What might birth itself teach your developing system about struggle, agency, authority, surrender and emergence?
Through them, we learned what was acceptable and what would cost us our belonging. We learned what happens when we finally get what we’ve been trying so hard for and whether or not it is safe to arrive and savor the moment.
You might think that’s just “the way you are,” or attribute it entirely to your personality. But it is actually a survival adaptation. When you are very young, maintaining that connection is a matter of life and death.
Long before we interact with the outside world, the time of our birth is already teaching our developing system about struggle, agency, authority, surrender, and emergence.
The music to which we dance to life is laid down in the womb. This means that early impressions and imprints are made at a cellular level during gestation. When babies’ brains become more developed after birth, they will learn words to describe what has been sensed earlier. Prenatal and perinatal psychologists have told us for decades that impressions, both positive and negative, are made in the womb and these impressions can last for a lifetime.
From the very beginning of conception, we experience the gestures of pursuing and receiving, contracting and expanding, yielding and bracing, enveloping and bonding.
At birth, we experience:
- Pressure and resistance
- Movement and support
- Intervention and change
- Emergence into taking up space in the world
These early impressions create the music for how we dance through life, laying down the imprints for how we meet its challenges. We learn to organize ourselves around life, and we learn how to move through change.
When life gets difficult, what do you do?
- Do you push harder and try to force things to go the way you want?
- Do you fight the outcome?
- Do you freeze or feel like you are trapped and can’t get out?
- Do you try to manage everything yourself and resist help?
- Or do you go the other direction and just collapse?
Then what happens when you do actually get what you want? Can you let yourself settle in, rest and enjoy it?
I have written previously about our first touch as our first physical contact with our mother at the time of implantation and then the mother/baby dyad communication. In this article I am focusing on the birth process itself moving through the birth canal.
When the baby is mature, they send a biochemical signal of readiness to the mother’s body. This triggers a cascade that releases oxytocin which causes the uterus to contract and sends prostaglandins to the cervix causing it to soften and open.
The baby’s body feels the tightening of the uterine muscles as resistance. They descend and rotate through the pelvis as the mother’s body and the baby’s body respond to one another. This is a process, not an event. The environment is slowly changing.
Both you and your mother’s body participated in this dance together. In this space, you experienced pressure, movement, resistance, support, and timing.
Many instruments are playing in this orchestra, creating the music to the song you will dance to for the rest of your life.
MOVEMENT ONE: STRUGGLE
What does your developing system learn when the way you move forward is through resistance?
Stanislav Grof outlined for Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) that map the psychological and physical phases of the birth process:
The First Matrix (BPM I): The time in the womb before labor begins which he describes as a state of undisturbed primal union and oceanic oneness.
The Second Matrix (BPM II): The onset of labor. This is a period of intense pressure and contractions, but with “no exit” yet because the cervix has not fully opened, often triggering feelings of entrapment.
The Third Matrix (BPMIII): The propulsion through the birth canal. The cervix opens and the baby pushes forward against the resistance .
The Fourth Matrix (BPM IV): The moment of emergence and delivery. This is the final release from constriction, bringing a profound sense of liberation, rebirth and taking the first breath.
Each movement represents a distinct phase in this lifelong symphony. The music begins in the womb, serene and harmonious. At the onset of labor, the rhythm suddenly changes to a heavy, pounding pressure driven by intense contractions. As the baby pushes through the resistance of the birth canal, the song intensifies, until the moment of emergence and delivery where the music finally swells into a triumphant release from constriction.
Have you ever noticed a difference between simply being in a difficult situation and feeling that you are moving through a difficult situation? They’re both hard, but one of them feels like you are still getting somewhere. There is a difference between pain with no way through and pain that has movement. Does this mean your birth caused your tendency to feel trapped? Maybe not entirely, but Grof’s matrices provide an experiential and therapeutic model to explore your relationship with struggle.
MOVEMENT TWO: AGENCY
With the amount of force that a baby goes through with being born, how much agency does it even have?
Ray Castellino remind us that babies are conscious, active participants who birth from the inside out. Dr. Jaap van der Wal an embryologist points out that prenatal communication is a rich, ongoing dialogue through gestures of movement, folding, unfolding and becoming through which we develop. Prior to birth you communicate with your mother through five interconnected pathways: biological, sensory, emotional, spiritual, and energetic or telepathic.
The unborn baby is definitely participating in this dialogue, but agency is not the same thing as control. Agency doesn’t mean we get to dictate the music or force things to happen exactly the way we want.
We have agency through our choices. It is entirely about how we choose to respond to the music of the moment:
- What do we sense?
- How do we adjust?
- When do we choose to move, pause, or change directions?
Even in the tightest constrictions of the birth canal, the baby is constantly negotiating, adapting, and finding their own steps through the dance. It’s really about how we choose to respond such as in what we do, how we sense, how do we adjust, move, pause or change directions.
Then you might ask: “But what if I wasn’t allowed to respond?” This brings to the next movement.
MOVEMENT THREE: AUTHORITY
This enters a tender area since this is a place where forces larger than life itself enters an intense transition. There are times during birth where it doesn’t always go as planned and an outside authority steps in or life itself takes a different turn.
When an outside authority steps in and overrides your internal timing, this early experience can deeply imprint how you view power, boundaries and guidance in your life.
If your natural self governing internal impulses are shut down and your natural movements are met with external forces, your ability to trust and follow yourself is stored as a lasting imprint on the nervous system. Ray Castellino emphasizes that there is an undistorted Somatic Blueprint that remains intact at the core where the frozen impulses can be processed and completed.
There was a Swedish study I remember reading decades ago, that has stuck in the back of my mind. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Swedish researchers published a series of studies suggesting an association between certain forms of severe birth trauma and later suicide by violent means. One of the later studies showed a strong association in men who died from self harm were exposed to multiple forms of birth trauma such as forceps and other instrumental procedures.
The researchers examined birth records for 412 forensic deaths in Stockholm, including suicides, alcohol-related deaths and drug addiction, and compared them with controls. They reported that suicides by asphyxiation were associated with asphyxia at birth, while suicides by violent mechanical means were associated with mechanical birth trauma.
In a perfectly collaborative birth, the mother, baby and those present at the birth, dance together in a responsive rhythm. If there are overwhelming external forces or intervention, then it feels like someone has taken your baton away. It is as if the orchestra has suddenly changed to a metallic garage band. Your developing system learns that it is not safe to follow your own rhythm and so you dance to the outside forces to survive.
MOVEMENT FOUR: SURRENDER
If there are forces out there that are beyond my control, then what do I do?
First, I want to be clear that surrender does not mean giving up. Sometimes we mistake agency for the ability to control everything. But there are forces we simply have no power over. You cannot stop every contraction, you cannot eliminate all resistance, and you cannot control your environment. However, you do have the agency to choose how you respond to what is happening.
We often think surrender means losing all our choices. But perhaps surrender actually means saying: “I am willing to respond to what is actually happening.” We surrender to what we cannot control. We surrender to the outcome. True surrender is the choice to stop fighting the tempo and start dancing with it, relaxing into the rhythm of what is actually happening. It is letting the music move through you and how you choose to step within it. We surrender to the momentum of the song and the final note of the outcome.
MOVEMENT FIVE: EMERGENCE - The Art of Arriving
Let’s now look at what happens when the struggle is finally over. This is where we enter Grof’s fourth matrix: emergence.
Some people know beautifully well how to struggle, but they haven’t learned how to arrive. This isn’t just about having a difficult time when life is hard; it is about why you might have trouble when life finally gets easier.
When you look at your own patterns today, ask yourself:
- Can you let something finish?
- Can you actually receive help?
- Are you able to stop fighting and let go?
- Can you enjoy the moment after a struggle and integrate it?
- Can you emerge into peace without immediately creating another problem to solve?
In the final movement of emergence, the music and dance have reached their grand crescendo and resolutions. The rhythmic pounding of the contractions stops and the friction of the birth canal ends and a new melody begins.
However, if the symphony of your birth was interrupted or your transition into the world felt unsafe, your nervous system may still be dancing to a frantic tempo of struggle. Then when the music changes to celebration, it can feel unfamiliar or even terrifying.
So many of us find that moving from the song of struggle, and bracing to realizing it has ended is not obvious. You may not even know that it is safe to stop dancing for survival. It is possible to slow down and allow yourself to step onto the dance floor of a new reality and simply take up space and celebrate the arrival that is you.
RECLAIMING THE BLUEPRINT
This isn’t really about your birth trauma, as much as it is about how you meet what is happening. Maybe the deeper question isn’t so much, “What happened during my birth?” as it is about: “How did I learn to meet what was happening?”
When there was pressure, what did you do? When there was resistance, how did you respond? When another outside force came in, could you stay connected to yourself? When you couldn’t control what was happening, could you surrender without disappearing? How did you learn to emerge? How did you learn to take up space in the world?
That is what this is truly about. Your earliest movements and gestures in response to your environment created a template for how you take up space in the world today. They affect your sense of belonging and your fundamental right to exist.
It is important to remember that the story of your birth trauma is not the only story written inside of you. Beneath your adaptive survival strategies, is an unbroken, intelligent blueprint encoded in your body that remains completely untouched. That original, natural impulse, the pure essence of who you are has never been destroyed. It is still inside of you, waiting to be listened to.
When I participated in a womb surround, my practitioner placed her hand on my forehead and my lower back and gently held me as my body freely moved in flow of my own impulse, swaying, expanding, folding inward, bracing, opening and emerging into the welcoming arms of the group. I was received with such a warm reception and a lullaby by one of the women in the group. This is what re-writing your birth story is like.
This is one of the reasons, I became so interested in gestures and early imprints. We can move away from needing to convince ourselves to behave differently to providing a new experience or finish an old one that was never completed. That may be an experience of being supported, having choice, being able to pause, following your own impulse, following through instead of getting stuck halfway through or moving at your own pace. It is about reclaiming safety, belonging, connection, trust and sovereignty. You don’t have to force yourself to behave differently. Your body can begin to discover there may be more than one way to meet life. An old movement that was frozen half way can complete through a new experience.
You get to take up space, you are allowed to move at your own pace. You can discover what it feels like to be completely supported, to have real choice, to pause when you need to and follow your own internal impulses all the way through.
CLOSING
I’ll leave you with the question I started with. When life gets difficult, what do you do? Do you push harder, fight, freeze, try to escape, take control, resist support, or collapse? And then, when life finally opens, can you let yourself arrive and take it in?
You don’t need to decide that your birth explains everything, nor do you need to find a single event to blame your difficulties on. All I’m asking is to simply become curious about the music you dance to. Let yourself feel into the unique orchestration of pressure, resistance, authority, surrender, and emergence.
Your first great journey may have begun with birth, but it isn’t over yet. You are still learning how to dance through it.
I have a free quiz you can take to discover your earliest unmet core need. You will be given the results afterward of all 7 needs.
Sources:
Jacobson et al., “Perinatal origin of adult self-destructive behavior,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 1987.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3425362/
The Teachings of Ray Castellino
https://online.castellinotraining.com/course/teachings-raycastellino-2
The Adventure of Self-Discovery with Stanislav Grof, M.D.
https://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/grof.htm
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