Where do I begin? A single cell begins my
life as a unique individual. Two cells, sperm and egg, meet to ignite this
process. Knowing by mysterious bio-intelligence and millions of years of
experience to let go of what is no longer needed and combine what is. We begin
with the essentials of life.
How do I begin? Am I just a cell? The cell
that begins me emerges complete with its experience from within mother, father,
and cosmos. We might say that three sets of consciousness come together at the
moment of conception: maternal, paternal, and whoever/whatever I may have been or
experienced before. Call it karma, destiny, fate, miracle or just plain
mystery. I am here. Can I celebrate this truth? Can I even acknowledge it?
We know from research in the field of
prenatal and birth psychology that the conditions of our conception may affect
our ability to embrace our lives, and new life, as it emerges. Our first
transition is the transition into life, beginning with conception, reinforced by
birth and later events.
Who am I? We may spend the first years of
our lives trying to be like our parents and the remaining years attempting to
be different. In the midst of that, who are we? Are we ever ourselves? What did
I bring with me into this life? The question emerges again: nature vs. nurture.
Obviously, both are important.
Watching a fascinating TED talk recently by
medical doctor Siddhartha Mukerjee, I am reminded of the importance of both our
beginnings as a cell and the environment we find ourselves in. Mukerjee points
out that medicine has been influenced by the discovery of antibiotics 100 years
ago to focus on finding a medicine to cure dis-ease. Sometimes that works and
often it doesn’t. More recently he notes medicine has shifted its attention to
the immune system as an important factor in dealing with illness. A step
further takes medicine to concentrate on the cell and its environment. Returning
to our source.
Returning home to our beginnings. We are
cells. Communities of cells that have grown from the one cell which began us,
within the environment it began in.
I am touched by this talk because it
underlines the intentions of all the work I so passionately engage in:
Continuum Movement, Craniosacral Biodynamics, Prenatal and Birth Therapy,
Somatic Mindfulness…
My mentor, Emilie Conrad, founder of
Continuum Movement, spoke of “moving medicine.” A primary intention of
Continuum as I understand it is to support movement in creating a different
environment, a medicine involving a different context, for our growth and
development. We use breaths, vocal sounding, fluid movement and mindful
awareness to inquire into what might lie beyond our patterns and habits. How
can we let go of whom we think we are, how we have always functioned, our
habitual behavior, allowing something else to emerge? How can we soften the inhibitors we have
developed through our life experiences, returning to our essential fluid nature
and its inherent resilience?
Altering our cellular environment for
health. This could describe both Continuum and Craniosacral Biodynamics.
Biodynamics is a gentle hands-on therapy derived from osteopathy, designed to
facilitate slowing down, deepening under the conditioning of our lives, and
returning to our slow, essential subtle energetic pulsings of life. The Breath
of Life. Again, as we support clients settling under their reactions to the speed
and stresses of life and past traumas, the context or environment within which
their cells are suspended begins to change. Instead of growing in relation to conditions,
cells and tissues can re-orient to the original universal or “Biodynamic”
forces, which guide our early formation as little embryos in the womb,
providing an ongoing energetic map beyond and prior to the conditions of our
lives. Melting on the treatment table or through Continuum loosens the hold on
us of the forces of our history, traumatic memories, deviations from our
essential nature.
The awareness developed through Prenatal
and Birth Psychology and the holding field of prenatal and birth therapies can
also create a new, healthy context in which to dissolve and re-form. Therapy
can be a form of re-parenting. As well as developing insight as to the early origins
of our issues, we can shift our relationship to those primal conditions in which
we formed. Guided in therapy to slow down, orient to resource, and attend to
our current, more supportive environment, the overpowering effects of our past
begin to diminish. We return to the love and intention we came in with, letting
go of our attachment to what may have occluded them along the way. Our cells
can shine again as we embrace life anew.
Where do we begin? Where do we begin this
time?
