If someone tells you that you’re safe and secure, there may rise up inside you a frisson of anxiety. How can they be sure? What if disaster strikes? What if there’s a financial crash or an earthquake? What about all that potential danger lurking around? What if…? One of the roots of the word ‘secure’ stems from the Latin ‘se’ meaning ‘free from.’ The only way you’ll ever feel truly safe and secure is when you feel free from care and stress. How? By retreating into stillness. Become your own security guard, and that means protecting your heart from anxiety. Don’t allow your stressful thoughts to get inside you. Lock the doors and install solid security bars around yourself. That way you can watch those thoughts stroll tranquilly outside you. Your security guard may advise them to move along if they seem to be loitering. They can’t have any effect on you as long as they stay outside. And if you’ve inadvertently trapped a thought that’s insecure inside you, open the window and let it go: it can find its own way through the bars. Imagine the thought as a wild creature that needs to be set free. It cannot be bound up in you—if it does it will claw you to pieces. In stillness, you can release all your caged thoughts. Yes, you can be completely free of all them. Let the freedom of stillness guard your heart—that is the secret of feeling safe and secure.
