From Survival to Truth: The Uncomfortable Edge of 2025
Pattern-spotting is kind of my thing. And as we begin to close out 2025, there’s one that keeps following me around. I’ve lived it myself, I see it constantly in my work with clients, and it shows up in those supposedly random conversations that somehow land right where they’re meant to.
We are living in an epidemic of mistaking survival instincts for intuition. We call them bodily wisdom, spiritual truth, or inner guidance, without realizing they are often old strategies still running the show.
Survival patterns are not the enemy.
They were brilliant once.
They helped us navigate chaos, instability, and emotional overwhelm.
I see this again and again, how these strategies kept people going when they had no other choice.
But here’s the truth I keep coming back to:
What’s familiar often feels true… even when it’s not.
And now, what is actually true, what’s aligned, grounded, and self-led, often feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or even wrong at first. I’ve felt this in my own body, and I watch others meet it right at the edge of change.
Survival Is Fast. Truth Is Confronting.
Trusting your body isn’t about following every emotion.
And body wisdom isn’t about obeying instinct.
What I’ve learned, through my own healing and through sitting with others, is that embodiment is the slow, deliberate unblending of what is patterned from what is honest.
Survival urges are fast, protective, and familiar.
Truth, on the other hand, often asks something entirely different.
I see how truth asks people to:
Stay when their default is to flee
Breathe when their instinct is to shut down
Stay with themselves when the pattern is to reach outward - to a person, a substance, a role, or a dynamic….to outsource safety.
This is why truth can feel confronting. It disrupts what once worked.
What Truth Actually Feels Like
Truth doesn’t usually arrive as certainty or calm.
More often, it sounds like something quieter and braver:
“This is uncomfortable, but I can stay.”
“This feels wrong because it’s new.”
“This is unfamiliar, but it’s where I want to grow.”
I’ve watched people mistake this discomfort for danger, and I’ve done it myself. But over time, it becomes clear: this discomfort isn’t always a signal to retreat or even to “heal” more. It’s a sign that something is ready to be reviled, and something is ready to be released….
What most people don’t realize is that healing happens in stages. There’s a biological and physiological rhythm to it all, and this is usually the final phase before someone’s life begins to take flight in a new direction.
The Shift From Survival to Self-Led Truth
This phase of healing is often the most confronting.
It asks us to look honestly at where we’ve been and who we’ve been outsourcing our safety, regulation, and sense of self to.
There’s a moment I see people reach when continuing the same patterns starts to feel like a greater loss of self than the fear of change.
A moment when staying the same becomes more costly than stepping into the unknown.
It’s the point where the body begins to lean toward something unfamiliar, untimely, and not yet shaped by the systems or stories we learned to survive within.
Standing at the Threshold
If you’re still with me, this blog is for you if:
You’re already aware of your loops
You catch your reactions as they happen
You can name your patterns, even when they still pull at you
You’re standing at a threshold I recognize deeply, the place where the most radical change begins.
Not because everything is resolved,
but because staying with yourself has become possible.
And it’s here….more than ever right now, as a somatic practitioner, that I’ve seen truth begin to speak louder for people than what they once had to survive.
