Birth after birth

Becoming whole is a process of dying and rebirthing over and over. We are these curled up creatures, muscles trembling at the effort of holding the energy configurations that we learned to keep us safe. The entire world (rich with nourishment, love, complexity, and wholeness) is calling out to us, but we fight it – to open into it, our parts tell us, is to die. In doing that, we are living within such a small part of reality.

Stepping into wholeness is a death.

There is a moment where we cross a threshold. It starts with the build up – the intensity, the fear, the tension. Our parts are screaming at us to hold on, not to let go. We fight, fight, fight, to stay within the reality we know, the reality that we are convinced will keep us safe. Then, as the energy grows and something begins to tip, there is the point of no return. When we make a choice – even a micro choice, somewhere in our subconscious, to step over the threshold (or to let ourselves be pulled by the tug of the universe) – there is a moment of absolute freefall.

Nothing is known. There is no compass, no way of orienting – the old one has fallen away, and the new one has not yet arrived. An entirely new way of being arises, one that is unfamiliar. There is no amount of rationalizing or thinking that can get you there – at a certain point, you just … let go. And fall. And allow the terror of falling. And then, as the new way of being forms like breath drawn into a baby’s lungs, there is delight. Freedom. Something reconfigures. Our parts breathe out a sigh of relief as they fall apart into wholeness and the peace they have craved. Our reality expands, and our light, that has been pushing through the cramped curves of our curled up body, glows brighter.

I have often thought I knew what the healing pathway looked like. I extrapolated out from the paradigm I lived in, tracing the outlines of what I wished I had more of – more joy, more freedom, more aliveness. But over and over, the pathway found its way to the places I most wanted to hold in, where my parts were most fervently holding on for dear life. It found its way to the shame that would burn through my body, to the terror of the primal, uncontrollable wildness, to the fear of existence itself. There, I would say, really? Must I? Yes, there.

And each time, when those places finally felt enough safety and trust to step into freefall even with their terror, my being would open into a wholeness that was beyond comprehension from wherever I was standing before. Over, and over, and over.

Every time I let go into greater wholeness, it is a birth. It is a moment of trusting myself and the universe enough to push my way through the birth canal and into the unknown.

Every time I hold someone through a threshold crossing, whether big or small, I am in awe of the courage it takes. It is their being saying: Yes. I am here. I am here for this. It is trusting life enough to let something die. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.

Coming into wholeness is filled with beauty, and love, and gentleness, and care. But it is also the path of the warrior.

I recently spoke to a friend who was a midwife for decades. There is a time for the watery, emotional love, she says, but most of what I am here to do is be a lightning rod. I am here to hold the truth while the baby comes in, here to catch them, here to be a tether between this reality and the next.

And the same is true for the births of our psyches. To step into death and come out the other side takes the courage of the warrior. It takes discernment, and truth, and trust, and the decision, over and over again, to choose wholeness. To midwife is to be a lightning rod between paradigms.

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Many months ago, I went through a birth into a new layer of wholeness. In the beautiful glow of pregnancy and the sense of something is coming, I wrote this piece. It hadn’t felt ready to be shared before, but as the universe keeps flowing and folding us through this big initiation we’re going through, it feels like sharing it now may offer something to those who are going through their own flavour of birth.

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I am birthing myself. A little one rests inside my womb, small, solid, filling my insides with a sense of substance. There is a being in here, my body says to me.

Her head is pressed up against my cervix. She is curled up tightly, arms tucked into her sides, eyes shut.

She is held by the dark, pulsing warmth of the wombspace. It is safe here, in this amniotic fluid that is all she has ever known.

I think, perhaps, she is the part of me that never came out into this world. As my body was pushed through the canal I could not fight, before I was ready, my soul screamed out – forced out of my mother’s body, she dug her fingers into my own womb and found a new home there.

Through her, I can feel my physical birth. Fluorescent lights and clinical modernity. The shift from energetic richness, flow, and emergence, into the cold rigidity of the rational mind. A part of me refused – absolutely not – and has waited, waited, until there was enough safety.

She has shared my blood for 28 years. Wrapped in her warm blanket of darkness, she has pulsed in the space of no separation. My cells and her cells intermingle. When I have been too much of a child to nurture her, she has reached out for others to breathe in nutrients.

She is stubborn, this little child. She will not come out into a world that cannot hold her, into a world that does not love her with everything it has. She knows what she deserves.

Loving, she says to me, is a dark wooden cabin surrounded by forest. It is mother and grandmother beside you in the warm, wet air. Loving is the sound of the medicine woman’s aching voice as she sings you into life. Loving is the fire the men wait around, holding vigil for your passage.

Loving is knowing that you are coming into the unknown, surrounded by people in love affairs with life and death.

Birth and death are the same, she says.

Before you take your first breath, there is death. There is a moment where you don’t know what oxygen is, don’t know if when you open your mouth you will get the life-sustaining force you need. You have no idea what happens.

The moment before you take your first breath, you do not know what it is to breathe. Nothing has prepared you for this. In a timeless second, before life, there is death. As you leave everything you have ever known, you let go into the void and fall. And you trust.

I am mother to this being, and she needs – she demands – everything I can offer her. A stable home. Loving friendships. She needs me to relax, release, let go, and trust. She needs my commitment to nurture her as she takes her first breath in this world, a commitment to be the world that can hold her. Nothing less.

It is a challenge. Are you here for the responsibility of bringing a newborn into this world? She asks me. Can you make a stand for the world I need?

My answer wavers. Yes, my darling, anything, I tell her. Then, later: Isn’t what we have enough? I am afraid I cannot keep you alive.

She is content to stay in the comfort of my womb until I show her that I will birth her into love. That she will be caught as she comes out, hear the voices of her elders, feel the warm breast of her midwife. That I will give up anything to be there for her.

And then, when I have birthed her, I may midwife others. May hold their hands through the fear and the pain, may whisper words and croon songs in their ears, may hold the precious newborns as they take their first breath. May stand with unwavering love as the village gathers to shout – a new being is born. We are here.

There is a bliss in this pregnancy. A rose blush glow over me, the joy of feeling her. We meet at the point where life touches death; she is an open door in the liminal space where the doorways begin. I hold my hands over my belly, pulsing love, and she responds back - the two of us in this freefall of possibility.