“Is it Rebirthing?”
I can’t tell you how many people have jumped in with that question even after I have followed the title of the body of groupwork that I lead with my wonderful colleague Avi-Esther, with an explanation of the kinds of methods we use. These methods include some active methods such as movement and dramatisation and some yin-style methods such as mediation, visualization, bodywork and breath. So I thought I’d lay it out in bare terms on paper - just to clarify! Not that I have anything against rebirthing: I loved the breathwork session I did. It’s just that while breathwork is a powerful modality for thawing out and releasing numbed out and suppressed emotions, for me, it is not the whole picture.
When it comes to healing and therapy…I’ve been on a journey for the past 11 years and I have tried many things, all of which (for the most part) have greatly contributed to my personal healing journey. After a debilitating back injury aged eighteen and receiving a life changing bodywork session two years later, I moved to a beautiful residential school of the healing arts in Northern California. During my time in the States, I trained in shiatsu and nutrition, become a doula and fell in love (well in that stunning environment, who wouldn’t fall in love?) Unfortunately my marriage ended in a painful divorce when I was 24, which also spelled the end of my time in my most beloved California. Soon after arriving broken hearted back home to my family home in Oxford, I learned NVC (to help me develop the communication skills that would have helped me navigate the rocky terrain of my marriage), deep dived into tantra (to heal my broken heart and connect with my inner child), did a foundation course in dance movement therapy, was in therapy, went through the landmark forum and associated personal growth courses, trained in counselling and psychotherapy, (though I’m not a qualified psychotherapist, but people often mistake me for one!) explored creative arts facilitation, voicework, breathwork and received and have given countless bodywork sessions… All of this experience has informed me that the most effective approach to therapy and healing is a variety of methods that give an actual in-the-body, in real time, lived experience of the essential unobstructed, expanded, vital, Soul-Self.
And quickly! We don’t want to be sitting on the couch forever, do we friends?
In just a short amount of time we can learn to connect with and give voice to our Inner Elder - that part of us that can understand and make whole the separate and seemingly contradictory parts of ourselves, so that both aspects can learn to be in right relationship to one another. When we can do this intra-psychically, we can also replicate this with outer relationships and it goes both ways – often reparation of developmental injuries will happen in therapy or a positive intimate relationship where that person’s kindness and modeling of a healthy boundary or dynamic gives us the tools to be kinder towards ourselves. Something magical happens when we can see and feel our nervous system rewiring as it releases and lets go of old patterns and takes a new way of being deep down in to our bodily cells: Now that is inspiring, life affirming and life changing!
So when I discovered the Birth Into Being methods taught by Elena Tonetti- Vladimirova, I knew I had found something that ticked all my boxes. Dymamic - tick, powerful – tick, deep – tick, playful – tick, frees stuck emotions – tick, liberates creativity and zest for life – tick, connects us to our Soul’s calling – tick. So I trained with Elena in 2010 and since then I have assisted her on many trainings and this winter of 2012 I am co-writing the training course manual with her. In short, I love this work. It has changed my life.
The Birth into Being methods blend movement, hypnotherapetic regression, visualisation, breathwork, bodywork, dramatic enactment, family systems therapy and inner child healing, shamanic ritual, psychotherapeutic dialogue and body process in a unique way which unlocks body memory and releases trauma. This may sound like a lot, but when you are dealing with core issues there is no quick fix and no ‘one size fits all’. A creative approach is required and we offer our participants the opportunity to go very deep with this work through a series of weekends, or simply to take a quantum leap in one workshop.
The Birth Into Being methods were originated by Elena Tonetti Vladimirova and her colleagues in Soviet Russia in the 80’s, to empower couples and clear the leaks in their energetic field so that they could give birth naturally in the black sea, since the alternative option – or rather, mainstream situation, was to give birth in a barrack like building where women were frequently abused by medical staff and where newborn babies were taken away from their mothers and fed tranquilised water to keep them quiet. The leap in faith and consciousness that surrounded the discovery of water birth (which has now become a popular and widespread gentle approach to birthing), originated in these dark times in Russia. With so much political suppression, as is the natural order of life - to mirror and respond accordingly, the only thing to do was to create a revolution! So summoning up their collective strength these brave people drove their revolution like a tiny plant, breaking through the oppressive concrete of Soviet rule and for eight beautiful years they did intensive birth preparation courses in Moscow in the spring, then spent the summer months at the Black Sea where women went into the warm, calm waters and came out carrying their newborn babies. These images can be seen in the award winning film “Birth As We Know It” which was made by Elena Vladimirova in 2006. Since then it has spread like wildfire and has been translated into 12 languages by grassroots volunteers who have felt compelled to spread the film which delivers a powerful message and an energetic transmission of what it takes to give birth naturally. At birth camp, there was no plan B - no delivery room for complications…They had a 100 percent success rate. No modern technologically proficient country can boast such figures. In fact, technology has the opposite effect on birth statistics as it introduces a hierarchical dynamic of specialist (god) versus unknowing woman (humanity) Now that I have potentially offended those who are religious and people whose lives or loved one’s lives were saved by medicine, just to make it clear where I stand - Thank God for technology and medicine. It’s just the overreliance on it that I take issue with. It’s like eating too much rich food. Once in a while it’s good, but too much and your digestive system can’t cope and it gets stagnant and loses it’s ability to digest efficiently. This is what has happened to birth. Women have been giving birth in fear, passing on the fear to their babies and disconnected from their instinctive, primal animal selves. The birthing field magnifies unresolved emotional issues: When something is left unresolved in the family, it will show up in the delivery room as a form of complication. Whether we are preparing for the birth of a child or birthing a creative project in our lives, studying or researching, making music, writing a book, or dealing with a challenging transition in our lives, these methods are highly effective since they free up energy that is tied up inside and set this energy in conscious motion aligning the embodied unfolding of our lives with our soul’s trajectory.
In a Birth into Being workshop we work directly with the Limbic system, also known as the mammalian brain which is the emotional centre of the body/mind. When we were growing in our mother’s womb our developing nervous system was impacted and deeply imprinted by the emotional climate of the family we were going to be born into. Our first experiences of what life is like were held in those watery nine and a half months as our mother’s emotions educated us about what to expect from life. Her feelings about being pregnant, her relationship with our father, her stress levels - all of these affect us. Foetus’s are highly sensitive to all of these feelings and sensations and cannot avoid them, for they are literally bathing in the hormonal waters that transport these moods to them. Like sponges, they absorb everything, without discrimination. So our experience in the womb becomes our blueprint for what love is, even if it was incredibly painful or worse, annihilating.
To illustrate this point, if a parent is disconnected, we may feel very isolated in the womb and decide that we are alone and invisible – and live our lives adapting to this developmental wound by trying to be seen and failing or just simply by hiding out, because invisibility was our learned comfort zone. Likewise, if a parent is incredibly stressed, we may pick up that love equals stress and as adults we may not feel like we are in a loving relationship unless we are adequately stressed. See what I’m getting at? Have you considered what imprint you might have taken on from your formative experience? We often say that babies are so pure, and of course they are but sadly often their nervous systems are wired disadvantageously even by the time they are born, particularly if the birth was traumatic. Even regular, routine interventions such as the immediate cutting of the cord are perceived as an assault to a newborns delicate system. When a lot of the babies blood is still in the placenta, it is being robbed of it’s own stem cells and immunological factors and vast quantities of iron that it would take a long time to produce on it’s own. Now that’s disempowering.
So it is, during a birth into being workshop where we unearth these patterns, complete unfinished business and harmonise the different systems of the brain to rewire the notion that keeps us stuck and playing small in life. We also have the embodied experience of being conceived, gestated and born in total love and ecstacy! Most of us would not have had that experience. When I was born it was common practice to separate babies from their mothers soon after birth, to let the mothers rest. Now tell me - who wouldn’t want to claim a loving and blissful experience as their birthright? For me personally, the imprint of isolation, feeling lost and abandoned that I grew up with has deeply shifted. This work has brought me profoundly in to relationship with what I am passionate about and it is a pleasure to midwife the seeds of change in others as they courageously let themselves be transformed deeply by the group birthing field. There are a number of practitioners of this work internationally. For more information or to find a facilitator in your country, visit www.birthintobeing.com Avi-Esther and I will be holding regular workshops in London in 2013. To see our schedule, please visit www.soulhealingarts.com. We also have a couple of spaces on our upcoming workshop this weekend on the 24th and 25th November in London. Contact me for more info [email protected]
RSS Feed