I recurrently see a pattern between how we are welcomed into life through the birth canal and how we navigate it from there on; the internal health of our mother, the hands that received us (whether with love or not) and the environment we were birthed in have tremendous impact on our health and wellbeing.
Our birth is also the earliest embodied encounter to love by way of immediate contact, sensory experience, and neuroception. For example, the intonation of a mother’s voice is a new-born baby’s initial cue of safety.
As we begin to grow, love is communicated through our breathing, eye contact, facial nerves, and body language. If we’re not in defence mode, we can begin to express it verbally and more vulnerably.
Whatever the language of love, our essence comprehends it in the depth of our being. Analysis, interpretation and insight come much later long after the understanding is engraved in our heart. Love can be sweet or bitter, open and fluid or rejecting and stiffened, courageous or fearful, direct and clear or distorted and inconsistent. It is a stream of kindness and grace; abundant, dependable, and coherent even when we are not. Or it can be fitful, sometimes volatile, rapids to manoeuvre in our too small vessel.
What is vital to remember is that the way in which we were introduced to and received love could not have changed. We could not have softened or strengthened it or made its course more steady. However, we have power of choice in the present moment in how we wish to give and receive it.
The primary birth gifted to us by our parents requires little consciousness – it is biology. The work as adults is in birthing yourself, which necessitates a level of awareness. It is in remembering your ethereal creation and infusing your cells with the breath of love from Source which conceived you as Soul to house your body in the first place.
You have to start to reinforce the belief that it is possible for you to give birth to yourself in this lifetime.
While the haunting of our primary encounters with our caretakers, the gist language of love we’ve inherited, will always be part of our physiography, it is not a permanent life sentence. We can turn our head to face inward and forward to allow our gaze to widen and embrace a fuller context that holds ourselves, our parents and each other. The colossal ancestral field from which we stem.
Perhaps now we choose to feel the easy warmth of their love; who they truly are beyond the personality they developed to survive their personal traumas.
Perhaps we can move beyond the story and judgements into a more open, intrinsic truth of our being that offers back our power and ability to embrace life rather than resent it. Because resentment towards life is equal to the resentment we carry towards our mother and our initiatory experience.
And perhaps then we could disarm ourselves into receiving their love at its elementary vibration, so we can rest in their support of our tenacity as the fruition of theirs.
I wish to end this piece with a healing soul sentence:
“Mother, I take you in exactly as you are. Mother, you are the right one for me. Thank you for the gift of life that came through you. I have received a lot from you and it is enough for me. It is my turn now to take care of the rest.”
We often use such ‘soul sentences’ during Family Constellation sessions and/or after solo meditations when doing the work of taking our parents in our hearts. If you’re interested in how to use and create your own soul sentences do email me back to let me know and I’d gladly write a blog post soon!
