Peace on Earth Begins in Birth

Several years ago, I had a wild and woolly banter with a male friend of mine who had been a drug addict, love addict, sex addict, and all-around relationship addict. We had an enlightening conversation concluding that in some ways we all have some kind of “addiction” held captive in our psyche – an addiction that is also linked to pain in some way or another and although the pain is crippling, we seem to keep searching for it – even willing to recreate it.

His experience with relationships and addictions connected so perfectly to the research and work I have been doing for many years in the pre and perinatal period of a baby’s development. I excitedly shared with my friend the work that I do in this arena of birth and what I have learned in relation to this knowing.

And it is what I want to share with all of you, my blog readers – in the most conceptually accessible way. It is that we are all born with a sense of who we are firstly from our prenatal experience and secondly from our birth experience. Everything our mothers thought, felt, and experienced during pregnancy has had an impact on our development via the neurological vibrational signals and patterning that influences our brain circuitry. Mothers and babies are a closely pulsing symbiotic field of influences that marinate and interchange sensory information on a second by second basis.

In layman’s terms, if the maternal environment has ongoing stresses, these stress fields have a marked impact on a baby’s experience in utero (scientifically verified by Joseph Chilton Pearce). This has been noted (for e.g.) as a baby with a larger reptilian brain which essentially shows an imprint of flight, fight, freeze, collapse built into the foundations of its nervous system. Contrary to this, a calm maternal environment, and hence a calmer mother, calmer baby, results in a baby born with a larger neocortex.

What exactly does this mean?

Explicitly, how we treat mothers whilst their babies are growing in utero, and then how she feels about this said treatment – in terms of to her thoughts, feelings, emotional output, and sense of the world – has a direct and potent influence on the formation of her baby’s brain and heart development that encompasses its psychological, spiritual, emotional and energetic awareness of the world around!! Yes, that’s right – a mother’s emotional state combined with the chemical and hormonal output can determine her babies in utero experiences. Are they optimal, ambivalent, fearful, connected, or disconnected?

Does the world understand how HUGE a revelation this is? This understanding always astounds me as I delve further into the rabbit hole. Why? Because it can be life-changing (on a spiritual evolution level) for all of humanity!! The way in which we treat and care for mothers has a colossal knock-on effect as it directly impresses upon our in utero experiences and results in a huge impact on the evolution or neglect of future human beings.

Just imagine the outcome of humans having the potential for love to be imprinted in utero and carried into birth as a marker for world peace! This knowledge and the implementation of it through the creation of conscious sacred birth environments could no doubt HEAL the planet! With dedicated practices, centred on deeply caring about the mother/baby dyad, we could change our species for the better – WOW!

How and why is this so?

It is important that we have the connection to our mother laid down in the most optimal neurological patterning through pregnancy, the birth process, and immediately after birth because our experience of peace, love, connection, emotional safety, and compassion throughout life is a result of this connection. In utero, the opportunity to lay the human template for a baby’s life is available moment by moment. Then both mother and baby’s first awakening Earthside in the first hour (or Holy Hour) after birth continues developing and refining this interpretation and design.

Did you know that there are actually 9 stages we need to move through once born, to trigger, switch on, and set this life-affirming imprint? The question is do we as a global community truly understand the significance of these precious building blocks? If we do, is it even respected? Or is it treated with little or no regard for the mother and baby’s lifelong health and wellbeing? If the birthing process is unnecessarily severed and/or interrupted, how does this have a detrimental effect on crucial bonding and attachment that continues well into childhood and beyond?

When nerve pathways are functionally laid down, the connection between the hemispheres of a baby’s brain will initiate vital interactions in order to switch on the many pathways available for optimal living and relational loving. In fact, I say that these multi highways switch on our “humanness” (and perhaps our humane-ness), the places where we internalize empathy.

These activations found in our physiology and biology, that I call essential primal drivers influence how the sensory interconnected perceptions of smell, touch, taste, hearing, sight, heart space get interwoven in a blanket of protection for physical and emotional safety. We implicitly learn what feels good, right, available to us in each moment and trust in nature’s nectar (the love hormone Oxytocin) to turn on the lights of the gifts of a merging human consciousness.

And conversely, if this has been less than harmonious or violently neglected or indeed switched off, we form within the intricacies of our brain circuitry a different kind of reality. The neurological experience immediately after birth can switch on survival mode – the need for self-protection and self-preservation. This state of being contributes to a feeling of implosion where our biological needs for warmth, security, and attachment are not met. A host of pathological and psychological lacks get vibrationally and energetically embedded in a distressed baby as well as a distressed mother.

We can say then that if these neurological imprints are not set as nature intended, brain neurons and synapses may go haywire or not fire at all, and in fact, they can actually break off with no connections occurring. If this persists into the first years of a baby’s life and beyond, a snowball effect occurs that leans deeper into the childhood experience of something amiss in life that is internalised as emotions of shame, anxiety, grief, sadness, and even depression.

So, going back to the opening of my blog; what does this have to do with my friend’s addictions? Well, being armed with a pre and perinatal understanding can explain some of our codependent and repetitive behaviours that may cause these social, sexual, and relational addictions. Addictions that don’t serve our highest form of self-love because of our early imprints where we may not believe we are loveable. Not feeling loveable can undermine our ability to think rationally and feel accepted.

At birth, a baby’s primal NEED is to be with its mother – the person they were connected to for 10 moons – and if no emergency is required – this biological imperative MUST be upheld to lay the ground as a contribution toward lifelong security!

As we move on from part 1, I ask, what is it that babies learn about the world when this natural psycho-biological need is severed or in fact altogether neglected? Remember I shared that babies’ brains are essentially wired for the receivership of love states yet when disconnected from their caregiver at birth, this wiring takes a different route that is more attuned to “survival mode”. Survival sets the nervous system imprint in a way that says the world is unsafe, lacks empathy, gives a sense of coldness, perhaps even abusive and violent. The message babies then energetically garner is the feeling “I am all alone on this journey Earthside. I am not safe, there is no one here to support, embrace, protect, and LOVE me.” In other words, the feeling becomes “how do I belong in this place?”.

And this is where the wild ride of ambivalence and emotional severance can manifest. It is known that in some ancient warrior tribes baby boys were denied breastfeeding for the purpose of raising fighters. Why would this be so? In order to go to battle and kill an enemy, there must be a level of detachment from shared feelings of warmth, safety, love, and connection. In our modern world we can expand upon this and surmise that if we battle against our own nature through confusion, separateness, or hopelessness in order to declare that there exists an enemy within, this then helps justify seeing an enemy out there.

So where does this leave us in 2020? As we watch mothers birthing babies in environments that lack compassion, or an understanding of this precious imprinting, we see a world that is creating troubled infants. We know globally that when the severance of the mother-baby bond is sabotaged during the birth process, oftentimes in a cruel and heartless way, it will no doubt set up lifelong feelings that reflect deep heartbreak and heartache.

Heartbreak, an emotional sense of dismissal, can manifest as increased susceptibility to physical ailments in children. These ailments in relation to unconscious birth practice seem to have escalated in our babies and children. And then this dis-ease (lack of being at ease), seen as emotional distress in our children, shows up as a sense of detachment with an earnest longing to belong.

One culprit of this is the use of oftentimes dangerous and unnecessary birthing drugs that are known to interfere with a mother’s natural hormonal flow, hence a babies birth experience at a visceral level, and will underpin these kinds of emotional sorrows we are seeing! Dr. Michel Odent, in his continued attention to primal research, often speaks about the manifestations of this at length. It’s a HUGE topic that I will cover at another time.

So, with this knowledge, and returning to my conversation with my friend, I expressed to him that relationships, where addiction manifests, could sometimes be the result of our very early birth imprints. Whether those imprints have manifested from the prenatal period, the immediate post-birth period, the postnatal period, and extended beyond, they are all worthy to consider.

I have become conscious of all these things in the 24 years I’ve spent working as an independent birth educator and recognise on an unconscious level that we tend to create the familiarity of our childhood through an attachment to a default pattern in our intimate relationships whether it feels good or not.

So let’s consider it like this. If our mother-baby bonding was less than ideal, or if unnecessary drugs were administered, or if the relationships we had with our primary caregivers as babies to childhood and beyond were dysfunctional, cold, lacking love, distant, emotionally painful, or we were neglected, not seen nor heard, abandoned and more, we unconsciously carry this language of pain, whether ambivalence or distress from the imprinted experience then (wait for it) we recreate the scenario with our intimate partner and call it Love!

And to top it off we often don’t even realize this manifestation, often known as co-dependence, that thrives on our emotional pain! Why is this?

Well as we now know, the imprint of the layers of brain circuitry embedded in our deepest subconscious and implicit memory (from the formation and placement of the brain neurons in utero and as babies) all have an innate intelligence from a neurobiological pathway that knows how and where to attach.

If this is disrupted from physical or psychological abuse in birth, which may for e.g. come from birth care providers style of care that is lacking an understanding of nature’s physiology and how love states are created, the brain synapses get diverted away from their blueprint navigation or they may even snap off and never form. This acute loss affects a baby’s brain development in both the limbic system and neocortex and robs them of their full potential as a human being.

Ahhh how simple would it be if we actually respected birth’s physiology and its psycho-spiritual roots!

And as I am always personally curious to learn more, I wonder about the science of brain plasticity. Can we regrow these missing neurons at the junction of the synapses throughout childhood and adulthood?? If so, what does it take to grow them? How do we repair the unconscious as well as bring it to consciousness for healing? Is acknowledging and understanding this complex patterning the first step to re-training our brains?

All good questions as I further my own studies and educate birth professionals (doctors, gynecologists, midwives, doulas…etc) who may not yet have a full understanding of the primal period and its acute influence on how humans develop.

I do believe that once we understand the true potency of this knowledge where in most instances, Mother Nature knows best ( for after all she is our first Mother), we then can subscribe to the qualities that birth is inherently safe, that the mother-baby bonds of deep attachment are the ultimate first quest we encounter to implicitly and viscerally know love, and that the way we treat mothers, babies, children, partners, families, communities have the potential to heal the ongoing separation of ourselves and each other from our spiritual potentiality in this ocean of Humanity.

Without wasting another second this knowledge MUST be deliberately, wisely, gently, and consciously embedded in ALL societies to uphold conscious sacred birth and conscious sacred birth practices so we can all live with our hearts intact.

My friend and I expounded on this knowledge. We talked about the value of living life wisely in both the relationship with self and others and how most times we live outside of ourselves or co-dependently in relationships. In this, I see many of us waking up each day but living as though we are not really living our maximum potential because living can be painful when there is a sense of something amiss.

Yet there is always hope for healing and activation where new ways of being can emerge. Feeling loved and supported in a non-judgemental way to live as awareness with emotional intelligence as vibrant spiritual beings is a great goal. I know, I am an idealist at times. But hey, wouldn’t you want to aspire to swim bravely in the ocean of potentiality to awaken what else could be possible for a more fulfilled life? I would. It can be a long road unfolding in a non-linear way yet it is the experiences we encounter along the path of discovery that excites me.

I pray that the whole world will wake up to the why’s of how we can birth babies into the arms of Love and the beating heart of true Love to elevate consciousness for the sake of all Humanity and create the tenements of peace on earth to begin through birth!