From excitement to acceptance, during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise here is what to expect:

Excitement:

As any newcomer walking into a new life adventure, you feel excited to start the Seven-Day Survival Exercise.  Most people in our line of training, are nature lovers and feed off challenging situations.  This is why excitement overflows the veins.  The idea of needing to be creative and challenging yourself is a wonderful feeling.

Irritability:

Imagine yourself being taken out of your daily comfortable lifestyle.  Being in a secure building, or having running water and a flushing toilet.  Then, that warm plate of food and cup of coffee etc. Now suddenly all those comforts are being taken away during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise. Human reaction in any unusual and uncomfortable situation is to feel irritated.  Irritability is caused by the need to bath, lack of energy and feeling hungry/thirsty and not being comfortable as in your home.  This is a natural and normal human emotion to emphasise that you are not in your comfort zone as normal.

Anger:

As part of the stages of emotion, as bad as it might sound…. You become angry during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise.  As with feeling irritated (which is the beginning stage of the anger process), this is a human reaction no one wants to feel, but is needed to overcome.  So why become angry, well this is the hyped up emotion that our brain develops when an issue or problem does not get resolved.  So when you become irritated and there is nothing to turn that emotion around or to make you feel better, it develops in anger.  Anger is not a nice but important emotion and we feel it in our daily lives in different circumstances.  During the Seven-Day Survival Exercise feeling angry is an important part of the stages to feel, manage and overcome.  There is nothing wrong with being angry, it’s how you control that emotion that makes the difference.  It is extremely daunting and difficult to be stuck somewhere, with nothing for days on end.  Our bodies go into defence mode when it’s been threatened and fights its way to get out of a certain situation.  Anger is one of the most important emotions to feel as this is your fighting emotion to get through a difficult situation.  The Seven-Day Survival Exercise will make you become angry and this is good, this is needed and it will help you in future to handle any situation where you are taken out of your comfort zone or when you are in danger.

Fear:

Fear is also a very normal emotional stage in any uncomfortable situation.  When doing the Seven-Day Survival Exercise, the feeling of fear normally falls between feeling angry and becoming depressed.  Fear is felt because of being scared to feel something you don’t want to feel, for example, the fear of heights.  So when you are scared of heights, it becomes a phobia, which normally is something you are fearful of doing.  For example someone that is scared of heights, that anxious feeling you get when dealing with heights, is the emotion of fear your body feels.  Meaning it is something you do not want to do or like to do.  The same type of emotion awakens during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise.  You become scared of how you feel and of not feeling well and what needs to be done to survive. Fear is when you become so aware of something or a situation that it scares you and fear/being scared is something the human body wants to prevent from experiencing.

Depression:

During the Seven-Day Survival Exercise, after feeling so angry, hyped up and ready to fight anything that comes your way, you become over-aware (which is fear). Then there is depression, when your brain goes into a stage of system down.   What this means is that your inability to get out of an unwanted situation forms some kind of depression where your brain tells you to give up and let go.  It is almost like a sad, selfish/self-pity “no care attitude” and just refusing to give any more of your time and energy to get through this.  As with the other stages, again this is very important to feel and overcome during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise.  Feeling depressed is really bad and there are people living with chronic illnesses, which either are or forms part of depression.  Depression is a mindset.  Not in the sense of a button you can switch on and off, but in a deeper mental sense it is a mindset. It is easier said than done.  However doing the Seven-Day Survival Exercise you basically “exercise” your brain and method of thinking, which is a very hard but wonderful skill to master.  Depression can be overcome during bad situations and circumstances.  Your mind is extremely powerful and whatever it makes you think, it can make you believe.  This part of the emotional stages is the worst, but the most enriching.

Grief:

Grieving is a process to deal and come to terms with a bad or unwanted situation as like when dealing with death etc.  The Seven-Day Survival Exercise also has an emotional stage where you experience grief or grieving.  Meaning you go through the process of dealing with the situation you are in and then overcoming the above-mentioned emotional stages.  To grief is never nice and dealing with grieving is a process on its own.  Before coming to terms with a situation or circumstance, you need to work through the grieving stages to be able to accept the situation or circumstance you are in.  Grieving is a hard part of this process, but this is the “healing” process.  The same process as when taking medicine when you are sick or dressing a wound.  You have to work through your own mindset and decide if you are going to accept what is happening or has happened and look forward.  Or are you going to be stuck in the emotional stages and allow it to become a snow-ball of feelings and hurt.

Acceptance:

This is the final stage of the emotional stages.  Reading everything above might seem like a lifetime of emotions to work through, but it really is not.  With the Seven-Day Survival Exercise this is the end goal of what you want to reach emotionally.  Everything mentioned above is the path to walk to reach acceptance.  Each individual differs, so for one person it might take longer to reach this point than the other.  The main goal is just to get to the point of acceptance during the Seven-Day Survival Exercise and this is the point of all this effort.  We all deal with emotions differently, so if one person reaches this point quicker than another, it does not mean they will never get there.  You need to allow your mind, body and soul to work through these challenges in your own time.  Emotional stages are not something you can copy from another person.  No person on earth can have the same emotions or timeframe of emotions and not only timing but the manner in which emotions follow is different with each of us.  The above list is just an example and some may experience it in a different sequence than others.  The Seven-Day Survival Exercise is to build you, not break you and it is so rewarding reaching the stage or acceptance.  At this stage you are just calm and doing your thing to get through it, without having a battle with yourself in your head.

In short, the moral of this entire exercise is that you cannot change the way situations, circumstances or life takes you.  What happened in the past is the past and we cannot foresee the future.  So what is the point?  The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can fix it.  Certain things cannot be changed or fixed, but you can control how it affects your life going forward.

So if you look at the bigger picture.  These emotions are what you would more or less feel in your daily lives or in threatening situations.  The Seven-Day Survival Exercise will not take those situations and circumstances away in your life.  But it will definitely benefit you in which manner you deal with those situations, which can also save your life.