Are you Living or are you just Surviving? We all do both but some do more surviving than living. What is the difference between the two?

As you grow and develop, starting at conception, you are at times faced with trauma and perceived potential for great harm or death. So as any creature would do, you have to find out how to survive and, for humans, it is much harder because we place meaning on life and we operate in the world based on meanings.

Once we learn how to survive, our neurological response becomes automatic. When past events seem to be happening again, your autonomic survival system steps in to operate its patterns of behaviors to survive again and again and again.

It becomes then of utmost importance to learn our patterns of survival so we can heal the trauma, perceived or real, and in the moment choose a different response.

When you are triggered, an experience that has one of these survival patterns to start, are you willing to try something else or to even wake up. The strange thing about us is that many of the automated responses, although they have similarity to past experiences, may or may not be dangerous for you. Also, once a pattern of experience begins it will continue to operate until survival is assured again.

To start living begins by learning about your patterns and choose to heal the wounds so you can make other choices available so that you can be in a state of living.