The Ultimate Safe Zone For All Minds

The mind and body function are information processors, breaking down experiences into discernible patterns that help us navigate movement, nourishment, protection, and overall survival. This process involves built-in protective mechanisms, such as the fight-or-flight response. All minds share everyday experiences and functions, including physical pain and pleasure, as well as positive and negative emotional states. Our thinking styles emerge from these fundamental experiences, which both limit and express our movement. Consequently, thinking and feeling are closely intertwined, forming essential components of our survival mechanism, enabling the body to seek healthy nourishment and defend itself against danger. Thinking more or less attaches us to the physiological experience of feelings.

Neuroscience has revealed that the brain is "neuroplastic," meaning it adapts to different circumstances. As the saying goes, "where neurons fire together, they wire together." Children who grow up in nurturing environments have brains that reflect this positive processing. In contrast, those raised in less nurturing circumstances often face significant developmental challenges. The result is a variety of so-called "attachment" issues later in life where certain of us become overly attached or avoid attachment. This highlights a fundamental truth: all minds and bodies require safety to function well, initially found in a nurturing environment but ultimately rooted in the existential recognition of a reality that underlies our entire experience of living.

As neuroscientist Louis Cozolino notes in his book, The Neurobiology of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain, "We are not the survival of the fittest; we are the survival of the nurtured." Healthy brain development occurs in an atmosphere of psychological safety, which is primarily derived from connection. This ultimate connection experience involves recognising that all reality is one, and we are part of that reality.

While many neuroscientists still operate under a materialist perspective, asserting that intelligence and even consciousness are products of the physical brain, they have yet to prove this—and I believe they may never will, for science only deals with objective phenomena. However, both neuroscience and the ancient teachings of non-duality converge on the idea that the human brain functions more effectively in an environment of psychological safety. Although psychology and neuroscience may identify physical circumstances in childhood as primary sources of development, non-dual philosophy emphasises that the essence of loving beingness is the most reliable source of this safety.

Many of us may have experienced challenging childhoods that spill over and affect our adult life. However, that does not preclude us from achieving existential safety or rising above those difficulties to transform our experiences. The non-dual understanding teaches us that we are not merely our minds and bodies; instead, these are expressions of our essential conscious nature, which provides ultimate security for all minds.

With love,

Freyja