reconnecting to your innate passion
As humans, we are intrinsically passionate - even if that passion purely rests on our instinctual drive to stay alive.
We are born with the automatic processes that work to sustain life. We come into this world crying - a strong respiratory effort, kickstarting our lungs into action so that we can continue to breathe freely. For the first few years of life, crying is our main form of communication and we will cry to capture our mother/carer’s attention in order to satisfy our basic physiological and safety needs. Before we develop cognitive control, our bodies do all the work for us — our body protects us unconditionally and reveals our innate passion.
We feel pain so that we are able to perceive risk and therefore protect ourselves from danger. Our emotions have been designed and fine-tuned through evolution in a way that promotes our survival. Any type of event or situation we encounter sparks a specific instantaneous and unconscious reaction within our body that prepares us for action and for movement. We receive automatic impulses and signals from our nervous system that bring our awareness to our basic survival needs when they are not met; the drive to satisfy them is innate — there is an inherent force within us that wants to keep us alive.
As we develop and we gain consciousness, our basic needs remain at the centre of our existence and they are perceived as our only needs until they are satisfied. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, once we satisfy these basic needs, they no longer serve as motivators and we begin to pursue higher-order needs. The needs within this pyramid structure are arranged in order of priority to survival — the higher, the less essential. As one climbs this pyramid, the needs don’t objectively change but our perception of their essentiality increases, and the strength of pull towards satisfying the higher-order needs becomes stronger.
For example, when you are very hungry, your body is expending a large amount of energy producing automatic signals in order to motivate you to find food, and therefore it is likely that you will experience less of a pull towards needs that are higher on the pyramid.
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 1943
Whereas, if you have covered the basics; you are physically full, quenched, and safe — it is likely that you will feel more of a desire to seek connections with others and this might feel as though it is an essential need.
Why is it that we seek to climb Maslow’s pyramid and we can’t just be content with having covering the basics?
The arousal theory of motivation explains this by suggesting that this process is driven by a separate need — and that is to maintain an optimum level of physiological arousal. Operating within the human brain are pathways linked to the dopaminergic system that triggers neurochemical rewards for goal-directed behaviours. This process forms the basis of intrinsic motivation — humans have an innate association between behaviour and reward-response, which becomes reinforced throughout life — becoming what could be considered a natural addiction.
In a modern first-world, we have access to a range of technologies and ‘on-demand’ services that take a huge load off the amount of work required to cover the basics. With these primal needs under control, we are presented with higher-order needs, which are harder to pinpoint — their cues and signals are not entirely automatic. The satisfaction of these needs requires an integration of feeling and thinking — a mixture of instinct and cognitive understanding. Since we are constantly bombarded advertising that presents us with a mixture of both helpful and distracting information and advice, we are left having to decipher a huge amount of content that makes tuning into ourselves a lot more difficult of a process.
“Our mind has evolved in such a way that new wants keep appearing in it relentlessly. But do not confuse them with needs. Needs are necessity, but wants are luxury.”
The problem we face by skipping this period of development is that we tend to rely more heavily on a cognitive understanding of ourself in our body. When we disconnect from our embodied intuition, we drift away from knowing our true needs and it is easier to be mislead by our wants. When wants and needs are confused, it makes it a lot harder to understand ourselves. Wants can be viewed as products of society’s influence whereas needs are our unique truths at the core of our being. We are stuck having to navigate between what we have been made to believe we want and what we actually need.
Knowing our needs frees us from being consumed by the delusions built by advertising — by knowing and trusting ourselves, we protect the strength of our uniqueness.
Operating in the lower stages of the pyramid helps us to become accustomed to our primal self and our instincts — by experiencing the process of listening to and responding to our automatic impulses and signals, we naturally develop a strong foundation in our body.
We live in an extremely fast-paced world that can sometimes crowd our mind with an oversupply of information. To counter this and tune back into our bodies rhythms we can; aim to decrease the amount of external stimulation, utilise mindfulness techniques, and simply give yourself a chance every so often to slow down.
The good thing is that our instinctual human nature doesn’t ever leave us, it is at the core of our being. No matter how far the mind wanders, the inbuilt intelligence of the body remains. Each one of us contains a unique embodied intelligence, and by tuning into the body we can gain access to it.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
References:
Abdel-Khalek, A. (2002). Why do we fear death? The construction and validation of the Reasons for Death Fear Scale. Death Studies, 26(8), 669-680. doi: 10.1080/07481180290088365
Danesh, H.B. (2011). Human Needs Theory, Conflict, and Peace. In The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology, D.J. Christie (Ed.). doi: 10.1002/9780470672532.wbepp127
