"Safe space" gets used so often that it’s started to mean almost nothing. A phrase on a flyer, a hashtag, a nice thing to say about a yoga studio. I want to actually unpack it, because in my work, and also what I learned throughout holding space and while working with my teacher Punnu Wasu, and what I learned at my BBTRS (Biodynamic Breathwork & Trauma Release System) training, "safe" isn’t a mood you set with candles and a playlist. It’s something very specific that happens in a body, and it’s something a space holder either builds, deliberately, session by session, or doesn’t.
Here’s what I mean by that, and what it actually looks like inside AURA.
Your body is doing a threat assessment constantly, whether you notice it or not. Underneath conscious thought, your autonomic nervous system is scanning: is this place, this person, this moment, safe enough to let my guard down in?
In BBTRS we talk about this through the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in your autonomic nervous system, running from your brainstem down through your throat, heart, lungs, and gut. It has, roughly, two settings that matter here. One is the older survival branch. This shows up as freeze, shutdown, or that flat, far away feeling when things get too overwhelming to fight or flee. The other is the newer branch, tied to safety and social connection. It’s the one responsible for slowing your heart rate, deepening your breath, and letting your face and voice soften enough for someone else to actually reach you.
Which one is online decides everything about your experience of a room. You can have the best cushions, the nicest lighting, the most beautifully worded welcome message, and if a person’s nervous system reads the space as unsafe, none of that reaches them. The reverse is true too: a fairly plain room can feel completely safe if the right signals are there.
So when I talk about a "safe space," I don’t mean an aesthetic. I mean a place where enough of the right signals are present that a nervous system can actually downshift out of alert.
BBTRS training is unusually specific about this, probably because the work (deep, connected breathwork, big autonomic releases, sound, movement) asks a lot of a nervous system, so the container around it has to be more deliberate than "come as you are."
A few pieces I was trained to hold, every single time:
The physical basics, taken seriously. A private, clean space with enough room to move, enough padding to protect elbows, wrists, and knees, and enough sound insulation that no one has to hold back what wants to come out. It sounds almost too simple to mention, but I’ve learned that parts of people remain constantly monitoring whether the neighbours can hear them, which stops them from actually feeling free to feel anything.
Consent that keeps being asked, not asked once. I can really tell from my own experience that asking for consent is not a form you sign at the start and then forget about. Consent, and an ongoing check in, is key to making the journey safe: is this still okay? Do you want me near you right now, or space? What are your boundaries today, which might be different than last time?
Clear communication before anything intense happens. What a session actually involves, what might come up, what your role is versus mine. Not because something’s going to go wrong, but because knowing what to expect is itself a form of safety. The nervous system relaxes around predictability.
A place that is allowed to hold whatever shows up. Sound. Big movement. Tears, laughter, silence, shaking. Part of building the container is making it wide enough that nothing that comes up has to be edited on its way out. Expressing yourself in a space is not always comfortable. And holding it is neither. But holding space is not about telling people what to experience. It’s closer to a stage manager’s job than a guru’s. It’s the actual infrastructure of what people mean when they say "being held."
Here’s the piece of my training that changed how I think about this whole subject: the room isn’t the only thing that has to be regulated. I am.
You can feel, not consciously, but somatically, whether the person across from you is calm or holding it together. A dysregulated space holder, no matter how good their words are, puts a subtle static into the room that a nervous system picks up on before the mind does. So part of what I actually do before and during a session is track my own state: feet on the ground, breath moving, aware of when something in your process touches something in mine, and able to come back to steady without making that your problem to manage.
This is also why, when something in a session activates me (because it will, eventually, for any space holder who’s honest about it), the training is explicit: notice it in the body, reflect on it afterward, and don’t make it personal in the moment. You are not responsible for carrying what gets stirred up in me. That’s mine to tend to, outside the room.
Everything above is about the container. The other half, the part that actually determines what you’re able to move through inside it, is what BBTRS calls resourcing.
Giten Tonkov, who founded BBTRS, puts it simply in his book Feel to Heal:
Resourcing is calling into play anything or anyone that supports our well being.
Giten Tonkov, Feel to Heal
A resource, in that sense, is anything that supports your sense of steadiness: something you carry with you (an internal resource: a memory, a place in your body that already feels calm, a sense of humor, the felt sensation of your own breath) or something outside you that you can lean on (an external resource: a person, a place, an object, even the temperature of a room). Long before any big release happens, part of the work is simply building your own list: what actually helps you come back to yourself when things get big?
Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, opens his book Waking the Tiger with a story that shows exactly what an external resource does. Right after being hit by a car, in shock and going into freeze, a stranger, a pediatrician who happened to be passing, sat down and held his hand. He has described how quickly that one point of steady human contact settled his physiology, calm enough for his body to actually start processing the shock instead of just being flooded by it. Nothing more complicated than a hand to hold.
The reason this matters more than it sounds is that a session isn’t a straight line into intensity. It’s a rhythm. Moving toward a charged sensation, then back toward a resource, then toward the charge again. This back and forth is called pendulation, and the practice of not releasing more than a system can integrate at once is called titration. They describe something your body already knows how to do, the same way you’d naturally pause and catch your breath mid conversation about something hard. The skill is just doing it on purpose, instead of leaving it to chance.
This is also, honestly, why I don’t believe in pushing anyone past what they can integrate in one session. The goal was never to see how much someone can handle. It’s to expand, gradually, what they’re capable of feeling and releasing with ease, so that resilience actually grows, instead of just adrenaline spiking and crashing.
Follow the circle for a few breaths before reading on.
Put together, this is what a session at AURA is actually built on: a physical space set up on purpose, consent that’s asked more than once, a facilitator tracking her own nervous system as closely as yours, and a practice of moving between activation and resource instead of straight into the deep end.
If you’re carrying overwhelm, burnout, or a kind of flatness that’s hard to name, these aren’t abstract states. They’re your nervous system stuck in a pattern: too much activation with nowhere to discharge it, or a shutdown that’s stopped registering as anything other than "tired." What breathwork and somatic work (working with the body) offers isn’t a fix applied to you from the outside. It’s a structured way to let your own body do what it already knows how to do (charge, express, and settle) with someone tracking the container so you don’t have to do that tracking yourself.
That’s the actual answer to the question I started with: why do we need a space to reconnect with ourselves, when we could just put the phone down at home? Because putting the phone down doesn’t rebuild a felt sense of safety in your body. A held, resourced, well built space can.
Still have questions about any of this?
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