I was watching a complex clip from an interview with Jane Fonda, whom I always find delightful and compelling. She was talking about having resilience and a survival instinct. I disagreed with some of her definitions, but she made me think. A few months prior to seeing that clip, I was thinking about the creation of familial and tribal structures. Those structures made it possible to lose the individual survival instinct. It simply wasn’t necessary for everyone to have, oddly enough thanks to skill distribution. Everyone is able to hone their intuitive voice, and that voice will always guide you toward life. But a survival instinct cannot be taught. You either have it or you claim it. And, in your adolescent or adult life, there will likely be a moment where you have to claim it again.
What’s required? A self-concept… which eventually evolves into an embodied self. There has to be a moment of self-recognition. “I am a me.” Notable in all of this is that not having a survival instinct is not the same as being self-destructive. Self-destructive has “self” in it. That is the suppression of your survival instinct rather than the absence of it. If you’re reading this and you’re feeling your body clench, there’s something being called up for your attention. You owe it to yourself to follow that pull, but if you cannot, I’d suggest closing the post here.
Someone reached out to me in response to my repost of the clip. From the framing of the question, I could tell they lacked a self-concept. (I created the Soul Retrieval to assist in self-concept work and think of it as foundational to all of my work. The download of it is available in the shop. Secondary to that is the Root Activation.) There is a degree of sovereignty required to ground any sort of personal change. Your sovereignty can only be supported once you claim it, just like your survival instinct. If you try to skip the pre-requisites (and I am not talking about my work), the language of life will always be faintly unintelligible. Intuition is the language of life.
I’ve become conversant in the language of life through learning to listen and identify. I’m a proud seer. I am a very proud “me.” I used to be self-destructive, so that was a development. There is a polarity at play where people who lack self-concept are attracted to those with a strong sense of self. Many dysfunctional relationships can be examined through the lens of “Survival Instinct: do you have it, mother-effer?” The people without a self-concept find great comfort and refuge in being support staff to those with one, even if they are self-destructive. You may also find a high concentration of people sans self (concept or embodied) in helping professions. Again, this is about the readily available refuge.
Fonda described resilience as the ability to scan the horizon and reach out for what’s needed to survive. To be sans self-concept is to believe in a trickle down theory, not outreach. You end up with the scraps, which do not feed the soul. You may be consciously unaware that’s what you’re receiving and may even be outwardly “successful” but, again, the body is the guide. If you are feeling anything tight, contracted, constricted, etc. in the body as you read this, a purge is available to you.
As tribal structures shift and collapse, lack or presence of survival instinct is going to be more apparent. I use shift carefully because I strongly believe our new tribal alliances will be more ideological. (That’s not actually new but it will look very different.) People will seek out others who believe similarly. Of course this may fall along traditional lines of creed and caste, but there will be a rise of microcommunities centered around niche interests. This will go beyond “hobby” and into “way of life.” Those who lack a survival instinct because they haven’t claimed themselves will obviously be welcome as support staff in many of them; however, if you are at all attracted to me and my work, you know that I would like you to be a conscious deciding factor in your experience.
There is no shame in not having a survival instinct. I notice it often in people whose childhoods simply did not leave room for individuation. Essentially, there was insufficient oxygen and other nutrients required for integration. I spent quite a bit of time alone as a child and I credit that with allowing me the necessary room for exploration. I still became self-destructive in adolescence, but my survival instinct showed me which way was up long enough for me to re-emerge. I want everyone to be aware of their pilot light; I cannot stress enough how needed it is in these times. It’s time to claim your survival instinct. Don’t hesitate to reclaim it at regular intervals for good measure, too.
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