Safety means safety to experience whatever arises. When we feel secure enough, our natural capacity for love and connection begins to unfold naturally. Our defenses - whether spiritual materialism, perfectionism, or withdrawal - gradually soften. We begin to trust the raw process of life itself.
This understanding transforms our approach to spiritual practice. Rather than chasing particular states or insights, we focus on building a secure relationship with reality - learning to trust its fundamental nature.
Having a secure attachment to reality doesn't mean all our experiences are pleasant or desirable. But it means reality itself is, at its core, trustworthy. Even our deepest insecurities and fears aren't evidence that we are fundamentally unloved or unlovable. We are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God.
This is what spiritual traditions have been pointing to all along. When mystics speak of "being held by God" or "resting in awareness," they're describing this fundamental security. When they talk about surrender, they're pointing to a trust in reality so deep that we can finally let go of our protective strategies and simply be.
Perhaps most crucially, this understanding helps us grasp why genuine transformation often appears as breakdown. When our system finally feels safe enough to release its protective strategies, everything we've built can crumble. What we once saw as our strength - our self-reliance, our spiritual attainments, our carefully constructed identity - reveals itself as an intricate defense against our true vulnerability.
This is why spiritual development cannot be forced or hurried. Just as you cannot command a child to feel secure, you cannot will yourself into secure attachment with reality. It unfolds gradually, through repeated experiences of safety and attunement. Sometimes this happens through meditation or prayer, sometimes through therapy or deep relationships, sometimes through forms of grace we may never fully understand.
The process holds an inherent paradox: we need to feel safe enough to face how profoundly unsafe we feel. We need secure attachment to heal our insecure attachment. This is where spiritual communities, teachers, and practices become our "transitional objects" - temporary secure bases from which we can gradually develop a more fundamental security with reality itself.
The implications of this understanding ripple outward: our spiritual struggles mirror our attachment patterns, healing emerges through relationship rather than force, safety precedes genuine transformation, apparent regression often signals progress, and true spirituality cannot be separated from our deepest emotional needs.
This brings us back to our beginning - the recognition that spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience.
When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity - just as a child learning to walk must first release their familiar supports.
This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.
Consider how spiritual traditions so often speak of "the dark night of the soul" - periods of profound doubt and disconnection. Through the lens of attachment theory, these experiences reveal themselves in a new light. They aren't failures of faith but opportunities to develop a more secure attachment with reality - one spacious enough to hold both light and dark, connection and disconnection, certainty and doubt.
Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality, Daniel Thorson
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