Scared and hopeful

Me:

What if I'm no longer tough? Or if I become softer? Or become freer?

My brain (I'm not joking):

But we are going to die!

That was really the conversation I had with myself this morning. It both scared me and gave me hope.

Scared me because I know where it comes from, at least part of it. But, the knowledge of its origin and that it doesn't make sense anymore, is not enough for it not try to control my actions.

It gave me hope because I got to be SO much kinder to myself from all the pressure I put on myself to keep on going in survival mode.

NO, I'm not in that mode all the time, but I can still feel it creeping in, especially when I feel already very tired.

I have recently read ("Scarcity, by Sendhi Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir) that when our brain is too occupied with scarcity (may it be real or imaginary, my perspective), we have way less room to make good decisions. I guess that could mean that the brain goes to automatic response.

Automatic responses come from the part of the brain that was trained when we were very young.

For me, that means an amazing fear of death (my body almost died when I was still in my mom's belly, a place that was supposed to be safe. But in my case, my body registered it as danger, as love being very close to loss and death.

So, according to my self-interpretation, being in a state where there is scarcity, which in my case is often about not feeling I have enough time, I tend to choose from an automatic place. That place is a fear of death, which also results in working harder than before, and getting closer to the death of my body.

When I am smart enough to immediately be kind to myself, I say: "Love, breath. These are the thoughts that have been there for so long that they imagine they run you. And you think they are there to protect you. Despite ALL the 'good intentions', you don't need them anymore. You are safe."

Then I apply what a close friend taught me, not to shut up those voices in my head, but to make them lighter and change their meaning. I imagine a ferret jumping up and down, saying, "But we are going to die! We are going to die!"

I don't even believe in death. That ferret would be very disappointed if this body were to die from not being tough enough with my body, and we would still be there, trying to reach an illusion of perfection. Instead, we would be failing again and again.

So, we would both sit on a sidewalk of some place in another reality, laughing, saying," but we didn't die! We didn't die!"