30 — From practice to embodiment in nervous system work
24:00 — The “gas in the system” metaphor for activation
28:00 — Overreaction, self-judgment & nervous system habits
31:30 — Training the body to notice safety cues
34:30 — Discharging stored stress & releasing excess charge
38:00 — Inside-out vs. outside-in approaches to release
42:00 — Trusting the body’s ability to read reality
45:30 — Safety, systems, and the limits of certainty
49:00 — The two parts of trust: environment & self
52:30 — Celebrating nervous system wins & closing reflections

Submit your questions for the Q&A [here]

Photos and links from this episode: www.mindandmountain.co/podcast 

Transcript

Sarah 0:15
Hi there. Welcome back to co regulation conversations. Today is a beautiful day here in Anchorage, and I'm out for a walk in the winter weather, which is relatively mild right now. Yeah, really nice conditions for going on a walk and talk with you, hearing some birds, and there's some snow on the branches of the trees, which is always really beautiful to see. Probably going to find some really nice slumpy snow too. I'll take some pictures and leave them for you on the podcast page, if you want to see like, really good conditions for those weird snow shapes that are defying gravity, that I love to spot when I can. And I'm here to talk to you today about this nervous system breakthrough that I've been having recently, around trusting safe enough. The if you listen to the earlier episode where I talked about my Cordova trip over the holiday season, and the learnings from that, this is one of the pieces that came out of that conversation that I wanted to go deeper into. And yeah, the the way I felt this breakthrough on that trip was that we were ice skating in glacial lake conditions, which always feel a little bit dicey. You know, like the way that a glacier ends in a lake means that the glacier, the part that you can see above the water, is, like, relatively small compared to how much of it is underneath. Like this idea that we have about icebergs, there's like, a certain amount that's above the surface and like, usually a pretty significant amount below the water line, so anytime I mean ice skating or boating, you know, like being around icebergs and glaciers is amazing, so beautiful, and really has this kind of other worldly quality to it, because of how gorgeous and ancient it feels. It's like such a special thing to be able to do and and also comes with some degree of risk with it, because of the way that these icebergs, these glaciers are moving, you know, they're a river of ice that has movement to it, and so it's changing, and that change might mean Like a calving event that would impact the ice. Or in the case of icebergs, we kind of know that they're just not they're not that stable. They can potentially roll because of the way that they're positioned in the water. And yeah, so in I've had, you know, handful of experiences, lucky me, to have been able to skate on glacier lakes, skate around icebergs, you know, a time or two each winter, we're able to do that around here, really special, and always comes with a degree of like anxiety for me, just knowing that, like the conditions that we're exploring right now aren't all that safe. There's like a risk factor that's very real, and I'm not a particularly high risk person. Always been very aware of the things that might go wrong in a situation, and I. Sometimes that comes through, like visuals in my mind of like what could go wrong here, or the sense, like the anxiety in my body of what could, what could, what could happen, and how intense that would be scary and, yeah, I mean, those those realities have been kind of always top of mind for me inside of my outer recreation time. So ice skating around icebergs has never felt like it's gorgeous and it's like otherworldly, and also it's fairly stressful because of the way that that risk is feels like always present, and so we we've generally managed that by trying to reduce exposure time to the risk. So that strategy means doing kind of like a dash in and out, if you're going into something, a situation that has some risk, then minimizing your exposure time to that risk minimizes the overall exposure. And I mean, you could minimize that by not going at all. But if we want to experience it, experience the like magic of it, and be as safe as possible, this strategy of like dashing in and out has felt like a way to handle that

Sarah 6:39
and what happened this year in Cordova, with the way that this glacier Lake set up there in early winter, is that the it had been really windy, and the wind had blown all of the icebergs in the Lake down to the first third of the lake, and packed them all in there, in that one section. And because of that packing, they were all in this one zone. And they were like fairly smushed in together, though there was space in between them, because it seemed like what they were butting up against was other icebergs underwater. It's a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of an educated guess that that was what was happening, because we can't actually see what's going on under the water, under the ice, but it seemed like they were all packed in and like a budding each other under the water. And because of that, it felt like they were fairly stable in a way that I hadn't experienced before with icebergs, like they had lateral stability by being, like, connected with each other under the water. I can't say for sure if this is actually what was happening, but it like, logically makes sense to me that that's what was happening because of the way the lake had set up, and also because of the way that, while we were there for these days that we were skating, we never saw any movement in this in this area with all the icebergs, it just seemed like it was very solid. On top of that, it had been quite cold for a while. And so the ice had grown had a chance to grow pretty thick. I think it was over a foot, like between one and two feet thick, which is super nice for us skating wise. And so the conditions were very good for relatively safe iceberg, ice skating like safe enough, right? Not without any risk, but about as good as you can get for that kind of situation. And my win, my breakthrough, my nervous system win related to this is that I was able to really trust that and feel like it was a safe enough situation for me to want to be in and trust the assessment that we had made, and trust what I was the cues that I was reading in the ice and in the icebergs and with all of that together, it just really felt like it was okay to be there for longer times, and we could let our dip. In and out. Strategy, go and just hang out around these amazing features, super beautiful. And I was really enjoying the difference in being like, normally, often having this anxiety running while doing this amazing thing. And the difference to notice that when I'm in that place of being able to trust safe enough that I could just relax and enjoy it and be really present and just have fun. It's such a relief to be able to have a settled nervous system, even inside of an experience that has, you know, a little bit of challenge to it, and especially has that challenge in in other times I've been in that similar environment. This time, less of that threat was present, and I feel really proud that my nervous system was able to really take that in and differentiate between the real threat, like, how much real threat is actually here, and what we might call a perceived threat, which could have happened if the nervous system was, like, making associations between, like, any type of icebergs means threat, which would make sense, right? Like, that's not that far fetched, that, like it's sketchy to skate around icebergs, yeah, that is, that is pretty true. It's got some some, there's some sketch there. But what I am celebrating here is that it can be possible with practice and skillfulness inside of the nervous system for the body to differentiate the nuances of what is an actually sketchy situation and what is a less sketchy one, or What I'm calling safe enough. I really like this term safe enough. It's like one that I've been using a lot inside of my teachings, when we're talking about orienting to things that are pleasant and resourcing and helping the nervous system build the skill. You know, our nervous systems are so good at orienting to threat, finding the things that are wrong about a situation, and often less skilled at the counter of that, which would be recognizing safety cues and being able to land in that experience of less threat or absence of threat, things are okay right now, so much of the nervous system practices inside of that side of things, building the counter vortex and helping the body learn how to Notice when things are okay or even less bad, I stopped using the term just safety, though, because I do think that that might be a bit of an illusion, given that, let's see, given that we're all going to die, given that human life is full of challenges. I don't really like the term safe space, because we never know what someone's triggers are, what is going to be perceived as challenging or threatening to their body, and so we can't ever promise that something's not going to feel threatening or challenging to another person's body. Sometimes people use the term brave space instead of safe space, which I like, because it gets to the idea of like, if we can't promise safety, how are we going to try to show up here? And brave is one of the ways we might want to practice showing up. So Okay, another way I have been feeling this like, safe this, this new ability to trust safe enough is, you know, the way a like, if you have a gas stove in your kitchen, or you use, like a whisper light or. Or any of those gas stoves in your camping kit. And when you have the gas on, but you haven't lit the the flame yet, there's gas buildup. And then when you do light the flame, you know how it's like this big boosh, this big kind of explosion of flame once all of that gas that's in the air catches that, to me, feels similar to what I'm trying to describe here, inside the body, when a nervous system is able to, well, that's how my body used to feel when, like, before I deepened into this work, and my body was able to start trusting safe enough, it more felt like there was, like, this charge of activation in the system. And then when any little thing would happen, it would be like, whoosh, like, all of a sudden. This feels really, really intense, really big deal, like I remember being out on ice and hearing the ice crack, which is, like, legitimately surprising, and often sends, like a jolt of adrenaline, cortisol. The thing is that when I had the nervous system experience of that gas, that activation in the system, when the ice would crack, it would just be like, boom, this huge body response, like a full on

Sarah 16:38
body reaction, that I could tell was an overreaction. It definitely felt like more energy than I needed for the situation at hand, more than was helpful or appropriate at the moment. But you can't control what the body does by using the mind to like try to talk it out of it, the body has a big reaction because of the somatics going on, because of the way the nervous system is relating to the threat that it's perceiving, and how it's practiced in being with that. So I would have these big reactions, and then I'd go into this like, frustration spiral about it, because it would be like, all this big response out of nowhere. I don't want to feel like this. I know the situation doesn't need it. So then I'd be like, judging myself, frustrated about the reaction that my body's having and be like, Oh, why am I like this? I don't like this. Sucks. I don't want to feel like this.

Sarah 17:55
These nervous systems you know, that are so practiced at helping us notice the threats that are around, and maybe even have come to associate that level of activation with a type of safety. Like, if I'm activated, I know I'm safe. That's like, probably not conscious, but it might be subconscious in the way that the nervous system is, like making sense of activation in the system and how it has in the past, gotten us through some intense times. So maybe it starts to believe that that's those things go together, that like high activation is what keeps me safe. And some of what might be true here is that the nervous system is just not as practiced at using those same observational skills to look for safety cues. Its priority is to find danger first, so we can stay alive, and then also we've just got this very different type of load that we're putting our nervous systems through these days, with all of the stimulus and all of the versions of threat that require different that require really different interventions than the very physical ones that we used to need to respond to

Speaker 1 19:32
the bear in the tundra or the tiger in the bushes.

Sarah 19:39
So some of it might just be that not we're not as practice. This is like one of the ways that I think about us doing the work of helping our nervous systems to evolve, to come along and upgrade to what we're actually dealing with here in modern life. So.

Sarah 20:04
And one of the celebrations that I'm having with this experience that I am sharing, and I hope is also like generalizable enough for you to be able to at least use it as an imprint for where you might want to go with your own nervous system, what might be possible. Or maybe, as I share here, you're recognizing some wins that you've had along the way with this kind of thing too. But one thing I'm really excited about here is that my body has gone from the practice of it to the embodiment of this, trusting, safe enough. What I mean by that is that, you know, we do a lot of nervous system work here, practice, together, orienting, bringing the attention into the present moment, noticing when the body settles. And those practices are so critical, and they take some like mental space to remember to do they're intentionally done when we're in a practice space together, or I'm guiding you, or maybe when you remember to access them on your own, it's like, I need to orient, or like, let's look around and see what we notice. Like, kind of doing it in almost like a manual shifting type of way. But what I was noticing in this Cordova trip was that it didn't have to be manual anymore. My body was just like taking in the safety cues that it was receiving from the environment and from the discussions we were having as my was with my partner and sometimes with some other friends, like the discussions we were having about safety, they were landing just like the the cues that were there. I wasn't having to work at it, I guess is what I want to say. I wasn't having to effort to help my body notice that it was safe. It was just reading the cues and feeling safe. Oh my gosh, that's huge. It's so exciting. It's like, skip the middle man, the body now is, like, more accurately observing the reality of the situation and responding to that like, kind of like their that gas that I'm talking about, that like activation that had been floating in the system, if it's not there and you light a match, there's nothing to explode. Yeah, so that's that's like how that's feeling right now, both that my nervous system is more skilled at accurately observing a situation, so it's not reacting to something that's not there. It's not overreacting. And also that when it there is a trigger of some sort that does create some activation, there's not already a ton of fuel in the system that's like waiting to respond to something. Okay, here's a snow slope. I gotta take a picture of this. Okay, I'm back. It's been documented. It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 23:52
Hope you go check it out, because I'm marveling at these incredible shapes the snow can make. Really is kind of otherworldly. Wow, see there's another one. It's just like barely hanging on, amazing. Okay, I had to pause and document that one too for you.

Sarah 24:15
Yeah, so I'm attributing this nervous system breakthrough, which I think is possible for all of us, if you relate to this experience that I'm sharing, of like, overreaction in the body to a situation that doesn't necessarily need that much of a response, or the sense that, like, your system's running with, like, a lot of charge in it already, and so any little thing that happens it like, lights up, the lights the flame of it, like, in a big way, the the way I understand or think about how this work has progressed. For me is that one piece of this has been this active practice of helping the nervous system notice and land moments of safety, of safe enough, of well being, that practice of orienting to the counter vortex, looking for safety cues, helping be with them long enough that the body can really notice that they're there, and taking them in in a deep enough way that the system starts to trust that those cues matter, that they're giving us really important information, which means that like the only if before the information that it was reading As important was the information about threat, we're trying to build this other muscle group about attention to well being and safety cues, and then receiving the good feelings that come with that, like any kind of settling, Any type of space or tension release that might happen when you're noticing those safety cues, then the enjoyment of the impact is then also part of the work, because that's when we reiterate to the body, like, this is an okay thing to do. And look it's even like feels pretty good when we do it. So that is a big piece of what I believe has been helpful for this, you know, and I do it so often. I kind of am doing it constantly, honestly, that as my body has become more practiced at it, that's some of what has helped move this process from a skill that I'm consciously practicing to something that my body just knows how to do and receive the benefit of without the active like we need to do this now, like consciousness, it can skip the skip over the conscious part of it, and just be doing it on a body level, without my mind micromanaging it. And then there has also been a significant part of my work inside my personal process around helping my body learn how to discharge the stored stress that had been carrying from years of stress cycles that didn't know how to metabolize and be released and discharged. So that experience of the body learning how to discharge some of the stored stress has gone alongside this other work of noticing safety cues, and I believe that to be at least a part of what has helped that generalized the gas in the system, like the anxiety, The activation that was like kind of floating around from previous things, waiting to be, waiting for something similar to happen so it could over respond. Helped some of that the system release. Some of that has been part of a personal process, mostly inside of one on one work, because of how I don't know, because of how reluctant, maybe, maybe my like reluctant the system is to release that stuff has to feel very safe and well met and attuned to I do always wonder if there's ways to access that kind of discharge response inside of, like group work or Yeah, other, other ways outside of one on one spaces, some there are some therapeutic modalities that do, like a tremoring practice, where you get your body to shake after, like, holding a contraction for a while or something, until you start to shake. And, yeah, people get a lot of benefit out of that, or they say they've heard that reported at least, I'm more of a believer in the type of release and discharge that happens organically from the body, like inside out, rather than like doing an activity that that gets the body to make the trembling thing like. Outside in, but yeah, I mean to each their own for sure. There might even be a way that those types of like outside in, or top down practices for tremoring, help the body learn what a tremor feels like, and that it's okay to feel that, and then from there, you might be able to access a bottom up or an inside out version of a tremor that that is more effective at actually releasing that stored energy in the system, so that might those, those steps might work together. I will leave in the show notes a link to Carmen spagnolas work. She is one of my mentors who does group classes around group tremoring. So if that's something you would experiment with, that's one place I would point you to. And, yeah, I'm always here as well for more of the bottom up work for building the capacity in the space, in the system to Yeah, to make it possible to do some of this discharge and releasing, building up enough safety to allow the body to go in a new direction than it's gone before. With the energy that it's experiencing, it's kind of a big deal when that happens, and in my experience, often takes some time to build up that kind of capacity in a system. But very possible, very worthwhile, very exciting when it happens. Okay, so where I want to end this episode today is in talking about how I'm thinking about trusting safe enough these days, because for me, it feels like the ability to read that first the situation is pretty safe. Doesn't have to be all the way safe. Pretty safe is about as good as we really get these days. That's why, how we can continue to work on this stuff. Inside of systems collapse, inside of patriarchy, capitalist, imperialist, white supremacy, these fascism, you know, these systems that are like actually not safe, and especially for those with non dominant identities, like actually not safe. So if we were looking for safety, we would not be able to get very far. If we're looking for safe enough, though, we're looking for these moments when it's like, I've got some support. Signs are pointing toward we're probably safe here. That's that's like what we're looking for, got time when we it's safe enough to let down our guard at least part of the way. So that's the trusting. So that's the sense that the situation is pretty safe. We're doing there is we're orienting to safety cues. And then the second part is that if something goes wrong, I can handle it. That feels to me like the essence of trusting in your system, trusting in

Sarah 34:02
your resources, maybe it's in the people who you're out with, or the people you know you can call on for help if you need to trusting in your own resiliency and in Your own body's ability to judge situations fairly accurately. Which honestly that's come for me with the process of removing this excess charge from the system, I start to trust the system more now that it's responding more accurately to the situation. So it's sort of it's like a feedback loop that circles in on itself.

Sarah 34:48
So this is what we're kind of aiming for, practicing this orientation work and looking for safety cues and noticing deactivation enough so. So that we can accurately judge when a situation is pretty safe, and then over time, building this second part, which is the sense that if something does go wrong here in this relatively safe situation, I'm going to do everything I can to handle it. And that's a really nice place to be. Feels really good in the body to have that sense building it's come slowly over time and yeah, yeah, we're just feels really important to acknowledge and celebrate when we get a sense for it's working and stories to share about that. So if you have stories about how you feel like this has been working for you, please share them. I'd love to hear. You could send them to me over Instagram, or we have the Q and A link in the show notes on every episode. If you want to use that to share a win, I would love it. I haven't gotten many questions recently, so I haven't been doing a ton of questions, but I also welcome your questions if you have any. Okay, thanks so much for being here in celebration with me and maybe pointing our ships in a direction where this type of experience is possible more and more frequently for more and more of us as we continue to deepen into this work. Okay, take really good care of yourself, and I'll see you next time you