The One Thing You Need To Know To Feel Secure

Most of us wait to feel "safe" before we let ourselves feel happy. We have good things in our lives, but we place larger goals on top of them. These are excuses, deflections, distractions from actually being able to enjoy all of these things. This is because when we "chase happiness," we're actually just chasing security that we think will allow us to be happy.

To say that it's scary to be vulnerable is a wild understatement. It's the reason for most of our emotional unrest: we are disconnected and out of the moment because we don't want to embrace the bad that comes along with the good (and this is usually because we don't know 'why' the bad is happening, and we don't believe that we can control it once it's there... so we suppress it, and that's our form of control.)

But the only thing we are actually controlling is how little happiness we let into our lives. Suffering (or rather, pain, more accurately) is going to happen regardless: from resisting or from embracing. One lets us feel happiness, too. The other doesn't.

This is what you must know before you will feel secure enough to let yourself do that: there is no such thing as security. Being truly self confident is being able to accept that you have flaws, you aren't perfect, people may take issue with you, but you can be okay with that. Learning to feel truly in control of your life is accepting that there are few things you're really in control of, but that's OK too.

The point is that to feel really "safe" is just to accept that there's nothing that can make us feel "safe" other than acceptance. It doesn't matter whether or not you have a million dollars or the love of your life or the job of your dreams: you could lose it all tomorrow, they could leave or pass away, the company could crumble or you could leave. This is not to just outline some insane doomsday scenario for you, but to drive home the point that there's nothing that's truly safe, and seeking "safety," like certainty, or security, is only a deflection from actually, you know, living.

Let go of needing to feel secure by realizing there is no such thing. Sure, bolster up your savings account and invest in your relationships. Realizing there's no such thing as security doesn't mean to completely let go of being responsible. It just means to not rely on those external, physical things to give you the safety necessary to begin to really feel and experience your life.

When you truly accept there's no such thing as "security," you'll be grateful for what and who you have in your life, because you'll realize it won't be there forever. It's then, and only then, that you'll really start living.

Images: Unsplash; Giphy