“You can’t ever trust the crowd or the multitude. People will love you today and drag you tomorrow. Re-centering today means not entrusting myself, my identity, my security or my worthiness to anyone other than the Divine.” 📍Plettenberg Bay 🇿🇦South Africa I read the above quote in one of @shantelsmith’s posts and it resonated so much with me and the state I am in now. My priority since moving to South Africa last year has been “safety”. I have been chasing the feeling of safety [also: peace and softness]. This isn’t something I grew up with in my home, so I spent most of my childhood developing coping mechanisms to protect me from a world that felt unsafe to me. Now that I’m an adult, those same coping mechanisms no longer serve me and so, I have been spending my time unlearning those same coping mechanisms that are no longer healthy for me or for the relationships I want to form. One of the greatest lessons that my therapist taught me, late last year, was how to find that feeling of safety within myself, at any given moment. This has been a game changer for me. As someone who very easily absorbs the energy, opinions and feelings of those around her, and internalizes traumatic experiences for far too long, learning how to re-center myself has been so key to feeling emotionally, mentally and physically safe. No matter what is happening around me, I can find calm and safety within and that is what safety, peace and softness mean to me. The less we allow external factors to control how we feel, the freer we are. #softlife #traveldiary