'Mind the Gaps' by assessing survival needs and Create a Thriving Culture

✦ Journey Inwards: The Path to Expansion and Healing

Through living and crying we dodge hurricans of despair, This land is born of you, children of the night, writing by Amanda McGregor - (survival)

There are many paths into the expansive energy of enlightenment. Our beginning meditations might focus on discomfort within our organs, or an understanding of the layers of emotion, wandering through trains of thoughts, to find nothingness, or the quest for the self in non identity, or the quiet soreness of unresolved tensions or sensations in the body. The moment we turn inward, we sense something extraordinary; reality itself becomes fluid and an expansive universal energy opens. We are plugged into a greater 'Source'.

In Buddhism, we ask: Where is the “I” within?  In exploring this, we encounter an infinite space of non-identity, a space beyond ego. We touch the quantum landscapes of multi-dimensionality, the overlays of soul programming and the narratives that shape our life lessons.

Yet even as we bathe in light and bring peace to pain, the space in which childhood impact trauma, the energy space from the wounds often remain; creating a rupture to the energetic system. These complex perimeters surface in behaviour, relationships, in work and in life itself.

Sometimes, if we reflect on our waking life, we notice the subtle echoes in our choices, in the small compromises we make to survive. Unhealed, the impact wounds of our ruptures, from childhood, manifest as mirrors in our relationships; stress, illness, or over time they emerge as behaviour patterns. They can cause interference in our relationships, overwhelm, unavailability, passing off, they may influence pathways that lead 'no where', as dysfunction overwhelms primary needs and robs a person of being able to form constructive pathways or relationships.

Imagine if government, schools and mental health systems integrated work on 'closing the gaps' earlier. Imagine if cultural structures supported basic care in 'needs' as a fundamental principle? We would have a healthier, more resilient society.

The changing flow of our emotions, guiding us back to 'Source', offers a space of expansion. Days and weeks were once held in quiet bliss, where inner emotional concerns held in the organs of the body, are gently unravelled into light and the layers of self soften into light and expansion, touching with Source from all directions of the body and organs to realise the abstract nature of existence. Yet even in this expansive inner world, practical support is essential: basic survival needs must be met. History’s monasteries held persons in these basic concerns. Only when daily needs were secure and stable in shelter, water, food, personal care, individuals could nurture spiritual intelligence fully, writing scriptures and illuminating manuscripts from this channelled place of intelligence and light.

Reclaiming Voice: Healing Unmet Survival Needs

Mental health is beginning to acknowledge what the body has always known; trauma and psychological distress are not abstract, they are echoes of unmet survival needs.

For years, I have worked with people to bring awareness to these impact wounds. They are not always born of direct trauma, but of quiet and acute neglect: emotional withholding or avoidance, absence in emotional or physical intimacy, subtle directives that tell a child or adult that their needs matter less than another's, or that their pain does not need validating.

A governing factor overrides real concerns. Working around the narratives and stories of a person's childhood helps us to develop a coaching pathway in which we can work on developing more security, safety, higher quality experiences and bring more value to their lives - more power and control. Ultimately, if those primary needs are met, they can change the dynamics of any situation, as the responsibility of caring for these unmet needs, leads to power and resources. With power, leadership and change, we transform the experience of the working culture, creating a thriving life and lifestyle.

I have turned the pyramid of hierarchy of needs in to a coaching model that is highly effective and can run through organisations, schools and companies.

Maslow gave us a framework in his hierarchy of needs: Looking at healthy food, water, safe shelter, love, belonging, emotional intimacy and self-actualisation. Even if denied, exploited or conditioned, these needs give rise to survival strategies, coping strategies that form narratives that we can develop healthier communication and behaviour patterns to enable thriving, well being and leadership.

However we are held back through the compulsion to please, the fear of being replaced, the exhaustion that hides behind “I am fine.”

These are the hallmarks of co-dependence. They are often replayed in workplaces, relationships, families and social systems. When a person or company’s needs are placed above the person, persons unconsciously adopt survival strategies from childhood: over-giving, silencing themselves, sacrificing authenticity or autonomy, staying in the situation for reasons of survival.

Loyalty becomes endurance, care becomes invisible labour, resilience is mistaken for infinite capacity.

Psychiatrists like Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk remind us that patterns of neglect manifest physically, emotionally and relationally. Donald Winnicott showed how secure environments allow growth, while John Bowlby highlighted the role of attachment in resilience. These principles extend beyond childhood, they echo in communities, boardrooms, hospitals, companies and classrooms alike.

Sometimes, if we allow ourselves a moment of reflection, we can see how deeply these patterns have shaped our lives, quietly steering decisions, we are fully responsible, yet our experience is fully and innocently corrupted, society dumps blame; these traumas may innocently lead a person to wake up lonely, homeless, deceived, in debt, isolated and wonder what it is, that drove that path.

The Workplace as a Mirror

Neglect at work mirrors emotional neglect from childhood. Systems that prioritise working goals over the healthy stability of persons, encouraging the work force to cultivate a co-dependence. Employees adapt: over-performing, self-sacrificing, forming highly competitive cultures, staying silent, reaching burnout. Their personal needs; emotional safety, rest, recognition are ignored.

This inequality is insidious. The company or dominant person may thrive, but the individual quietly erodes; burns out; stress and disconnection are inevitable, leading to isolation and a loss of voice.

Organisations that fail to recognise this dynamic harm both people and long-term productivity, communications, creativity and loyalty. A healthy workplace nurtures both performance and personhood. It provides stability, security, reciprocity and recognition. It encourages autonomy while offering support and enabling a unique path of development in which those that have nurtured skills and leadership form and integral part of the team. Thriving companies, emerge from environments that treat human needs as essential, not optional and look after the people on a level of long term care, looking at housing, pensions and healthcare. Enabling long term care, value in experience; in early career, in creating and nurturing family, in securing a home, in midlife and financing the exiting and end of career.

✦ Reclaiming Personal Time

Healing unmet survival needs is not only about emotional awareness; it is about practical space to live fully. Employees need freedom to care for themselves as well as the organisation or company.

Many say that the only time they can take to exercise and run, truly move and breathe is at 5 a.m., before the workday and childcare demands begin. It is not unusual to have to 'steal' sleep time for reflection, self care and also work in evenings, to make up for lost income from exploitation and the miss use of time.

But also a signal of a system that ignores the human need for daylight hours to live in health, presence and vitality.

A healthy workplace recognises that life cannot be 'cornered off', or 'edited out' at the expense of wellbeing. Policies and expectations must allow employees to be respected for their experience, eat and rest properly, move their bodies during the day, attend to mental health, reflection, develop growth systems through communication with colleagues, develop processes through their experiential learning in which they remain in leadership and assert their authority and manage their work programmes, family and personal life without undermining, guilt or compromise.

This is a healthy systems that go beyond survival. Co-dependence thrives when organisations expect employees to bend themselves into availability at all hours, without accounting for time, energy or impact, or turning those valuable hours into constructive paths of positive relationship. Ignoring natural rhythms and stages of life, exploiting the persons personal needs by pushing them beyond healthy values or working goals.

Developing healthy working culture enables space for health, reflection, and creativity; it is both ethical and practical. Well-cared-for employees are more engaged, higher performers, resilient, inspired and capable of sustaining long-term productivity.

Reconnecting to Life

Healing unmet survival needs also requires practices that restore autonomy, vitality, and voice -

Creativity enables self expression through painting, writing, music, or design, nurturing autonomy, individuality and imagination.

Movement through dance, yoga, walking, running, stretching, reconnects the body to energy and presence enabling dopamine levels to create a healthy mind and body.

Reflection in journaling, meditation, mindful contemplation cultivates awareness and choice.

Nature, through time outdoors, in forests, gardens, or by water restores calm and perspective.

Nutrition, fresh, nourishing food, supports body and mind, and conveys the implicit message that self-care matters.

Fluidity in understanding a person owns their time and energy, their developed value and cannot be reduced through policies that seek to deconstruct through taking experience but not valuing experience; value is seen through positive invaluable impact instead.

These are essentials. They counter co-dependence and rebuild a sustainable, thriving life. Even a quiet pause outside, a stretch of the body in sunlight, or a few lines written in a notebook can remind us that life is ours to live fully, our time, our energy, our choices, living expansively, not just to survive through an entangled web of someone else's goals and priorities that are often dangerous to home, health and well being.

stone walling, survivor, sculpture, artist unknown to me

Rebuilding Society

Our communities mirror these same dynamics through zero-hour contracts, unaffordable housing, patriarchal systems; they perpetuate poverty, scarcity and dependence. Skilled workers that live in debt due to not making enough through their full time job for housing - live under bridges, in cars, or in temporary accommodation. Women at midlife, after decades of caregiving, juggling work in a job and in child care, are often quietly discarded when they reach the midlife menopause.

Peace and sanctuary grow from stability, equality and respect; from systems that recognise survival needs as a foundation and care about their workers thriving, living a life, worth getting up and out of bed for. Healing begins with safe homes, sustainable work cultures, understanding each person's needs are important whether the customer, the worker, the leader and by enabling emotional intelligence to be taught in schools, organisations and communities.

When individuals reclaim their voice, autonomy and care for themselves, they do more than survive, they create new cultures, operate with vision, inspiration, innovation, bring awareness in development and change. They develop systems into healthy eco systems that put all systems of intelligence(emotional, spiritual, intellectual), on the map as the neuro system that creates a heart beat, that works with universal consciousness, illuminating attributes and demanding more from living, the natural growth of a system of beauty that fires on powerful levels of concern, bringing intelligence into the heart of working practice so that high performance can bring astonishing results. Persons bring innovation, empathy, and resilience back into work, family and society.

To close the gap between survival and thriving, we must stop designing systems that feed on vulnerability, avoidance or neglect through exploiting people. We must restore care as both the root and the fruit of a healthy culture, one that nurtures freedom, creativity, health, economic realisation, communication and a sustainable life for all.

Amanda McGregor talks about the importance of children having their survival needs met and the reference of power and control being largely about responsibility in needs and dynamics in families.