“In the Beginning was The Word,

and The Word was God”.

 

Well, that’s got you, no doubt. But it does start an important conversation.

Up until my mid 30’s, I was numb. I am not talking about emotionally, although that was true too. No, I am talking about my body. Obviously, I could feel enough to just about function, but it was a minimum, and it took me to begin therapy, via my Psychosynthesis training, for me to realise how numb I was. An enormous amount of emotion surfaced and was released, in the first year of that study, when I discovered that I was as angry as hell.

I had realised earlier that there were physical affects caused by emotional issues after a bout of relationship counseling. It hit me that every time I planned a trip to Brisbane to see the family, I inevitably came down with the flu, bronchitis, whatever, and magically, couldn’t go. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t putting it on or lying. I was really ill. I can remember also, when I got sick while there, but again magically, the minute I got off the plane in Sydney, I was, again miraculously better. Immediately! But in my understanding at the time, viruses worked independently of feelings, so it was impossible to conveniently get one every time I booked a plane to Brisbane. I made a connection, and thought it was amazing.

In my PS training I also did some experimentation with Rebirthing techniques. In the first full session I had with that modality with my trainer, I was healthy when I lay down, and had bronchitis when I got up from the futon that was used on the floor for the purpose. Impossible! Not only possible but predictable really. It was all about my mother.

So, leading on from all this letting go, my body started to feel things, and I have to say it wasn’t pleasant. My joints hurt. My kidneys hurt. My heart ached, literally. I also started to feel heat, as well as energy, in the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet. It felt like something had thrown the ‘on’ switch. However, learning to interpret these sensation was a long road. I had lived safely (or maybe not, when I think of the disastrous choices I made during my life to that point) for decades, living through my mind. I had no idea what sensations were for. I learned, through a nervous breakdown, burnout and the years that followed, that we ignore our feeling, sensational feedback at our peril.

Not long before that period, I had gone to an astrology seminar, dedicated to the exploration of the Saturn Return. Look it up. It’s fascinating. At some point the presenter began to outline the process of birth, via the various matrix we pass through on the way out. He talked about a ‘loving womb’, where Mum (and Dad) was happy to have us, feeling warm and relaxed about our arrival. Nice. Then he described a ‘toxic womb’ where Mum was dreading our arrival, frightened by the whole procedure. He talked about the wonderful feeling of being hugged as we eased our way down the birth canal of this welcoming mother, verses the fear/freeze of the tense fearful womb, where we had stewed for 9 months, dreading more of the same out there.

Halfway through his explanation my throat closed, I felt huge claustrophobia, and wanted to bolt. I had been 32 hours labouring to come out, (or maybe trying to forestall the inevitable) to a Mum who had been told never to give birth again. During the ordeal she was not supported by either Dad (he was terrified and in hiding) or the hospital staff, left in a room alone for the whole time, until they whisked her off to an operating theatre to pull me out with forceps. I avoided working with more Rebirthing for ages after that, though I knew I needed to, scared of what it might bring up. Sensations were real, always telling me what needed to heal.

After recovery from my burnout, (caused by not listening again) I went back into my practice. I had, yet again, learnt the hard way from all of those experiences. My work progressed, as did my studies and experience as a therapist. I often naturally found my way into the womb experience of the clients with deep trauma. If that’s where the work took us, I was willing to facilitate that. Recognising how our life learning begins so much earlier than currently accepted, I often struck client resistance to attempting recall of memories so early. The idea that the child had no cognitive recognition of that time has been embedded in our understanding.

Except that it’s wrong! A child’s sensory ability is alive and well from the zygote onwards: the moment we begin our journeys of individuality. We have sensation happening all over us. We feel the swishing of the fluid as Mum walks. Indeed, that’s a prominent sound along with the most notable one of Mum's voice. We have attached ourselves to her to feed directly from until all the little tentacles that we extend turn into the placenta as our own energy bank, still attached but not in the direct way it was initially. So everywhere, and every situation she experiences, so do we, on a sensory level. I did feel Mum's anxiety, carrying it with me still in the core of my DNA. But I know what it is now, addressing it for what it is.

Turns out, I just learnt from a great book by Melliassa Assilem Gifts of the Mother that we humans have split our brain functions into two, probably to allow greater capacity. The right side, that which uses sensory input, is there with us working away in the womb. The left brain, outer world logic, doesn’t start growing until after we are born and out in this world. This is the reason, it seems, that we are so helpless out here for such a long duration, where other animals have that outer functioning ready to go from the outset. Meanwhile we still have to grow that bit before we can fill it with the functionality required. And thereby lay the problem.. or many.

I have covered the real survival issues that arise from not listening to our senses to survive in the article Coming to our Sense. But let me reiterate, they are the part of us which have been ensuring our survival since the we zygote set off on its journey. We still have a right-brain function that will never leave us to flounder. Unless we ignore it! That becomes easier and easier to do the more the left brain grows and fills itself up with the dysfunctional idea of our cultures. Now we come to the title of this piece. It is with the left brain that we begin the process of learning what the sensory images, we have been collecting all along, are called in our parents’ language.

I have played with kids, teaching them words many times. Pointing to my nose, touching theirs and saying the accompanying word ‘nose’. This they dutifully repeat. This is the way the world is formed within the left brain. Soon we have a glossary in our heads of all the names that all the images inside of us, as well as outside, are called. By someone else. We take those words into ourselves and, in the absence of anyone else around to show us differently, we believe that’s how the world is. The WORD is God, the creator of the world as we know it. We forget that there was a world before it that still exists within, quietly, or insistently, trying to get our attention, showing us where this reality has been created wrongly for us as a person. We have entered the world of ‘group think’. Not only is the WORD God, but the God of WORD is the LAW.

We now think before we feel. Indeed, we forget we have feelings and the only way they can get our attention through the noisy words, constantly defining and redefining life for us, is through pain. If we ignore the small expressions of pain, we end up with the big crisis of pain one way or another. But it is so hard to think, or even think of thinking, without words. They just come, chattering away as they go. Arguing mostly, but sometimes affirming, what we have been taught. They are not interested in what works, but just what they have learned. I am a great thinker. I like to believe that I am open minded and willing to explore the deeper caverns of reality. But for me, as I suspect most of us, the attempts to think without words is a challenge.

When I challenge my clients to feel their way into anything early in their lives, I am taking them into what I call their prelingual reality: that time they existed without words. (Mind you they were still hearing them as she spoke them and conversed with Dad and others around before the birth). We have impressions from the beginning. Those impressions can be vital to our self-understanding. We may not have had the words for those impressions at the time, but we surely did have the experiences that they were based on. What we now have to do to access them, is to have the left-brain logical mind co-operate to put words to the images we are left with.

That requires an act of trust. Unfortunately, the God of Words has been taught not to trust those deep knowings because they will upset the group think. Along with our trust, then, we also must be brave, because this inner knowledge WILL change your life. From the inside out.