Beyond Survival: Harness Chaos to Unlock Your Most Elevated Potential

By Helen Holt

How do we break the repetitive cycle of conditioned behaviour patterns that often lead to self-sabotage, a spiral of stress and a life of escapism? In Beyond Survival, solicitor, yoga teacher and leader of women’s retreats, Helen Holt, shows that by harnessing the chaos of our routine-based daily lives, we can short-circuit our nervous sys

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avondale Retreat
• Release date: Dec 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781916380127

Book preview

title

First published in 2020 by Avondale Press

Copyright © Helen Holt 2020

The right of Helen Holt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-9163801-0-3

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-9163801-1-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-916-38012-7

To my mother and all the women dedicating their hearts and minds to fearlessly heal the Earth.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Awakening to Our True Selves

Braced for Change

Shame and Blame Game

Breathwork and Meditation Practice One

Chapter Two

Sabotage of the Self

Rewiring Through Habit

Intercept the Loop

Transformation – Chaos to Order

We Are Our Own Inhibitors

Trigger Response and Disruption

Breathwork and Meditation Practice Two

Chapter Three

Dancing with Death

Breathwork and Meditation Practice Three

Chapter Four

Our Capacity for Expansion

Breathwork and Meditation Practice Four

Chapter Five

Human Energy and Vitality

The Brain

Breathwork and Meditation Practice Five

Chapter Six

Listening

The Limbic System

Breathwork And Meditation Practice Six

Chapter Seven

Shame and Negative Self-Talk

Breathwork and Meditation Practice Seven

Chapter Eight

Stories and Trees

Invitation to Pause, Reflect and Meditate

Bringing the Body Back to Homeostasis

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Introduction

This book marks our attempt to guide you on an autonomous journey to the discovery of who you already are, while strengthening the magnetism required to becoming the full potential of who you were born to be, by connecting the dots on how the various parts of your life have been mapped and making space for the parts that have become dissociated or discarded. This work will help to bring you back to one wholesome, creative and happy human, in tune with the universe. Melding our love of and fascination with the laws of nature, science, anatomy, energy medicine, money, technology, law, poetry, philosophy and what we believe to be a crosscultural global and energetic psychological revolution currently under way, this book has come into being through years of conversation, research and re-learning what many of us have been taught about life. We invite you to take this book as a dialogic process, as an encounter with the deeper part of your essence, a hands on, voluntary self-engagement in conscious inquiry. We bring with us our hope for a common humanity of connection and our desire to enter honest and meaningful connection and conversation with others that we all fundamentally crave. When we share our stories, we share a whole part of humanity that if we trust our instincts, was more than likely waiting to be heard. Letting go of knowing the outcome, is one of those great mysteries that gives answers, we never even knew we had asked for. There is no intention to project an ideology on to the reader. Our mission is to begin a conversation that will play a small part in unfurling the spiral of collective confusion and help to free ourselves, so that our inherent wisdom can reveal itself within us all. In response, we hope that the reader can use this text to demonstrate a true willingness to contribute and actualise in the greatest way possible – through self-expression. When we underestimate the power of expression, we stifle the unlimited potential of unexplored territory in our relations with other people, in business, in self-discovery. An openness to take risks to open difficult questions invites our brains and society to evolve. Within this exploration, we will touch on themes and myths dissected by the minds of Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, and our modern-day contemporaries Joe Dispenza, Brené Browne, Bessel Van der Kolk, to name a few. Learning new and expansive material as experienced and interpreted by someone else, can change the way we view the world and therefore how we act in accordance with what we believe. As our brains become hard-wired over time, through repetition of behaviours, we have the potential to re-wire our neuro connections. Often the incessant desire for rapid social expansion can be stymied by the political and financial climate (whether intentional or consequential), which appears to hinder us attaining or even valuing practical and spiritual wisdom. Acknowledging the deep human need for guidance, we must become more discerning and learn to take ultimate responsibility for decisions and by consequence, our lives. This involves asking questions of ourselves. And just as important, ensuring we listen to the answers.

Chapter One

Awakening to Our True Selves

He who would be a man must therefore be a nonconformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The complexity and precision of our human form is both beautiful and fragile, but in a world obsessed with technology, it can be difficult to see the wood from the trees. The human body is the most sophisticated technology that has ever existed. There are hugely valuable tools already within us that can assist in manifesting health, spirituality, connection and a fulfilled life. A fierce and visceral knowledge lies within our primal being, our inner knowing self, a soft bellied body that is always in a position to receive, not just gifts, but the vibrant, radiant, often frighteningly powerful kind of human we came here to express in physical form.

When we do not feel energetically alive, or we feel the need to force our bodies and minds to be motivated, it is time to become intimate with the energy of our electromagnetic field and the vital energy lodged deep within our bodies. Harnessing that deep receptivity, we begin to liberate the unique vibration flowing through us, opening pockets of inspiration and avenues of creative potential, allowing the multitude of hidden gifts we already possess and opportunities that we are due, to come into our lives.

When we seek to understand what’s holding us back, we regularly encounter fear. Fear of betrayal, fear of failure, fear of being and remaining unloved and unlovable, fear of being dominated or overwhelmed by others, fear of the unknown or the strange, fear of our desires and passions, fear of the dark, fear of not living up to our parent’s expectations of us, fear of losing control.

When we fear the consequences of taking actions that we intrinsically know will be of benefit to us, we must take the time to question why. In confronting our fears, we need to determine how we return to our original state of truth and we hold that as our ultimate objective. But to break that down we need to recognise and notice how we hold our emotional bodies in the presence of others and how much freedom we give ourselves to fully express ourselves in each moment. This requires that we increase our self-awareness.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that human belief systems and memories are self-constructed and self-filtered to internally and externally justify our identity and the way we live our lives. The journey of increasing incrementally our self-awareness can be exciting, as it unveils how much possibility there is for exponential growth in each conscious moment. The various forms that this journey can take, through guidance, healing modalities and lessons are what make up most of this book.

It is our individual responsibility to step within ourselves and give our bodies the neurological invitation to show up and be ready to receive in the quantum field.

Like Wi-Fi or radio signals, we are constantly surrounded by possibilities, ideas, concepts, opportunities within our direct sphere of energy. The question is whether we have the awareness and energetic imagination required to pick up their frequency.

Seeing how your life could be, and then living it in accordance with that bigger expansion is a small but important step in the right direction. It is only when we engage our organisational mind and clarify our destination that we can begin engineering the path to that destination. To get through our ordinary day, we barely need to use the unique power of our brain. We primarily side-step daily through rehearsed patterns of eating, sleeping, drinking, bathing and occasional social interaction, in patterns that are programmed and recorded by the body and mind in coherence since birth.

Our two-million-year-old brain, with its billions of neurotransmitters and inter-connective tissues¹ transmutes and processes knowledge throughout our bodies in every moment. Collectively, to step forward in truth, we must step into our brain’s most innate and intimate connection and coax our true self-expression outwards. Each of us offers a unique existence, perspective and truth that no one else has access to. It is up to us, as individuals, to undertake the healing practices and to create enough space in our inner world in order to be able to connect the dots or drop the breadcrumbs to the path outwards. We cannot just move forward, mindlessly and expect the universe to provide. Very often, we can remain stuck in our emotions and reactions rather than honouring the experience of processing each emotion as they flow through us.

I once did a seminar on retrieving our vital wellbeing with a group of twenty women, at Avondale, many of whom I had worked alongside before in various healing modalities. As we spoke about our individual responsibility to act and take care of ourselves, I used the anecdote of the oxygen mask and how it is essential that we place it on ourselves first in an emergency before tending to those around us. Only then, after we are fully prepared and equipped both physically and emotionally for the challenge of taking care of ourselves, do we turn to assisting others. When Emer, wearing a black t-shirt that said Breathe in white writing on it, stood up in front of the group and spoke, she stopped me in my flow and steered me completely off track. Alright I get you she said, self-care first, we must love ourselves first, I agree. ‘Goodbye’ to this excruciating cycle of over-doing, overcaring, over-attending and forget about all the evergrowing needs of others, that ultimately seem to take you for granted. But what if you are so physically spent, so emotionally overwhelmed and downtrodden in forever caring for everyone else that you simply care less if the engine cuts out and the plane goes crashing down around you?

I heard her loud and clear, as did every other woman in the room, most women with tears in their eyes. When she heard herself say it aloud, she realised that it was almost a rhetorical question backing up the point. We are naturally programmed to care for our loved ones, for everyone around us.

We do very often put others first. We often love other people more than ourselves, especially when they are visibly struggling more than us in that moment. When our children, our parents, our pets are sick, we tend to sacrifice our own needs over and over.

We are a species seeking to survive. We believe if we keep others alive, we somehow have more of a chance of survival ourselves. We have all been there, in the line of fire. We have all put ourselves at the very bottom of the pile. We have all tried to fix those around us, looked on them with hope, love and a sense that if we just lift them up, we will all be okay. But the reality is we end up at rock bottom, just like Emer described, as we frantically run around trying to save everyone else.

We literally put our own sanity and health on the line. Our rescue mission for those around us forgets our need to sustain ourselves, puts us out in the cold and when the time really comes for us to step up, we have nothing left to give. We simply cannot allow ourselves to get to that point. We cannot love everyone else first. We must give each other permission to never let that happen, to not let our own well run dry. Because exactly like Emer described, we will be unable to give, unable to move, unable to breathe. We will ditch the oxygen mask. We will tire. We will grow in resentment. We will suffer unnecessarily in silence.

Every time we make a