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ESSENCE AND SURVIVAL

For those who think about their own lives, to live out of one’s essence is a conscious goal. To live from one’s basic, necessary, natural essence would seem to be the ideal — simple, yet attainable by a small percentage of people.
Most of us would like to live from that core of our being, to be ourselves, rather than doing tasks that have little meaning to us. Most of us would like to be self-directed rather than react to the whims and desires of others.
What exactly is an individual’s essence and how can we fully “remember” it and fully embrace it? Moreover, does a group or an organization have an essence? How can a family, a company, or a government act from essence?
Let’s start from the belief that all human beings are born with similar urges and desires: to survive, to feel safe and secure, to affiliate with others, to have some significance in the world and to live out who they are. In some areas of psychology it is believed that we all have a “self-actualizing tendency,” that is, we all have the urge to manifest, or live out, the essence of who we are to the fullest.
If we all have this innate urge, why don’t more of us live it out? That seems to be the $64,000 question.
What if we look at essence as the core of who you are and that core is very present and exposed at birth. As we experience the world — trying to meet our needs of eating, feeling safe, bonding, feeling significant, accomplishing something, learning more about the world – we also experience frustration, being ignored, feeling pain and being punished. All of us experience satisfaction and frustration, pain and pleasure, reward and punishment, love and fear, to some degree.
We can look at these “negative” events as layers of insulation, like layers of bark on a tree, that eventually began to cover our core, our essence. As we grow and learn about our world these layers of insulation become patterns of responses, habitual ways of acting and reacting in relationships.
Fear is a good example of a “layer of insulation” that becomes a pattern. Fear can be said to be a prediction of future pain based on pain that we have experienced in the past. All of our fears that we now have in relationships have been learned. As an adult in a marriage, we respond with fears that are based in our childhoods. We can say that we are responding from that layer of insulation as a way of protecting, or defending, our core, which in the moment seems vulnerable.
In this light, many things can be seen as protection, or defensive patterns that keep us from fully being who we are. Some call these defensive patterns “survival mechanisms” because subconsciously we believe our survival is at stake when we resort to them. Anger, suspicion, hyper-vigilance, confusion, retreat, conflict avoidance –all these, and more, can be patterned behaviors that serve the purpose of defending our core or, put another way, stifling our essence.
We were put on this earth to love and to be powerful. Anything else, while we may justify it and believe we need it, is a distraction from that journey to love and power.