THE DEATH OF THE SURVIVAL SELF; WAKE UP AND KNOW THAT YOU ARE GOD
solar eclipse in aries; a story started in spring 2023 is ending/beginning
I know my way up difficult, treacherous mountains I have climbed to seek the face of God. It is finding my way back down them and into my humanity that has proved to feel far more treacherous than any level of endurance, strength, and determination required to go UP.
To come back DOWN you need all of those things but also surrender. Coming back down happens much faster than the rising up. You have to be okay with speed, change of direction, and losing control.
Sometimes you make your way up through survival. There’s nothing but a giant mountain of painful experience before you, a landwhale of memory to be conquered. You have to want to show yourself you can move forward really, really badly. You have to want it more than anything. And you do. You will climb the mountain, maybe even be lifted up along the way by insight and enlightenment.
But what goes up must come down, even if never to return to the depths of hell you’ve already emerged from.
Coming into your humanity is how the Survival Self dies. The Survival Self believes it sees all from the top of the mountains they’ve climbed. They claim to know all potential paths of descent and their outcomes. They’re speculative, even suspicious, because they know what it’s like down there which is why they’ve worked so hard to rise up.
But there’s something rigid and lonely about the top of a mountain. There’s nowhere to really go from there. And going down, while it can seem scarier than going up because it feels like falling, is technically easier because gravity will bring you down anyway. Trusting gravity is like trusting grace— it doesn’t mean you won’t fall but that when you do, grace will come along to reignite your bravery and determination. That’s real sovereignty.
Real sovereignty is having access to your inner fire, your bravery, your relentless passion for life. Real sovereignty is not the absence of grace or the presence of judgement, but the allowance of it all. Real sovereignty is not staying at the top of the mountain or coming down the hard way just to prove that you can. Real sovereignty is always doing your best and knowing when it’s time to receive support.
No war is won without allies and when you have been at war with yourself for so long, you will need many, many allies to remember you were born winning because you were born to be love. If you wish to feel regal, it does not come from being alone at the top of all your mountains but from being willing to come down them and accept the assignment of being human with grace and vigor.
If you are in tension right now that also feels like some kind of mysterious awakening, I suspect you may be wrestling with The Death of your Survival Self. This is the part of you so deeply wrapped up by what seems like your humanity but is really your avoidance of the pain of it.
It’s easy to conflate the Sovereign Self with the Survival Self because they both require a deep sense of safety. How can you tell the difference?
The Survival Self’s sense of safety is about less of life. Less movement, less momentum, less change, less pain, less pleasure. More control, more stasis, more expectation, more resistance. Scanning, hypervigilance, reactivity, fear.
The Sovereign Self’s sense of safety is about more of life. More movement, more momentum, more change, more growth, more joy. Less control, less stasis, less expectation, less resistance. Softening, presence, response-ability, acceptance.
The Survival Self and the Sovereign Self exist on a beautiful spectrum of becoming that is our entryway out of aloneness and into the dream of our own making.
The death of the Survival Self is necessary for the Sovereign Self to be revealed not because survival is inherently the devil (on the contrary, it is intelligent design) but because attachment to the identity formed around it can be. Survival will bind you to every memory of pain and every fear of abandonment like a song played on repeat because that’s exactly what it is— the repetition of a pain point played out by a story.
The death of the Survival Self does not happen all at once and it does not feel easy. In order to allow it (because resisting it creates unnecessary suffering) you must understand this: your survival identity is not what brought you this far. The relentless, unconditionally loving, sovereign being underneath your survival is who has brought you to where you are.
Whatever version of yourself you have enthroned—whether an ideal or a false idol to the past— it may be keeping you from the truth of who you are. When that Survival Self is composted in the soil of the future you want to grow, you will remember who you are. That is how you are reborn into your innocence, your divinity, your humanity, your glory all at once.
This dark moon is like unplugging the drain stopper in the tub. The little water tornado is making clearing all the blood, dirt, sweat, and tears away but it’s making annoyingly loud noises as it works its way back to the Earth and taking longer than you think it should. But if you can observe it, it’s satisfying to watch all that old meaning dissolve.
You’re not lost. You’re in the thick of something real, something transformative. And no matter what happens, you’re coming home to yourself. That’s what matters. It’s hard and scary because you’re creating and mebraving experiences that maybe no one around or before you has yet known. You’re not foolish, you’re brave. Stop asking what you’re doing wrong and start asking: how is it that I continue to figure it out without anyone showing me how?
I know it feels like you’re dying— and you are. But only the parts of you ready to let go and let God so you can finally really live. On the other side awaits a rebirth that only you can prophesy and claim for yourself.
There’s only one thing to do: wake up and know that you are God.