The three pillars of inner security
Myths and truths about economic sovereignty
Spend your entire life working for the same company and retire with a pension? A made-for-TV story. Marry your high school sweetheart and celebrate your 50th anniversary with great-grandchildren? No way. What was common two generations ago, now seems like an insane fantasy.
Extreme uncertainty and volatility — this is the new normal for those of us who are present and paying attention on Planet Earth now. More people are waking up, and at the same time, the external world seems to be going more and more crazy. To me, this seems like a perfectly designed feature of the 3D human game that we’re all playing. It mirrors the expanding capacity we have to see through the illusion of stability and solidness.
The inconvenient truth is that the structures we rely on have always been shaky. And the systems we blame for betraying us have always been temporary. The age-old institutions where we deposited our trust and vested our power? They were never going to take care of us in old age. They only needed to pretend long enough for us to grow up into self-responsibility.
For centuries, an immature humanity has been incubating inside the shared delusion of predictability and control. That egg protected us while we were still growing. Now the egg is cracking from the inside as we rebirth into a new paradigm of economic and energetic sovereignty.
We can see now that none of the things we believed in was ever truly secure. But impermanence has always been the uncertain ground under our feet, since the beginning. Childishly, with blinders on, we built our castles and ego-shrines on top and threw temper tantrums when they got moved.
We ignored the truth of insecurity in earlier stages of our collective evolution. This truth was more than we could handle. But that was then; and this is now.
Our coming of age demands mastery of insecurity. This mastery can also be described as the development of inner security. In other words, we need to stop looking for security out there somewhere. We dilute our essence and leak our energy when we get caught in ego-driven efforts to grab external sources of security. No matter whether the object is money or power or status, our efforts lead to suffering.
If we want to build a healthy, whole, new economy, we have to radically reframe our ways of seeing. We take our power back when we start re-sourcing security from our internal world instead of the external world.
We have to stop confusing security with something earned as the result of personal doing. That mistake is an ego trip directly to the heart of disappointment and resentment. Instead, we have to remember security as something given — not just to one of us but to everyone. The benevolent holding of Life supporting Life; this is a built-in feature of reality. Maybe it’s a feature that has long been forgotten and deeply buried, but it’s still in motion behind the scenes.
The pillars of inner security can be seen as the conversion or renovation of the pillars of old paradigm, outer-sourced security. We turn each activity of seeking into a presence-sourced way of seeing. Instead of seeking outside for money, we simply see resourcefulness as it is. Instead of seeking outside for power, we simply see resilience as it is. Instead of seeking outside for status, we simply see relatedness as it is.
It sounds simple in theory, but embodying inner security is challenging. It requires us to unsubscribe from lifetimes of fear and scarcity conditioning.
Here I dive into resourcefulness, resilience, and relatedness in great depth. All three pillars of inner security are natural parts of the human experience — unlike money, power and status, which lead to striving. I describe each in detail and explore how we connect with them intentionally.
Mind shift #1. From money to resourcefulness.
Mind shift #2. From power to resilience.
Mind shift #3. From status to relatedness.
Note: I am going through some major renovations in my life at the moment, which I will be sharing a lot of richness from once the changes are fully digested. In the meantime, I am taking a short hiatus from writing and publishing new essays on Substack. So you may see me recycling some posts that I have shared before previously. Chances are there are many posts that you haven’t read yet even if you have been following me for a long time.