why am i still in the womb when my daughter is not?
why am i still in the womb when my daughter is not?
notes from the belly of the beast
Thank you for reading (en)WOMBED, a love letter of sorts exploring the ways we can cultivate artful participation and attentive witness to Life by embracing the full spectrum of our humanity and listening to the inner voice Thomas Merton called the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine. Feel free to share it with whomever you think would benefit from, enjoy, or feel deliciously challenged by these ideas.
a little bit on gestation energetics
Friends, in just a few days my second daughter will turn nine months old. A healer and elder, Tami Kent, tells me this is the end of a very long marathon. The culmination. “You must be full…” she says during our energy healing session to mark this portal. “Oh yes,” she muses as she tunes into my field “Very. And still so open.”
When a woman becomes pregnant and subsequently gives birth, and this is not commonly known in the West, she become permeable to an exponential degree. As her body turns into an incubators for another human, her energy field widens, becomes resplendent and porous, because the woman is accommodating the formation of another being. She is splitting, evolving, creating, and eventually will differentiate from the child in the womb, but it all starts as one.
Then, there might be the visitations of the child’s spirit beforehand, that tender insistence on becoming an available vessel for this new life, the communion, the energetic and spiritual tug, so the field keeps expanding. The woman is not only her-self. She has become many selves and contains the self/essence of a new being.
All this is a mystery, because even as we can observe something of the dusk-into-night climate of the womb, the golden filaments of being lacing together transcends what biology sometimes flattens with its explanations.
The womb (sacral center) and belly (solar plexus center) become the intertidal zone between the openness of the crown and the root, like two sides of an hourglass with no barrier, so the energetic currents can flow in both directions during birth. A tidal wave passes through each, as flesh and spirit join each other in the passage from inside to outside.
what we’ve lost and need to get back
During postpartum, these two directions (the halves of the hourglass) turn toward each other forming something like a seed pod, closing and stabilizing the woman’s field, her physiology, and her nervous system.
What helps this reversal and stabilization is a variety of things, perhaps chief among them, the tribe – a community of humans, especially women, of all ages, providing the backbone support for the delicate and vulnerable mother as she continues to give energy to her child. This support would ideally be in the form of long-term presence, nourishment, loving touch, storytelling, song, ritual, laughter, prayer, witnessing and listening to ongoing iterations of the birth story, intuitive forms of care, and later, intentionally bringing the new child into the community as a beloved member.
You might already see (or have experienced) the rub. These kinds of relationships are rare. Even in loving and connected families physical distance, various responsibilities, etc undermine the potentiality for such a secure and nurturing transitional season.
My experience of beautiful meals, visits, words of encouragement, packages with thoughtful items, and other forms of care i received leaves me feeling privileged and in awe of all those who made the effort. And, in the interest of honesty, i also want to acknowledge that the long-term surrounding experience of a tribe was not available to me. After the initial rush to meet the baby and drop off food in the first couple of weeks or so, we were mostly alone.
A lot of wonderful humans, including my most precious soul friends who are scattered across the country, kept in touch by texts and emails, so it was through no one’s fault that i felt bereft and longing most days. Attaching to every thread of female connection, keenly aware that i yearned for was written into my marrow by repeated ancestral experience, but not exactly realistic in our cultural moment. Knowing this didn’t lessen the unabashed call within.
the journey is a spiral, not a recurrence
So, nine months in, i find myself in an energy session where i need help fully closing the portals. As Tami leads me in a practice of anchoring deeply into the Divine Mother, into the beauty and sacredness of the earth, and into the medicine that is within me waiting to be unlocked, i weep freely and accept that while my daughter might be, i am not out of the womb. In this case, the womb of the Divine. I am a layer deeper into a process which i have completed several times. It’s another spiral, another iteration, another undoing.
To use the archetypal language i am so passionate about, i am yet again in the center of a spiral called The Heroine’s Journey. This is the typology of being and becoming, the discovery of essence, the reality of being born again.
My first instinct is to deny i am back here – haven’t i been through this cycle already? Haven’t i just come out of a difficult iteration just two years ago? Did i not learn already? Was i not undone? Remade?
But it doesn’t work like this – these seasons of profound destabilization where our identities, capabilities, meaning making mechanism, perhaps even the structures that hold us start to fall apart are not a one-and-done. They move in layers, deeper and deeper to make us free. To make us true and real and fully alive and ourselves. Damn it! Much like the myth of phoenix, we flame, turn to ash, rise again and again and again, each time brighter and more alive and less afraid. At least, i hope so.
Later in the week, this passage finds me and i sit on my front porch in the dusk and cry. Reality meets me and i’m comforted by its bitter truth.
If you wish to experience what it is to be born anew,
You must leave the crowd and return to the source where you began;
there beyond all thought and imagination and intention,
there in that darkness, you will prepare yourself to be born,
shining forth with a stirring that comes solely from within,
not from you but from God alone.
This birth begins in the darkness of unknowing
when you have relinquished all that you understand;
only when you have abandoned your knowing
and willing can God shine forth within you.
This is the noble birth.
- Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness & Light, "The Darkness of Unknowing,"
Yes, it’s a little on the nose given that not too long ago i wrote a poem intimating something of being born anew. Clearly, i tried to forget that was happening as soon i came awake to it.
Perhaps because in the past i would have read a passage like this as annihilation – after all, it sounds like all our humanity is erased. What i actually know now through the bittersweet of experience is that nothing deep and true is lost.
Yes, the false personality melts in the heat of love -- aspects that were never me to begin with. As they transmute, they become nourishment for true being, so much so (and i occasionally glimpse this in my trippier three-am breastfeeding stints) that somewhere below the ground of all being (i know, i know, hang with me! language becomes tenuous here) the divine and human have so seamlessly intertwined, i no longer know a self apart from this Consciousness, this Presence that is pure fire, pure life, pure love. They exist in each other much like the concentric circles ad infinitum of mother and child.
That sense moves in and out of my field of perception, but even tasting it sporadically leaves me ravished by wild joy. I need to also note here that is not some special spiritual state that puts me in a different tier than you. This is for us all, the hidden gift in our Life actualizing itself.
I rest in this sobering and orienting realization that I am still in the womb, getting ready to be born again. I let my yes become sweet on my tongue.
I wish we normalized experiences where life as we know it falls apart. Where entering the chrysalis as one version of being and emerging another had a place in our cultural understanding, acknowledged as a profound rite of passage. I don’t know about you, but i didn’t grow up understanding this. When things fell apart, i often viewed what was happening as punishment, putting the onus on mistakes i made, things i didn’t know. My response to the cauldron of becoming was to keep things together as long as i could, work harder, hide the cracks, and vow to be better.
It wasn’t until i began to release the notion of a punishing god and an unfriendly universe marred by corruption that i began to see the seed of light at the center of all things.
It wasn’t until the master narrative of a masculine god and all the (toxically) masculine structures around me fell apart too, and the Feminine entered my life right as i thought i was dying and all my attempts at reviving myself stopped working. She came to me as Sophia, the feminine face of Christ, Mother and Creatrix, and gave me back (as Maya Angelou writes so heartbreakingly beautiful) my forgotten heart song, humming it back to me so i might re-member.
Friend, your own life could be in seeming ruins in this moment, catalyzed by a loss, a beginning, a minute shift of reality like a finishing a project, or your child starting a new grade. All of sudden, things are just not working. They don’t make sense to you anymore. The only thing you know for certain is that a different way is needed.
A way of the heart, of silence, of witness, of nurturance, of life force. You long to get close to what is deeply real, not because you’re working hard to reach something, but because you sense that all the striving is leading nowhere. There is a Real you know in the landscape of dreams, in the waking moments before all your thoughts rush in. The Real when you touch a child’s head or the opening bud of a magnolia tree, so sacred your fingers are barely a whisper.
The cues are there, my friend, in the bursts of aliveness when you enter your body and stay for a while.
Last spring i taught a first-layer incursion into the map of the Heroine’s Journey and coupled it with questions and somatic exercises. If you’re interested in diving into these teachings, write to me at bonjour@simonaweik.com or DM me on Instagram @dr.simonaisabella for the recordings.
A twelve week follow-up container i’ve been dreaming about for a while is in the works as well, a deeper foray into healing and integration by working with this wonderful typology and reclaiming our full humanity and life force. A waiting list will open in the next two months.
Noli temere,
Simona