A life urge is an alignment towards health, appreciation, love, intimacy, creativity, honesty and passion. A death urge is a withdrawal into the wound pool, where younger personality parts feel rejected by others, and most importantly unloved by ourselves. In a death urge, we can struggle with the will to live, descending into sadness, illness, depression and hopelessness.
On a micro level, it could be said that you alternate between life and death urges each day that you are alive. Even one negative inclination could be thought of as a tiny death urge. Awareness is the key. When you look for the deeper roots of your unconscious urge towards decline, you can change direction from self-negation to self-love.
Most of us have at least one aspect of ourselves that has not felt deeply seen, loved or accepted by other people. When we perpetuate this outer rejection on an inner level, an unconscious part of ourselves might be in so much pain, it wants to die. And while a death urge does not necessarily mean we will actually die, we can become ill, depressed, or suffer in ways that make daily living difficult.
And, a death urge is not always predictable. This is because the soul has ways of healing that goes far beyond our conscious decision-making process. In my art studio work with adults at the end of life, for example, I was astounded to observe that frail elderly people did not always steadily decline.
I witnessed people with very compromised health conditions go right to the edge of a severe illness, and then mysteriously come back more vibrant than before. After meeting the edge of a death urge, some previously ill people started painting in the studio again.
Notably, they seemed less emotionally burdened. And, while I never knew what their internal process was, my impression is that right up until death, we are meeting and shedding layers of accumulated human pain.
The Part of Ourselves That Wants to Die Longs to Be Loved
The younger parts of yourself that do not feel loved may not want to live here on this earth. Yet, your purpose in life is to be vibrantly yourself. So, if your entire inner truth is not accepted by your familial or social groups, self-love must be cultivated. Loving yourself, especially when you feel unaccepted by other people takes great courage and dedication.
Your spouse/partner, family, culture or religion might reject, deny, ignore or criticize who you need to be or what you need to express. But you can stand in your truth, and choose to be here anyway.
We are each called to love ourselves and express ourselves honestly, so the world can become whole. Experiencing the inevitable gaps in love and connection as children, we all have the job of learning how to love ourselves unconditionally when we are adults.
Asking for Spiritual Help
As adults, no matter how much we long for perfect love from other struggling humans, we will not even be able to receive it unless we learn how to love ourselves first. And, when we do not know how to unconditionally love ourselves, we have to use our intuition to find a way.
While cultivating a loving inner parent is essential, I think a connection to a spiritual support system greatly accelerates our ability to re-bond to inner younger selves. In my personal experience, I have had to ask for spiritual help to love all of myself. I believe loving all of ourselves involves inviting the "higher help" that we disconnected from during past hurts or traumas.
When we ask for spiritual help to self-love, we can reach such profound states of inner embrace, we might wonder why we ever ignored and rejected parts of ourselves in the first place.
