How to be Safe by Cultivating Relaxed Alertness

November 16 2002

Reality seems to work by paired opposites. If you want to breathe in, you have to breathe out first. If you want to be wide awake for the day's work, you have to go completely unconscious, in the state called sleep, for hours beforehand. If you want to jump up, you first crouch down into gravity, then you spring upwards. We are all used to the ways these opposites work together. We know these opposites are complimentary.

Here is one that may be less familiar: if you want to be safe in a situation that has some dangers, cultivate relaxation. If you go around the world with a thorough sense of relaxation permeating your body, then when you get an alarm signal, an inner ahhhooooggaa or danger signal, you will know this is coming from outside. There is something to attend to. Your nervous system will configure itself appropriately to face whatever danger is there.

If you go around the world with danger signals blasting away in your head all the time, false feelings of emergency, then you will be too tired, stressed, and off-balance to respond appropriately if and when a real physical danger does arise. Your alarm system gives so many false alarms that you and everyone around you will weary of the noise you generate. So paradoxically, a way to cultivate a state of alertness, in which you go around in a state of responsiveness, is to cultivate a wide-open relaxation, senses wide open, body at play, instincts supple, at home and ready for anything.

I was at the passport office in Los Angeles the other day, getting ready for a trip to Mexico, and got a chance to witness an interesting guy in action. He was the security guard for the inside of the Federal Building, and he was laughing and joking with people as they came in. He paid attention to every person that walked through the door, and helped him or her to get into the right line. With people who did not speak English, he would politely signal that he would like to look at their papers, and then he would graciously walk them right to the proper window. I had about half an hour to wait, so I watched him and admired the informal mastery with which he attended to the room.

Most of the people in the Passport office of the Federal building that day were from other countries. Many appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. People were tending to their papers out of concern with the heightened security in the United States. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people inside a large room, in eight or ten lines.

At the same time that he was being loose and kind of dancing around, he was aware of virtually everyone in the room. His eyes casually scanned the room continually, and if he caught anyone's eye, he would nod, as if checking to see if everything was OK with you and are you being helped. He was so at ease, that if anything had been out of place, he would have noticed. He would have visually seen an incongruity, heard something false, felt a tingle on his skin or in his belly. He had clear radar screens. Although he was armed, he was as relaxed as if he were having buddies over for beer in his apartment. He did not waste one erg of energy in false vigilance, pointlessly being suspicious of people. No, he was embodying what real security is, which is to be both relaxed and alert. With this guy, there would be very few false alarms. And false alarms degrade the efficiency of any organization or group of people.

The whole staff there was relaxed, which is unusual. There must be a very good manager there, to create an atmosphere in which the employees can function well.

This security guard was a living example of what Gavin de Becker talks about in his excellent book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. De Becker is a security consultant, an expert in assessing when situations are dangerous. Police and federal agencies across the country often call on him. Although he writes about situations such as stalking and domestic violence, de Becker emphasises the need to trust your own instincts and to learn to read your survival signals. One key to this is staying relaxed as much as possible, so that when you do get a fear signal, it is accurate and useful. If you often scare yourself with fantasies that have nothing to do with what is going on in your immediate environment, then your survival signals may be drowned out by inner noise.

For years, I have recommended that everyone who experiences fear on a daily basis read de Becker. Now Gavin has a new book out, Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism .

All this points to the idea, don't walk out the door without meditating. Meditation, practiced the way I describe it in my books, is a great tool for tuning your intuition and living a relaxed life. One in which your survival signals only go off when needed, so you listen to them.

One day I walked out of the house and jumped in my car to go do an errand. As I was backing out of my parking spot, I noticed that a man with a rifle was hiding in the bushes about 20 feet away and that his gun was pointed directly at my head. This got my attention. About half a second later, I noticed that the rifle was not actually pointed directly at me – it was aimed over my left shoulder, and if he had fired without moving the gun, the bullet would have missed me by at least a foot. I know a little about rifles, for I grew up hunting, and I have worn camoflage gear and shot animals with a scoped rifle. So my brain was noticing details.

Then I checked with my skin sensations and my magnetic sense – I have a kind of proximity sense, that tells me with some accuracy the intentions of people in the space around me for 20 feet or so – and my skin did not seem to think there was any danger. All this took about a second and a half, perhaps two seconds. At the same time I was noticing more details about the guy.

For one thing, he was wearing a ghillie suit. He was camoflaged to look like part of the eucalyptus tree he was kneeling next to. (image courtesy of Raptor Systems, www.raptorsystems.com.au)



Also, he was not moving at all. He was in a total sniper's trance, utterly concentrated on the target. I thought something like, "This guy is a total professional, so no worries – if he wants me dead, I will be dead, no escape. If I am not his target, this is not the kind of guy to make a mistake – he is totally professional." Moving my eyes slightly to the left, I noticed there was a spotter a few feet away from him, also focused on me or something near me.

I took a deep slow breath, and let my body go limp, and at the same time projected love in all directions, "It's been a good life," put the car in neutral, let my shoulders drop, and just sat there, slightly to one side of his crosshairs, poised, looking at the sniper with a "Hey, what's up?" greeting, as if to say, "OK, I am in your crosshairs. Your move." Nothing happened for a few seconds.

So I glanced up, in the rear view mirror, and saw a boat on fire in the marina behind me. At least, there was smoke starting to pour out of the boat, and there were several people standing in the back of the boat.

Aha, I have backed my car right into a situation. He is actually pointing his rifle at someone on that boat, and his line of sight passes just to the left of my shoulder. Then I checked with all my senses again, and I felt no tension in the air at all, no danger. Interesting.

Finally the sniper glanced at me, eye to eye, by moving his head back from the scope a few inches. He slowly put one hand out, and made a slight, "Come on" gesture with his fingers. So I put the car in gear and slowly drove forward, and the sniper gave me a tiny smile and went back to his scope.

What was so enjoyable about this experience was that I happened to be alert enough that there was no "startle" response. My heart did not skip a beat. There was no adrenaline. I rode the wave of alertness up, a tenth of a second at a time, to an interesting state of easy readiness, ready for anything. I do train for this kind of relaxed alertness,

When I came back, there were a few people standing around in the parking lot, some Coast Guard types, the Sherriff, and the sniper and his spotter. I said hello and they told me they had been practicing a hostage rescue scenario.