GROWING UP AS A SURVIVOR

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"You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?" - Rumi

From the authentic space of my self, I look at my story. I see a little girl, very solar, spontaneous and intelligent; she loves being in the nature and playing with dogs and cats; she often feels alone; she wants to play, but she can't get attention; everything seems to be more important than her, in her eyes at least; she lies on her bed, playing with her cat; she feels lonely. Sometimes she goes out in the yard and plays with her cousins and brother; other times, she spends hours playing with paper dolls, creating colored, vibrant dresses out of paper. She loves drawing and she adores colors. She likes to sing and dance. I see a strange atmosphere; sometimes she is fearful, and she tries to stand up for her rights but does not have much success. She gives up.

She decides to become perfect in the hope that somebody will give her attention and appreciation — or at least notice her. She notices positive reactions to her attempt at perfection. I see a girl who sets very high expectations for herself and criticizes herself every time she isn't able to be better than she is. She doesn't know yet that perfection doesn't exist. She is convinced that she will gain love, acceptance and understanding by being perfect. I see lots of sadness, effort, struggle, disillusionment and resignation.

Nevertheless, she is a powerful fighter, highly disciplined, and intelligent enough to successfully gain a university degree, become professional and well known in the world of judo and athletics. She marries her first husband, builds a family and starts her own life.

She lives her life, expanding and experiencing lots of happiness.

She doesn't know yet that her home is love. Instead, she creates a false home built on weak foundations — lack of self-love, attachment to loved ones, fears and neediness. This false home will soon crash.

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I was born a very intelligent, solar child and, like everybody, started wearing my identity in the moment they gave me a name. My environment taught me quickly how to survive and get to material security.

Directly or indirectly, I was taught that life is a struggle; that the world is a dangerous place where we need to work hard to survive. I learned that happiness is not my birthright but something I had to struggle hard for. In short, happiness seemed to be a luxury for a few lucky people. My motto was "work hard," instead of "work happily."

I learned very well how to be a good survivor in society. I understood early enough that if I wanted to be accepted, I needed to fit in.

I always felt a longing to express and experience my passions and talents. I loved Latin standard dancing as a child, and I still do; I was fascinated by the way two human bodies could express grace in movement. When I watched others dance, I felt like a little child who, with widely open eyes, wonders about the life around him while trying to discover it.

I wished I could have learned one day to move my body in that way, like a piece of life in ecstatic motion — legs, hips, arms, shoulders and head perfectly aligned like a well-attuned instrument releasing a perfect, graceful sound. I loved how the colorful, vivid dresses of the dancing women waved in the air; they looked like Goddesses in a sacred dance. I wanted to be one of them one day!

Unfortunately, arts, dancing and singing were not deemed important in an environment which was merely based on security, and consequently were not cultivated. Studying the arts or doing anything for the nourishment of our true self was, at best, something considered nice — never necessary. It was time-wasting entertainment compared to the real goal: survival, which meant studying for the sake of money.

In this way, my natural longing for the things that set my heart on fire was completely overshadowed by the concept of earning money, surviving and creating a safe life.

This is why today, I consider it vital that we never lose touch with our true passions and talents — that we stay connected to everything our true self longs for.

At this point, I would like to encourage everybody to drop the habit of teaching children to study for the sake of money. I know in my skin that this only creates unhappy beings. Instead, we can teach them to follow and nourish their true talents. The heightened focus on money is also the reason why, in my opinion, societies no longer create any great geniuses. Where are the Leonardo's, the Michelangelo's, the Tesla's or Edison's? They were all great thinkers who gave themselves the time to unfold and work on what they truly, passionately loved; they spent their lives following their passions, ending up becoming geniuses who made it pretty well through life too.

Our society, in contrast, is full of too many beings who have to practically prostitute themselves in a job that doesn't fit them; a job that doesn't help them thrive because it doesn't match their talents and was only chosen in the name of some sort of God that is synonymous with money. We have the best technologies and the highest level of wealth compared to previous generations, yet we are certainly not the happiest and most fulfilled generation.

This partially explains why so many of us are suffering from stress, depression and dis-ease of all kinds: not only do we force ourselves to spend every day doing something that doesn't match our talents and passions, but we invest huge effort into trying to be exceptionally good at it!

Instead, we should live in a society that offers us a great environment in which to blossom as human beings; it should offer the terrain to enhance our talents and creativity. As it is now, society only uses human beings to support an economical system based on the wealth of a few rich families, sculpting human beings into "mass beings" and leveling out their uniqueness, instead of supporting individuality (from Latin: Individuum, meaning indivisible entity, one).

Getting back to my story, I was born, like all of us, with this great gift of instinctively knowing, how to be effortlessly happy and enjoy everything that is. Many others felt this way, too. As little children we knew how to spend time alone without feeling lonely. At the same time, we were totally immersed — one hundred percent involved — in the liveliness of life and all those around us. No fears, no doubts, judgments or critics; less dualism and more oneness and harmony.

Nature, play, love, hate, friendship, betrayal, creativity, risk, comfort, success, failure, justice, injustice, win, loss, good and evil — all the dualities of life were experienced without drama and wounds. As children we fell, stood up, smiled and went on with full involvement, eager to discover life. None of us lost any time evaluating the situation intellectually, judging ourselves as a failure and creating wrong beliefs about ourselves. We knew how to learn from a mistake or situation without getting fully wounded and shattered because of it.

Unfortunately, during the course of life, we lost this great capability of simply being and started taking everything as utterly personal. Why? Because of the mind and the conditioned identity. We create a layer of accumulated impressions, memories, opinions and beliefs around our being. Then we identify with that layer, thinking seriously that it is us.

Look back at your childhood and ask yourself: how was your experience?

Were you not more exuberant, sincere, open, perceptive, creative, and simply happier? The answer is the same for all of us: we were all more inclusive, we were able to incorporate everybody and everything in our experience without fears and doubts.

Now let's have a look at who we have become; maybe not all of us, but most of us have become more exclusive, meaning we see ourselves and others, good and bad, failure and success. We live completely in the dual nature of our physical and psychological Identity.

Since dualities separate, oneness/inclusiveness unites. I call this oneness inclusiveness, meaning our capacity to see and embrace every creature we meet as part of ourselves.

With an exclusive attitude, we separate ourselves from everybody and everything. We live in our rich houses and in our comfort zone, not noticing that we are isolating ourselves even from life itself. Our walls of preservation and safety have also become our walls of imprisonment. Rates of depression and isolation have never been as high as they are today, despite our material wealth and our high technology standards.

As far as I am concerned, all my child-like qualities and my true self became shadowed due to external conditioning. I was taught that my spontaneity was not good because it wasn't in line with the standard behavior, that happiness carried a kind of danger and it was not good for me to dwell in it; that sexuality was a sin, if freely expressed; that as a girl, I had to feel inadequate; that life is a dangerous place I must fear; and that to dwell in the state of being equals to laziness, while only doing is good.

The conditioning starts when we are called by our name for the first time; this is the beginning of the identity. Later on, this identity is fed by all kind of notions, opinions, judgments and impressions, with which we identify to the point that we believe it to be our true self when in reality, nothing is further from the truth. It's no wonder that my true, child-like self became quiescent during the course of life, substituted by a mind constantly at work in its loyal attempt to preserve my identity at all costs. This is how I became an identity, completely losing contact with my true self, my dreams and visions, and the real life outside.

Why do we believe of being the identity, knowing that this is only an accumulation of teachings, beliefs, opinions, and the conditioning gathered from the outside during the course of our lives?

Why do we believe we are our mind, rather than our true

self? Everything which is accumulated from outside can belong to us — but it cannot be us!

We can think because we exist in the first place, and not the other way around. It is only because we are a piece of life that we have the capacity to think. The education system, family, religious and social institutions of all kinds have conditioned us to the point of making us believe that their version of truth is the real truth. When we look closer, we can see that family, church and school have completely failed in their teachings! Nevertheless, they keep making us believe that what didn't work for them and their success will surely work for us!

We have been converted into beings which can only survive in society. The price we paid was the loss of our creativity and our happiness, which puts us far away from being realized beings. We eat, sleep, copulate, work, function and repeat these rituals every day of our life up until our death. Most of our lives contain no trace of expressing our limitless potential to the fullest!

We have everything but we don't have time. Time has become the most precious good we long for, but in the society we actually live in, we are not allowed to have it. Is this happiness? Surely not.

Some readers may be thinking, "What is wrong with wanting to be only a survivor?" The truth is that there is nothing wrong with it; it is only a very limited way of living. I know that we, as human beings, are the only species to have been created with such an endless potential, that it would be a shame not to explore it during the course of a lifetime! For a dog or another animal to live as a survivor is fine, but human beings are the only species to have been equipped not only with limitless capabilities, but also with the free will to decide how to use them.

Our potential deserves and longs to be explored and experienced in this life!

We fear our endless possibilities and by doing so, we imprison ourselves within the safe limits of our comfort zone, our well-known habits and rituals.

Believe me, I know what I am talking about because I was a survivor for most of my life; one of the reasons why I am writing this book is to awaken people from the trance of believing to be their identity. It's not worth wasting a lifetime to realize it! It's true that as long as we live in a society, we have to make use of our identity, but we have to realize that it is not our true self and that we can slip in and out of it whenever we want — and especially when it's keeping us trapped into a life we actually never wanted.

As far as my life is concerned, I did the best use of my survivor-capabilities, reaching what we erroneously call "success" early on in life. I continued accumulating material wealth and social achievements until I woke up one morning and became aware that all those things and achievements which defined me, were of no-existential value.

I had everything, but I had nothing. I was unhappy.

Of course, I had moments that weren't so bad. Each time I achieved something new, I was happy for a little while, but soon thereafter, I was looking for the next achievement and action plan. And once I had a new plan, of course I was not happy, until I reached the goal. I was always longing for more, trapped in the rat race until I asked myself: How much would be enough? The stars? The entire galaxy? Maybe the universe?

I became a functioning unit, working every day the entire day and as soon as I came home, I kept working — not with the things I loved, but the things that I had to take care of. Unconsciously, I had already stopped living, safe within my wealthy castle, waiting for my pension.

I grew up trying to attract love and attention through being successful. I was a judo professional and always at the top of my class at school. I got a university degree with the highest score within a short period of time. I got jobs in the best multinational companies. I got money, success, a family. Doesn't it sound like a perfectly happy and successful identity?

Perhaps it does, but it was not.

As it turned out, the longing that I felt for wealth and success, which pushed me to expand as an identity, was in reality a longing for inner freedom and for the expression of the limitless creative power within. I simply didn't realize it at the time.

I sensed that the meaning of life couldn't be only material things, family and a social identity. I sensed that there must be more to it. But I was too busy and worried about preserving my safety and identity to take the time to stop and look inward.

Does this sound familiar?

I was following my ambition instead of my vision, losing sight of how I really wanted to live and who I loved to be; I became purely functional, endlessly residing in the madness of my mental construct.

Please don't misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong about wanting a family and a certain social security if it is done consciously and doesn't turn you into a slave to your own objectives. What I am talking about is choosing out of fear instead of self-love, when we are identified in our objectives to the point that we become imprisoned by our own desires and become blind to freedom and true happiness. When this happens, we must realize that life is the path to the objective, rather than the objective itself. This means going from the compulsiveness of a survivor's comfort zone, wherein we impulsively choose out of fear, into the awareness that we are the creators of the life we desire. As creators, we choose to consciously give ourselves time to be who we authentically want to be.

What I discovered along my journey from compulsiveness to awareness is that compulsive decisions come from the mind, while decisions taken with awareness come from the peaceful space of my true self. It is by getting in touch with our inner self that the most beautiful decisions for our true happiness can be taken. Once we know how to tap into this inner space, we can take the right decisions for our life. We can still enjoy the material, physical aspects of life without getting enslaved to or identified with them.

To do this we have to ask ourselves some tough questions, like: How far do I want to reach? When will it be enough? How much money or safety do I really need to live? It is very important that we ask those questions and find out what is true for us.

At first, these questions scared me. But when I was brave enough to really look at them, I came to the conclusion that I could live nicely with about half of what I had, and that all the rest I was striving for actually wasn't necessary. I realized that I could lower my expectations somewhat, and by doing so, leave myself some precious time to enjoy the things that I really love, like writing, learning new skills, fashion & pattern design, painting, volunteering, reading. I found that I had time left over to simply be, instead of do. This, in turn, allowed me to give my presence and joy to loved ones and people around me. I gave up making decisions which were against my true self, a habit that I had formed in response to others' expectations or my own fears, which kept me away from realizing what I really wanted.