“How can you start co-creating a greater sense of both safety & excitement in your life today?”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article looks at how to transform conflicting desires into complementary desires. Its a topic that comes up quite often in my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, and getting a hang for it can open up lots of positive possibilties.
This week’s Wednesday & Saturday class continue our inner-smile meditation, with the focus being on ‘Meditating on the lungs & on transforming sadness/depression, cultivating courage.’ All welcome!
In the spirit of integration,
Toby
The quest for both safety and excitement
Our contradictory desires
One of the challenges that we face to our sense of even-mindedness in life is that we have desires. Not just desires, but conflicting desires that actively seem to be pulling against each other!
- We want safety and excitement in life
- We want money but also plenty of free time
- We want our body to look good, but don’t want to suffer from exertion
The list could go on, but I want to just double click on the safety and excitement and look at that as a primary example. One of our most feared emotions is, well, fear itself! Many of us feel uncomfortable about fear, and act to avoid it, and its subsidiaries, insecurity and anxiety. We desire safety, physically, psychologically, spiritually, and take out the element of risk, uncertainty, and danger (real or perceived). In an attempt to experience safety:
- We choose to trade the hours of our day for work that pays a salary
- We settle into a predictable romantic relationship
- We stay with known patterns and activities in our life
The issue with this then becomes that our life feels boring, predictable, unexciting. This then blocks another common desire, the desire for excitement in life, for variety, change, growth, adventure! To get excitement in our life we have to create a degree of risk, an encountering of the unknown, a place where the result is not guaranteed.
If we aren’t careful, we find ourself locked between the horns of these two desires. Our desire for safety stifles the excitement we crave. The excitement we crave threatens our sense of safety and stability. Either way we are unhappy, or feel unhappy because it looks like a loose-loose paradigm, we feel condemned by the contradiction.
From contradictory to complementary – Both and, not either or
In my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, quite a lot of what I do is help people spot contradictions or conflicts in their life, and work on balancing them out, turning them into mutually enhancing polarities that can propel them toward a better experience. In the case of safety and excitement, I can create a greater sense of safety by:
- Recognizing that I am physically safe almost all the time, and that the illusion of danger on the biological level is often merely an imbalance in my nervous system
- I can create psychological safety by choosing to be mindful of my inner narrative, supporting myself, not attacking myself
- I can articulate my vision of a greater intelligence in the universe that is benevolent toward me, thus learning to recognize and rest in a sense of spiritual safety
By cultivating in this way, I can feel more secure in life, satisfying my desire for safety. Having done this, I can then use that sense of safety to take more positive risk, and court excitement in my life! With my broader sense of safety, I can:
- Be a bit more socially daring/entertaining, without being afraid of judgments
- I can assert my wishes and desires for a fulfilling work life, not just staying silent and keeping on keeping on for fear of change
- I can take up activities I am not yet good at but want to be, and not be so afraid of looking foolish as I do so
With my healthy sense of safety, I can cultivate MORE excitement in my life, and my desire for both becomes a mutually supporting, virtuous cycle.
How can you start co-creating a greater sense of safety and excitement in your life today?
© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
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Ongoing on Tuesday’s & Wednesday’s (live & online), 7.30-8.30pm – Weekly integral meditation classes
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Ongoing on Saturdays – The inner smile & Earth healing deep-dive – An 8 session practice series
Saturday 25th April, 2.30-4.30pm – Mindfulness for emotional intelligence masterclass
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