When you forget that one day you will die and surviving will not have been enough.
You were born in the patriarchy. And as a human being born into patriarchy it is impossible for you to have grown up without being abused.
You were psychologically abused when you fell down and your mother or teacher says, "Nothing happened. It didn't hurt, there's no reason for you to be crying," or when your mother says, "Wait until your father gets home so you can see what's going to happen! "Or when you've been forced to eat when you're not hungry, or when you're sent into a school system where false 'authorities' tell you what you must learn and when you must learn it, then they grade you while deceiving you about some kind of connection between 'good grades' and a 'good job', like if you don't get good grades you're not going to be 'somebody' in life.
You were energetically abused when your mother or father took your diary to read your things, when they invaded your personal space to control and dominate you, when your privacy was not respected, when you had to be quiet and not ask questions because the opposite is disrespectful. When you have been forced to bow down to 'authorities', such as not asking questions to the teacher, not questioning something with your father because otherwise you would get beaten up.
When you were emotionally abused when you felt angry and all your parents could say was "stop throwing tantrums, you don't know how to behave". When you felt sad or afraid and your father or uncle said, "Big boys don't cry. Are you a man or a potato sack? You look like a deer crying like that. Stop being a scaredy-cat!" Or his mother said, "Don't spoil the mood, dear. Your make-up will run? you have to look pretty. You have everything, why are you crying? What did I do wrong for you to be crying? "
You were physically abused when your family and institutions fed you sugary foods filled with GMO corn syrup, artificial flavors, food coloring and preservatives, and called it 'food. When you couldn't express yourself physically as you wanted to, when you had to wear clothes the way your parents wanted. When your father or mother hit you with a slipper, belt, hand, stick, wooden spoon and told you that you had to learn, when you were grounded in a room for a whole day to 'think better of what you did. When a 'teacher' or 'nun' hit you with a ruler or a stick instead of dealing responsibly with your own unconscious anger, reactivity and your own shit (this negative attention is better than no attention is just another saying that normalizes violence)
You were sexually abused when you were forced or seduced into exchanging sexual energy or sexual contact against your own will. You may have been sexually abused through media, movies, pornography, and computer sex that plant images in your brain that are so strong and so far removed from reality that you can no longer have real sex. When your uncle wanted to hold you tight and touched parts of your body that you didn't allow.
If you are a mother or a father reading this and thinking, "Oh my God, I have done a lot of these things to my children, I have spoiled my children," I invite you to take a deep breath. You did the best you could. Don't start beating yourself up and blaming yourself for it, it won't change anything. Abuse is so rampant in the patriarchal capitalist empire that it is the default, and that is not your fault. That result is the consequence of living in Patriarchy, it is the consequence of not having initiated adults who take radical responsibility for their own shit. It is the consequence of you as a parent not getting out of your survival strategies and updating your thinking. These words may be hard to digest, but I invite you to allow the pain to be present in you. Allow yourself to feel the sadness, the anger, and the fear of living in a society where being abused has become the status quo. Only from that place do you have the possibility of creating something different in the present moment.
Just as you have replicated much of this abuse with children around you surely you have experienced much of it throughout your life. At home, at school, on the street, at church, at work.
Your Being came into the world, pure, whole, present, whole, ready to bloom. You spent 9 months or less inside a warm, safe space that was still, for many, turbulent and traumatizing. Then you chose to be born, or not even that you chose. 90% of women in Brazil give birth by c-section. The possibility of you as a baby entering Gaia and her gravity field with clarity, grounding, and connection is destroyed. You leave your mother and find yourself in a hostile, cold, noisy environment. The act of being born in itself is traumatizing. Then you grow up and probably experience some, if not all, of the forms of abuse that were mentioned above. This doesn't mean that you haven't had moments of joy in your life, or that your life sucks. One thing does not negate the other. However, for your Being to continue to inhabit your body you had to create strategies to deal with all this intensity of life, with all these abuses. In order to survive you chose to create survival strategies.
Survival is a specific orientation to life where your whole purpose and focus is simply to survive, which means to make sure that life happens. This is the most primitive instinct of any animal. However, unlike many species, you are an animal that was designed to experience something beyond survival. The proof of this is that you have consciousness about consciousness itself, which enables you to create, to transform, to love.
Survival is designed so that you have no surplus. At the end of the day - or at the end of every moment - there is no surplus. The goal of your survival strategies is to create enough surplus (money, food, fame, love...) so that you finally feel secure enough to relax, and then finally live. However, you never 'get there', it is never enough because everything is still coming from the center of survival. So this security created by having property, cars, bank accounts, investment portfolios, lovers, 'friends' in high places, etc. is all superficial and ultimately useless, a fantasy world that is killing the possibility of human life on earth. The inner world of survival based on fear still prevails.
You are probably already creating several stories in your mind about how bad and horrible these survival strategies are, and that you want to put an end to them, that society is sick. However, by thinking this way you are making yourself a victim of these strategies, as if someone else created them for you.
Are you reading these words? Yes, then I have good news: you survived, the strategies you created worked. For the sake of survival you chose to create survival strategies. You created your survival strategies, so you have the power to recognize them, and you have the possibility to change your mind about them.
Many newborns or children die suddenly, without any medical explanation, because they chose not to be part of the Patriarchy. To be part of it you had to kill parts of yourself. You had to create a series of strategies to survive it, otherwise you wouldn't be reading these words. The diversity of survival strategies is as varied as the number of human beings on earth. Here I will list some that I have recently discovered in my research:
Smiling to cover up that you are feeling fear, anger, or sadness so that you feel safe. Pretending to be polite, nice, friendly so as not to be attacked;
Speaking softly and slowly, inducing a state of sleepiness in the space so that people don't have the energy to attack or hurt you;
Fragment parts of your Being during the trauma and keep the part of you disconnected so that you will never be whole again and feel that pain
Become cheerful, bright, and happy all the time so that you won't be a burden and a burden to your parents because they did 'too much' for you;
Become nasty to constantly punish anyone who wants to love you or care for you.
Mixing your feelings (fear, anger, sadness and joy), creating guilt, shame, isolation, depression. When you mix them up you lose clarity of what is happening, so it becomes "less painful";
Become invisible and powerless so that you are not perceived as dangerous and others don't need to attack or hurt you once again;
You invent something quick to be the first, the one that everyone else admires and envies, so as not to show yourself vulnerable;
You commit to being beautiful above all else so that you don't have to connect with who you really are;
Playing confused, tired, in order not to be present with who you are;
Creating rules for yourself so that you can then break them and have a reason to punish yourself. Because you have been punished all your life, so who are you if you are not punishing yourself?
Telling yourself that you are wrong, to keep fitting into people's (and your parents') expectations;
Staying in hierarchical contexts so that you don't have to make a choice for yourself;
Get addicted to unnecessary risks, investments, gambling, spying, lying, cheating, stealing, gang fights, sweets to avoid connecting with the intensity of life and maybe of "disappointing" once again;
You try to follow the law to be seen as someone not so dangerous as to be put behind bars or given brain drugs;
You fight for the survival of whatever you have invested your identity in (e.g. religion, last name, flag, political party, diploma);
It is impossible for you to win the battle of survival. The only thing you can do is postpone your defeat. In the end you will die, as terrifying as that sounds. Sometimes people seem to forget this truth. Intellectually you may even understand it, but it doesn't enter into your other bodies because you remain committed to surviving, even though you know you are going to die. Postponing defeat is not a victory. It is just a fantasy world.
You were designed to experience something beyond that. You were designed to fly, to create, to make magic. You were designed to Live. And what is needed to change your point of origin from Surviving to Living? Initiation, Healing and Transformation.
Initiation is any process that enables you to take more responsibility than before, in practice. You were designed for the transition from Survival to Life, starting at about the age of 18. But several factors weigh unfairly against you.
First, you were born and raised in a culture that does not prepare you for this major life transition. School and university only emphasizes intellectual development, to the point that your mind has been disproportionately distorted so that you think you will die if you stop thinking. Or that you will starve to death because you won't have a job.
Second, the authentic processes of Healing and Initiation of the Adult Age that are formidable enough to cause Transformation were banished from modern culture about 6,000 years ago. Any ideas you may have heard about 'initiation into adulthood' probably came from indigenous or mass religious traditions that are unsound and unrelated to the rapidly changing conditions on Earth in the early 21st century. None of them support that you reclaim your own authority and anchor your center and power in yourself.
Third, cultures that welcome and support you in becoming an Initiated Living Adult Being are only partially established so far. There are at the moment a few intentional communities, projects and game worlds that thrive and function from Life. They are well hidden and invisible. Because you have been terrorized by big government and the corporate media you assume that something so 'abnormal' as an intentional community must be a dangerous cult or sect. The assumption that others and yourself make about you is that you must be crazy if you participate and feel interest in something like this.
The result of this is that so far you are very unlikely to have an Internal Structure in your Being that supports Life.
The good news that I bring in this article is that today there are possibilities for you to start adult life. There are ways for you to begin to change your mind about your survival strategies and finally Live.
One possibility I leave here is the Anger Club: an initiatory and transformational space for you to reclaim your authority, your integrity, your voice. You reconnect with this archetypal energy and from there you gain the power to start changing your mind and making new decisions. New decisions come from having more clarity and more possibilities. Starting on December 3rd I will begin hosting a cycle of Anger Club for Women, you are invited. If you want to know more information, click here.
Love and Sadness,
Unfolding Essência Gabriela