I am a survivor, sounds heavy right?
Last summer I was attending a women’s circle and I wanted to burn all my mechanisms that helped me survive. My thoughts at that moment were: I am whole, I am healthy, I don’t need to survive anymore, instead I can LIVE. It was typical that the fire didn’t want to burn my survival mechanisms at all and that the paper burned for a few seconds and quickly stopped burning. Now, when writing this post, I am grateful that it didn’t.
In this world we all survive in our own way, we all have found our own way in how we survive the best. And that is the only thing that is making us (appear) different from each other. Because love, consciousness or the name that you like to give it, is our source, where we stem from, who we are. We are all connected via this source. And we all have pain, are wounded in our childhood in some degree and have found our own way of coping with this pain. However, the way that we cope, the way that we survive is different. The way that pain is covered by love is covered differently by every individual in this world.
From the outside, one survival mode seems better than another, and in a sense that is true. One way is more destructive towards yourselves and another way is more destructive towards others, and some ways don’t seem destructive at all because they are mainly covered by distractions, but they all stem from the same pain. Finding compassion towards our survival mechanism that expresses itself in so many different variations is a spiritual journey, it gives you immediately more compassion and knowledge about yourself. When I started to understand my own story, my own pain, my own survival mechanisms and the way that it expresses itself in this world, I could treat myself as a baby, as a child that needs love, as love <3 It is stabilising, gives me foundation and it gives me the right to think, feel and do in any way that I as a person want to. It gave me connection with myself.
So if you find yourself in a survival mechanism again, ask yourself the question: What is it serving now? And treat yourself as love would do <3
And to finish with my last thoughts on my survival mechanisms. Thank you for being there, thank you for protecting me in situations that I found too scary to feel, too painful to feel and too dangerous to feel. Thank you for making me the person that I am today: walking around on this world exploring what living life is, in an as open as possible way, with the survival mechanisms that are still needed. And who knows, if some day I can burn all my survival mechanisms..
Hope to see you soon,
Melisse Su Wei <3
Next week I will talk more about survival mechanisms and its manifestations, so a bit more practical! And I love connecting with you, so feel very welcome to say hi <3