The Tools of Safety

Pratyahara, Drishti, Samskaras, and the Nervous System



By Troy Alan Cox

Thank you for walking this path with me, the path of describing my experience as a Highly Sensitive Person.  In the previous writings in this series 'The Senses of a Highly Sensitive Person' I described how I hear, feel, see and smell the world and what the sense of safety means to me.  Today I am describing some of the understand and tools that I have learned to use. 

These tools are not just yoga based although they have yoga based names.  I have found them to be real world applicable tools.  I use them everyday to help me deal with the world that always seems to be screaming at me and making me feel unsafe.  I hope that they can help others too.  

The first tool is Pratyahara, often described in yoga as the withdrawal of the senses. I do not experience this as shutting the world out. I experience it as giving the senses permission to stop reaching, scanning, defending, and reacting. For a highly sensitive person, Pratyahara can be the difference between constantly absorbing every sound, smell, light, facial expression, and movement around us, and finally having enough inner quiet to feel ourselves again.

This matters deeply to the Safe Spaces Project because most modern spaces do not encourage Pratyahara. They encourage constant sensory engagement. Bright lights, loud music, screens, notifications, clutter, competing conversations, artificial scents, hard surfaces, and visual noise keep the senses reaching outward. A safe space, for me, is a space that lets the senses soften.

The second tool is Drishti, or focused gaze. In yoga, Drishti is often taught as where the eyes rest during a posture. But for me, Drishti is much bigger than that. It is about where attention goes. It is about what the eyes are asked to do in a room. Are they constantly scanning for danger, distraction, conflict, clutter, or escape routes? Or is there somewhere soft, steady, and neutral for the eyes to land?

The Ocular nerve uses the most brain power.  When my eyes are not focused I am scanning others faces for micro expressions, watching the perimeters to make sure we are safe and catching every little movement in the room.When I consciously focus on one thing and one thing only everything becomes calm.  It takes practice and willpower but when I am able to focus all the distractions fade into the background and I feel calm.

The third tool is Samskara. Samskaras are the impressions, patterns, grooves, and imprints left inside us by past experience. They are not only memories in the mind. They can become responses in the body. A smell, sound, room layout, tone of voice, lighting pattern, or facial expression can pull an old impression forward before we even understand why we are reacting.

This is important because not everyone enters a space with the same history. Lavender may calm one nervous system and trigger another. Silence may feel peaceful to one person and frightening to another. A closed door may feel like privacy to one person and entrapment to another. Samskaras remind us that safety is personal. The same room is not the same room for every nervous system.

The fourth tool comes from yoga therapy and nervous-system education: the relationship between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is often associated with activation, alertness, defense, and survival. The parasympathetic nervous system is associated with restoration, digestion, repair, sleep, and the body’s ability to settle.

As a HSP it does not work for me to tell myself to relax.  I need tools, practical tools I can use in the real world.  I have practiced, lived and taught these tools so that I can live an easeful life.  I use these tools everyday without thinking of them any more.  All highly sensitive persons and those on the spectrum will have their own tools that work for their safety.  It will take time to find the right tools for each person but when they do it will bring them comfort in an uncomfortable over stimulated world where everywhere we go we are being kept in a state of threat.  Once the right tools are implemented the nervous system can learn to power down and the mind and body can once again feel safe.  It has to happen beyond a nicely decorated room, being told to just relax and hoping that it will all stop. It has to come in the form of safety.   

This is where the Safe Spaces Project begins to take shape.  A safe space is not just a beautiful space. It is not just a quiet space. It is not just a spiritual-looking space. A safe space is an environment where the senses, attention, memory, and nervous system are considered.

Pratyahara allows one to soften the overstimulated senses and withdraw the constant input through sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.  

Drishti allows one to focus on a single object and not get pulled apart by all the actions going on around us at all times.  

Samskara gives us the chance to examine if what is coming up by the triggers keeping us in a state of fear.

The nervous system asks: Does this environment keep me in defense, or does it help me move toward restoration?  These tools help me understand why safety is not weakness. Safety is architecture. Safety is sensory. Safety is relational. Safety is biological. Safety is personal.

And when safety is present, transformation has somewhere to begin.

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