07/01/2022
What if I told you we are all walking around carrying unhealed trauma from our own births? Our own experience in the womb + our birth matters.
Being born is an inherently stressful event - the struggle against a closed cervix, being tightly compressed and squeezed through the birth canal, quickly transitioning from a water creature to an air breathing organism.. it’s an intense journey. Then you throw in that most of us were born via the system - pulled from the safety of a dark and wet womb and into a cold, sterile environment, strange sights, sounds, smells, poked and prodded by unfamiliar hands, cord clamped and cut, strange goop put in our eyes, many of us taken from our mothers and placed in an isolated nursery, etc etc.
I believe that many of our difficulties as adults - fear of abandonment, fear of being alone, unworthiness, feeling unlovable, anxiety, depression, etc can be traced back to our own births. This trauma is stored in our soma and manifests throughout our lives in myriad ways.
Ideally we are able to work through much of this as we grow and if we become pregnant, through the prenatal time (there are some great therapies out there, holotropic breathwork is an example).
I do believe however, that the transpersonal experience of birthing can provide an immense amount of healing with the right conditions, as birthing a baby is the mirror to being born.
This is one of the reasons why I am such a strong advocate for undisturbed birth - it provides us the opportunity to become completely immersed in our birth, for the ego to dissolve (via hormones and brain waves like theta and delta), for us to find the core of ourselves and for us to do the heroic and restorative work of birthing our babies, and ourselves, anew.
