00:00:06 Speaker 1: There are moments when the world feels loud, demanding and endlessly pulling at us. And in those moments, the question is not how do I fix everything out there? But where do I go inside myself when nothing feels steady? Tonight we explored the idea of an internal sanctuary, a place within you that remains safe even when life doesn't.

00:00:29 Speaker 1: Welcome to the soul podcast, where we slow down, look inward, and notice the patterns shaping our inner and outer lives. I'm your host, Shreya, and today I'm joined by Robin Harris, whose work uniquely blends spirituality, neuroscience, hypnotherapy and decades of experience in technology and system thinking. Our conversation today is about creating an internal safe space, a personal sanctuary you can return to when life feels overwhelming, uncertain, or fragmented. This episode is about learning how to feel at home within yourself. Welcome, Harris. Welcome, Robin. I'm honored to have you on my show.

00:01:08 Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me Robin.

00:01:13 Speaker 1: what first made you realize that having an internal sense of safety was was not optional, but that is very essential.

00:01:22 Speaker 2: Well, I actually realized I basically, uh, Covid, uh, threw me into a very, uh, fearful state and, um, and, and I had to close my business, and I ended up after we came out of that, going back to work. But I was so fearful that I manifested, uh, a very challenging work environment, um, that paid very well, but it it cost me my peace of mind. And when that contract was over and I was sitting there thinking about it, I was just crying, just sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Um, I that is when I realized that I actually created that job from my fear based state of mind and I had to make a decision. Am I going to stay in this fear based state of mind and manifest another toxic work environment? Or am I going to take myself into a state of peace? And as I started reflecting the best jobs I've ever had, the best times of my life were always preceded by a state of peace. And so what I realized is peace is a superpower. It is a superpower. And it's something that's internal. It's not. You don't have peace because everything's going right. Things start going right because you have peace. And and so that actually made me pause and go back and look at my whole life to see, oh, that was a creation from peace. Oh, that was a creation from fear. And so what I noticed in the this very dynamics of the world we're in right now is we as a collective are creating from fear based beliefs, and fear has some siblings and offspring. So now you're getting to fear. You get hatred, you get, uh, greed, you get helplessness. All of these feelings are very it's like it's like something stirred up our collective consciousness and all those negative emotions came to the top, and and it's they're very creative. And I'm going to assume that it's because it's time for us to deal with it, that it's time for us to look at it. But each person is participating in, in some version of the collective consciousness. Now my question became for myself, do I want to add to the fear equation, or do I want to add to the piece of the equation? So I had to make a decision and to to really to really do that, you have to cultivate a way of creating inner peace for yourself. It's not an external thing, it's an internal state. I hope that answers your question.

00:05:04 Speaker 1: Yes, Thank you for sharing your story with our audience. And also, like many people, think safety comes from external stability like relationships, money, routine, certainty. What do you think we often misunderstand about where true safety actually comes from?

00:05:25 Speaker 2: Well, you know, if you look at something like Maslow's hierarchy and, and how we are as a human, we do have to have our basic needs met before we're going to feel safe. And so, admittedly, we're in a state where people are feeling their literal physical survival is at risk. And that creates that angst. And now they're starting to create more reasons to feel angst, because now they're adding to the wrong part of the equation. So I think we we just need to, um, really. Have some practices in place. And to be honest, I really don't know that it's possible to cultivate that level of peace unless you believe in something that's greater than man and and is benevolent. Benevolent. Now you can call it God. You can call it spirit. You can call it life intelligence. You can call it whatever you want to call it. But I think having that as a foundation allows us to kind of like, understand that how we see it and how we experience it and how man is architecting it isn't the end game. And man doesn't have the final say.

00:07:04 Speaker 1: Yes. I think like what I'm hearing is that external order can support us, but it can't Replace internal grounding like. And when we outsource safety to the outside world, we become fragile. When things shift. Which which they always do I think.

00:07:22 Speaker 2: Mhm. Mhm. And and and the here's a, here's another shift that it's more difficult to make is that when I talk about having a, believing in a presence that's greater than man and that's infinite and intelligent and benevolent, that's not an outside power. It exists infinitely. So what that means is that power actually exists within me. It exists within you. It exists within the trees, the animals. It's in my cats. So we're all being sourced by one source. You can call it life intelligence or whatever, but that intelligence is inside of me. I don't have to go to some external place to connect with that power. It's inside of me.

00:08:20 Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I totally agree. And also like from your perspective, especially blending neuroscience and spirituality, why do so many of us struggle to feel safe inside our own minds and our own bodies?

00:08:36 Speaker 2: Well, that's very interesting because one of the things is we've separated, we compartmentalize, we put mind over here, we put spirit over in another bucket, we put our emotions in another bucket, and we put our bodies in, in a in a different bucket. And the truth is, all those things are part of our personal ecosystem. It's not all separate things operating independently. They operate together. And so I think we, we, we struggle because we haven't really taken the time to understand the magnificence of what it means to be human. We know a lot about the brain, which is the interface for the mind. We know a lot about how, um, the body can manifest disease from our emotions. We know a lot about how mental health, a lot of mental illnesses are, are caused because of people harming people, either inadvertently or intentionally. So we know we know a lot more, but we as a society, we haven't taken time to integrate. Well, what does it mean? Because a lot of these woundings and a lot of these insecurities that haunt us for our entire lives are born in our very early years, because of the society and the environments we come up in. And and so when we separate everything, we don't think about, well, if a child's going to school hungry, how's that going to work? How that child going to develop a sense of safety and grow up to be a safe and responsible adult with personal agency. If a child is going to school and is being bullied, how's that going to work as they grow up? So we've separated all these things as if one part doesn't affect the other. That's not how systems work. So what happens to us at school? What happens to us in our home? What happens to us in our relationships, trusted relationships? What happens to us in our neighborhoods? What happens in the world, in the governments and on our jobs. All of that comes together to create that sense of is this world safe or not? And the brain is being programmed. All of these, these reactions and responses and fears are being hardwired into our system. And if if we don't take control of downregulating the system, bringing it back into a piece and we stay in that state as a society, more people feel anxiety than ever before. Not diagnosed anxiety as a mental illness. I'm just saying chronic anxiety, chronic worry, chronic fear, all that's going into our nervous system, it's going into our nervous system. So now you could say that we are embodying those negative emotions. And now we're creating from those negative emotions. So understanding our own body brain mind connection and understanding how how we interact with the world and what we accept as being normal is taking us off our blueprint.

00:12:32 Speaker 1: Yes, I absolutely agree. And also like it sounds like the nervous system plays a much bigger role than we realize, or almost like we are living in constant project management mode for our lives without ever closing the loop on rest or integration.

00:12:51 Speaker 2: Mhm. You say project management mode. It's funny because in project management mode there's a rest cycle. A project always comes to an end. It never goes on and on and on and on. That's not a project. So if if we were truly treating it like a project, it would come to an end. You would look back, you would do something called a retrospective. What did we do? Well, what can we do better? What can we learn? You integrate that learning and then the next piece, the next project benefits from the lessons learned from the previous one. So you're right, we're never closing anything out because we're never pausing and taking a look. And we're never integrating lessons learned. That's a very bad project management system.

00:13:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, I you can say that. Truly, truly I agree. And also like when someone hasn't developed this inner sanctuary, how does that usually show up in everyday life like emotionally, relationally, or even professionally.

00:14:05 Speaker 2: The way it. It looks is, um, that twenty four over seven culture of grinding, hustling, always doing, doing, doing, being very, very busy. Uh, someone on Substack was talking about, uh, one of her, um, children. Elementary. Like, they've got like thirteen practice and game sessions. And she was like, oh, my God, I need a calendar just for my kids. So now we're programming the kids to be doing, doing, doing, always something, being, uh, we always have to be doing something. We always have to be in action. And guess what? The power comes from when we can take some time to be still and to be quiet. And you'll see a lot of people that are like, I can't sit still for five minutes. I can't steal my mind. Well, you're not going to cut off your thoughts, but but but not being able to cut off your mind. Not being able to go without being stimulated by the constant scroll and taking in input from video and entertainment. So the first thing a person needs to do is carve out some time when they're not in that doing mode, when they can be in a being mode. Be still. Be quiet, be thoughtful, be, you know, just just, you know, and there are lots of different kinds of meditations. There are so many different kinds of meditations. You can find one that is right for you. There are actually moving meditations. Things like qigong and Tai chi, and even people like will find that something like running or walking, uh, will help them quiet the mind. So it's. You could start with as simple as practicing some, um, deep breaths for five minutes just to quiet the mind and certain types of breath work that automatically starts to calm the nervous system. You can't get any easier than that.

00:16:24 Speaker 1: That's really powerful because I think it reframes burnout, reactivity and even overachievement not as personal failures, but as signs that safety is missing at a very foundational level. And also, like, I'm really curious when someone wants to begin creating an internal safe space, where do you suggest they start without overwhelming themselves or trying to fix everything at once?

00:16:52 Speaker 2: Um, I would suggest there are some wonderful videos on YouTube. Um, for breathing exercises like it is. It's they're like a sequence of breathing exercises. And you, some of them will resonate with you and some of them won't. The the simplest one is to inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. Hold for four. It's called box breathing. Try it for two or three minutes. Do it multiple times a day. I teach my clients to to create an anchor, so they'll hold their thumb and their index finger together, and they'll do this breathing. And they think to themselves the word calm, calm, calm. And the way the mind works is you can create an anchor that gets wired in so that the minute you bring your fingers together in that method and you say the word calm, your body is programmed to start bringing that calm into the nervous system, into the mind. And one of the things there are all kinds of, uh, visualization audios you can listen to if you like nature, you know, you could be on, on the ocean. You can, um, be in a forest. You can experience the cleansing calm of a beautiful rainstorm. We have all the tech for you, and none of this stuff is expensive and hard to get your hands on. Just Google go to YouTube. I'm telling you, if it's something you want. You can have it. It's so accessible.

00:18:58 Speaker 1: That's really stands out. Like also like the gentleness of that approach. That is really, really amazing. And also that brings up something important. Like even when people begin this work, old patterns resurface under stress. What tends to help people return to their inner sanctuary when they feel like they have lost access to it?

00:19:23 Speaker 2: Well, you you first off to understand it, your inner sanctuary is already within you, and it's like you have a room in your house that you never go in. It's a beautiful room. You know, it's it the the sunlight comes in, there's this wonderful chair and there's a table and and you know, the ambience is amazing. And you just never go in that room. And this room doesn't need cleaning because it doesn't get dirty. It's a magical place. It's within you. But if you never go there, you don't get the benefits of it. So it's just like anything else, you know, when you get up in the morning, you know, when you get up. Shreya, you have a routine, am I, am I right?

00:20:24 Speaker 1: Yes. Yes, definitely.

00:20:25 Speaker 2: Okay, so when you get up, you have a routine. Now what if you add it and and you may already have it. You added five minutes of going into your inner sanctuary as part of your routine. So you get up, you go brush your teeth. You go sit in a in a chair and you call it your special chair. It just it's a it's a chair, but you call it your special chair. You get your little Afghan and you put it over your leg so it's comfortable. And you sit there for five minutes and you take nice, slow, deep breaths and you visualize being in a special place, or you listen to some nice audio or some soothing music, or some people might want to go into prayer, or some people might want to say a mantra. Saying a mantra keeps the mind from wondering, wondering, wondering, saying the mantra. And you make this part of your daily routine. Don't overwhelm yourself. Just start with that five minutes a day and you think, oh, five minutes is not that much. Five minutes of peace is amazing. Yeah. And then you progress. You can progress. And then before you go to bed, don't go to bed watching television and on on the screen, scrolling and everything. Stop a little early. Stop a little early. Quiet the mind and don't take chaos into your sleep cycle. So now you bookend. You're doing something in the morning and you're doing something in the evening.

00:22:29 Speaker 1: Yes, I love that idea like that. The sanctuary, like, isn't something we lose, but something we temporarily forget how to enter. And the way you just explained how to get into it, it's really, really amazing. And this is truly a very powerful and insightful conversation with you. And if after this my listeners want to connect with you, then what's the best way.

00:22:53 Speaker 2: If you go to. I want to say climb right mountain dot com. I actually have a visual journey for that. They can. It's a video that they can watch and then you can just listen to it climb right mountain dot com. And I also have additional resources on time to pivot. And that's the number two time two pivot dot Substack dot com where I share writings audio um meditations processes for basically learning to use the mind to create the life we want. And I'm sure most people want peace to be part of that life.

00:24:03 Speaker 1: Yes, and I will make sure to attach all these details and links below, so that the listeners can find them easily and get in touch with you. And for my listeners, thank you for spending this time with us on this podcast. If today's conversation starts something in you, then take a moment, just one breathe to notice what safety feels like in your body right now. Until next time. May you keep returning to yourself with curiosity, kindness, and care. And do not forget to hit the follow button. Subscribe and feel free to share your thoughts because your ears deserve premium content. Thank you.