What Do I Mean By Safety
Exploring the Core Principles of The Coracle: A Mythic Rites of Passage Mentorship
What is Safety?
I remember being asked this question my first day in massage school. The director had us break off into small groups to share our answers to this question.
My first response was that safety came from inside myself. I would know if something wasn’t safe, and take whatever actions I needed to return to safety. Everyone else in the group had specific items on their list, like feeling heard, clear boundaries, etc.
I remember feeling I was wrong at the time when I heard the groups’ responses. I was kind of embarrassed. There you go with another spiritual bypass, Jen. You clearly have a lot of work to do. Who are you to think you can keep yourself safe just with your own will?
I dove into the curriculum and learned how to cultivate a safe space from a trauma-informed perspective, something I am proud of and do my best to hold now as a massage therapist and mentor.
However, I still believe my original answer was correct. Or maybe a better way to say it, is my original answer stems from a deeper truth—safety is not something outside ourselves.
Yes, it’s important to be a trauma-informed practitioner, teacher, and citizen. Holding a space where you don’t re-traumatize your clients, family, friends, and associates, is a good thing. There are practical ways of doing this and I use them all the time to empower my clients on the massage table, as a mentor, and a friend.
And I know that holding a safe space in this way is not true safety. It’s a doorway toward it, but true safety is not dependent on any outside circumstances like a facilitator who listens, or friends with good boundaries. True safety only comes from within.
After massage school, I began a mentorship with Ke’oni Hanalei, of Maui, Hawai’i. Ke’oni is a descendant and lineage carrier of the Mū Hawaiians, the pre-Tahitian migration residents of the Hawaiian archipelago, and is an expert at making ancient esoteric teachings relatable and practical.
The first thing we did in our mentorship was to begin an exploration of my energetic feminine, the domain of safety and belonging according to Ke’oni, who updated the traditional model of the energy centers that correspond to the human avatar for the modern age. I share this model with his permission, and in gratitude and reverence for Mahat, the first known ancestor of Ke’oni’s lineage, who resurrected this knowledge 18,000 years ago after the earth had undergone cataclysms that destroyed most of humanity.
Ke’oni invited me to establish an unshakeable sense of safety by getting to know my ‘unipili, my feminine center.
Let me tell you, it would have been a lot easier to make a list of what I thought I needed to feel safe and ask people to conform to that! I realized, as our journey began, that my body had no conscious memory of what true safety was. Through a gradual unveiling, my mind was able to remember, I replanted these new memories in my energy system so it could be transferred to my cells.
Here’s what I discovered:
Speaking my needs aloud was important, but it wasn’t going to keep me safe, or bring me to the kind of safety I was seeking.
I also discovered that conforming to the world’s demands and expectations was not the way to safety, which led to some confusion. Some people were telling me I needed to tell the world what I wanted and needed to feel safe. On the other hand, I’d been conditioned, as a gendered female, to submit to my society’s cultural expectations, and downright often dangerous circumstances, to keep my self safe as a woman in America.
For the first year of my mentorship with Ke’oni, I still didn’t really understand the kind of safety he was talking about. Yes, I did discover what nourished my feminine and could contribute to my sense of safety. I got it conceptually, but I had no experience of it.
Direct experience of your own internal safety, despite whatever is happening in the world outside you, is what I’m offering voyagers in The Coracle.
I can’t take you to your own safety. I can’t provide the vessel, but I can provide the materials for the vessel.
It’s up to you to use your own two hands, to build your boat.
Have you ever stood on a beach looking out to sea and seen a head, very much-shaped like a human, pop up and look back at you? Or come upon a seal hauled out asleep on a stretch of sand? If you’re lucky, or quiet enough, maybe you’ve sat with that seal and watched it sleep, seen its whiskers twitch and watched its fur turn silver in the sun, seen a dream current ripple through its body.
A coracle, or currach in Gaeilge, is a small, handmade boat, made of sealskin or willow, both of which serve as totems on this journey.
Seals live above and below water. They are guides into the realm of lucid dreaming. Some even say some seals were once human, and that some still are, that if you go down to the shore on certain magical nights you’ll see them taking off their skin and taking human form; and that at dawn, you might catch a glimpse of one putting that skin back on and flopping back into the waves.
Willow is a tree that grows well in water, sometimes with roots plunging right into cold brooks or opaque lakes where it’s hard to see your reflection. Those kind of roots are in direct connection with the loon’s call, that wild, shrieking laughter that both chills and thrills the blood. Willows also weep. They know that tears are a path of beauty that opens the heart.
This may not sound like I’m giving you the materials to build a sturdy vessel, but maybe sturdiness isn’t what’s needed for this journey. What if buoyancy and permeability were more important? A light boat bobs easily on the water, and a thin-skinned hull is far more in touch with the currents than a steel hull. Coracles aren’t actually the best boats for ocean-going expeditions, and although St. Brendan may have made it all the way to Newfoundland in a skin-boat, they are traditionally used far more to navigate rivers and inlets close to shore.
And that’s why a coracle is the perfect vessel for this journey.
A boat made of skin just like our own first border.
A vessel with roots in direct contact with underwater currents.
We don't need to go into the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean. Staying close to shore, learning to navigate the waters that touch land, does not imply a lack of courage. It’s an act of embodiment and an acknowledgment of the blessing of being granted a human body.
Do you hear what I’m saying? The body is not a limitation. It’s a blessing.
I get the lure of going to those oceanic depths. I journeyed there over and over, doing my best to escape my body in all the ways you can imagine, but I never found safety there, and it was never enough.
I found safety when I accepted I was a human contained by skin, suspended on a skeleton, and that no spaces within me were empty. They were filled with organs and blood. I am a living cross, an experiment in time and space, and I get to know myself through the miraculous spectrum of emotions and how I respond to them.
Writing that last paragraph, I know I’m leaving so much out. There are so many details I could share to offer a proof of what I’m claiming, but I want to leave space for you to go on your own journey with the mystery. Do you need my stories as evidence or can you perceive the truth of who I am by perceiving my essence with your own knowing?
This is the invitation. Check in with your own knowing. Not just what your mind’s saying, although I value the mind and am obviously a critical thinker, but what your body is saying. Get specific. Ask your kidneys what they think of The Coracle! Ask your metatarsals. Ask your voicebox, and most of all ask your heart.
If you are feeling called to this journey, our online group odyssey begins Sunday, May 18, 2025. Five sessions, five stories, five invitations to go within and get to know yourself in a safe, contained journey (remember our craft is expert at navigating waters close to shore!) that will offer you the opportunity to unravel the wounds that have harmed your sense of inner safety through the deep images of fairy tales and myth, and imprint your cells with images that will move you toward a direct, internal experience of safety through folk tales, myth, and ceremony, that move you on the currents you need to establish yourself in your body, while deepening your connection with your soul in a way that makes the relationship permanent, or at least until death do us part.
I continue to be astonished by the path our ancestors left us, the fairy tales and myths that have been carried on time currents; stories that have survived, wars, genocides, famines, and migrations. As societies on our planet break down, as our ecosystems degrade, species go extinct, and beauty is mocked, dismissed, and eradicated, it’s time for us to reconnect with our ancestral wisdom, to travel back on those migration routes to a time that still lives in our bones when we were living in a real culture established in reverence for life, acceptance of hardship as part of the journey, and emotions as teachers to help us evolve into elders who can assist thus who come after us.
I recently experienced being acknowledged as an elder by a Hawaiian kumu. The acknowledgment came in the form of a chant and blessed every cell of my body. Before that, I was struggling with the idea that I could be an elder. Not because I’m resisting getting older. I’ve never really measured myself by standard beauty standards. It was more like thinking, who am I to say I’m an elder? Isn’t an elder supposed to be more established in life? I still feel like I'm up and coming, more of a process than a product.
I owned it after the kumu’s blessing. I don’t have a choice anymore. That chant was completely absorbed by my cells. I am an elder. That doesn’t mean I’m old, although hopefully I will be one day. What it means, is I made it back from the Underworld, and have enough years under my metaphorical belt to know I am embodying the gifts I received on the journey down.
I hope this essay gives you an idea of the kind of safety we’ll be inviting in. The great fun of being human is we get to experience the phenomena world in all its mind-blowing intricate details, so even though the journey is within, we get to explore through images and stories and all the sensations they provoke.
If you do still have questions about safety, or any other aspect of The Coracle, reply to this email and I’ll be happy to respond.
It will be my great honor if you choose to join us.
We begin The Coracle, Part One: The Journey of Safety and Belonging, Sunday May 18th. Five live Zoom sessions on Sundays, 9-11AM HST.
Five stories. Ongoing private email and ceremonial suppor,t and a Substack chat to interact with your fellow voyagers.
Registration is now open on my website. To learn more about this journey click on this button:
If you’re feeling a full-bodied yes, here’s a direct link to the registration portal:
Please share this email with any friends you think would benefit from this journey!
A boat made of sealskin and willow, round as a human cell,
invisible within the visible,
each individual necessary for the health of the
whole.
This is The Coracle.
Take your place in the hoop of life as a holistic force
to serve your community and the world
as humans were meant to.
The voyage has begun. Will you join us?
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light