Human Normal vs. Human Spirit…

Today I want to share some of my foundational material. If you’ve seen some of my online classes, then you may have heard this, and it really is the foundation for the rest of the relationship material that I teach. Today we’re going to look at “Human Normal versus Human Spirit.” So what does that mean? Human normal is all about our very normal survival instincts, which are instincts that we all have. They relate to survival, such as food, shelter, and protection. All of us have a need for those things, no matter how spiritually evolved we may believe ourselves to be!. The survival instincts around staying alive go all the way back to our days of caveman and cavewoman.

So they are our ancient survival instincts. The neural pathways in the human brain dictate a lot of our behavior because these instincts are alive and well on a subconscious level. It can be a kind of knee jerk reaction when one of our instincts is triggered, and we may not even realize it’s happening. We can find ourselves reacting to something so quickly. One of the ways you can tell when one of these human normal instincts has been triggered is you may be holding your breath and you may feel a tension in the body. It’s usually because someone is doing or saying something that you don’t like, right? So this survival instinct flares up in modern-day even though whatever’s happening is not really about our survival. It could be somebody loading the dishwasher in a way that you don’t like it could be somebody folding the towels or making the bed in a way you don’t like, or any number of things.

This could also happen at work. Somebody does something on the project in a way that you wish they wouldn’t have. And we have this tension that rises up in the body; we get tense and we might be holding our breath. That’s all very, very normal. Of course, with those things I just listed, nobody’s life is at stake. However, back in the day of caveman and cavewoman, there was a certain way or a certain order in which things needed to be done, especially around food, because if it was done improperly then people could get sick or even die. So these became our hardwired neural pathways and survival instincts. We all still have them and there’s a ton of energy behind them! If we try to suppress them or deny them, it is exhausting… just imagine, if you had a giant beach ball and you try to hold it three feet underwater. How much energy does it take to hold that beach ball underwater? It would take a tremendous amount of energy! And that’s what happens when we try to deny or suppress our human normal instincts.

Instead of that, we can harness the energy of our normal instincts and shift ourselves into human spirit. My favorite way to shift into human spirit is just to, whenever I feel that tension rise, just to take a few deep breaths. I slow myself down before I react outwardly with an action or with words that I might regret later. I’m just stopping myself, taking a few deep breaths, and reminding myself that nobody’s life is at stake here, right now in this situation. And if I need to maybe take a drink of water to slow myself down or walk out of the room and then come back, that’s ok too. All of these things can be done to help us shift into human spirit because human spirit is all about the enhancement of our life, to raise or to elevate our experience. It’s much, much different.

When we’re in human spirit, that is the domain where partnerships live and also empowerment for ourselves and for others. And human spirit gives us access to curiosity. So when we are in human spirit and someone is doing something that we don’t like, or we don’t understand we can, instead of reacting and jabbing at them somehow, we can instead come from a place of curiosity. We can ask questions, such as “Oh, that’s interesting, I never thought of doing it that way. Where did you learn that?” We can be really open, and really curious, rather than coming from a place of (sarcastic voice) “Well, that’s not the way I would do it. That’s wrong.” That would be human normal. Human spirit would be, “Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought of doing it that way.” And then, you know what? Just let it go!

Let it go because if you asked somebody to do something, it’s about the end result, really. It’s not about how they do it. Assuming that no one is in danger, then sometimes we need to let go of some of the details. People don’t need to do things exactly the way we think that they need to be done or the way that we’ve always done them. I find when I turn things over to other people in my business, they are, especially if it’s something they specialize in, so much better and so much faster at doing certain tasks than I would be! But I’ve got to be able to let go of the reins, let them do it, and then I’m happy with the end result. So that is the difference between human normal and human spirit.

Just to give you a little example, in human normal food is part of our survival instinct, right? We need to eat every day. We have a recurring need for food every day, and I could fully survive on a diet of donuts and coffee and beer and pizza. Those are some of my favorite foods and I could survive on that for a long time. However, what would that do to my body? What would that do to my health? Certainly, my energy levels would plummet in the short term, and my health would fall to pieces in the long term. Now let’s look at food from the perspective of human spirit, which is about enhancing and elevating the experience. So I might choose to be on an eating plan such as paleo or Keto, or maybe I go vegetarian. I can choose whatever healthy eating plan would work for me, that would support my health goals. That is an example of taking something like food and shifting it from human normal, to have an elevated experience of human spirit. I hope that makes sense and in my next blog, I will go over Hunting Mode and Gathering Mode!

To your happiness,
Barbara Cole Salmeron

Relationship Illumination Expert
Transforming lives and relationships…
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