Addiction, Bulimia and Poverty Consciousness – What predisposes us to suffer in this way?
Picture taken by Sarah Bullock at a previous Healing Birth Wounds Workshop. A symbol of hope and renewal
How are issues of addiction, greed and poverty consciousness patterned in our earliest moments of life as a microscopic clusters of cells?
The Blostocyst journey down the Fallopian Tube and then implantation in the womb may shape these deep psychological and emotional patterns.
What is it that all human beings have in common? It is our initial biological development of two gametes fusing to form the original cluster of cells that must travel on a long and perilous journey down the fallopian tube, to fall into the womb and then find a nurturing and receptive place to implant in order to develop into a human fetus. This is a journey that few survive. The odds are against us, since only between 20% – 30% of blastocysts actually make it. This we all share.
We are alone and in darkness when these early events occur. Usually our mothers have no idea that they have conceived us and will only know and respond or react to their pregnancy when we have been in the womb for around a month or two. We are alone and somehow must survive in a body where we are attacked as a foreign invader by our mother’s immune system.
Mainstream scientific thinking may deny that we can be influenced by such events, never mind actually remembering them. However, even as psychologists such as Freud and Jung began to document the influences of our childhood have on our adult development, later pre-natal psychologists and researchers such as Frank Lake and William Emerson have unearthed through empirical studies, a vast amount of information regarding these primal and extremely potent experiences. These memories are held at a cellular level and can be accessed through a number of therapeutic means. We can contact our essential self or soul which lies behind our personality when we access these memories.
We are at a critical time in our planetary history and there is an intense need to turn away from the patterns of reacting and acting out our fear and feelings of not having enough. These are psychological patterns of impoverishment that drive destructive behaviours of addiction, materialism and exploitation of the world’s resources. By exploring the forces that shape us, we are now in position to be able to choose to be conscious or stay with our self defeating patterns.
Conception between the sperm and the egg is a major event with it’s own profound psychological implications which I won’t discuss here. It is the journey, post conception down the fallopian tube and the task of implantation which truly marks the soul’s journey into embodiment; into the physical realms, into the merging of the blastocyst with the mother’s body. This is implantation, the most heroic of all journeys and is documented in the many mythologies of the world. There is no turning back from this journey and yet the most likely outcome is death.
Following conception the human zygote divides into a two cell organism and then continues to divide and multiply at a rapid rate, gradually becoming a larger cluster of cells which will eventually after implantation develop into an embryo and later a foetus and baby. Are we only properly human at the point when we have become an adult or are we human as a baby or even in those earlier stages as embryo or even blastocyst? Blechschmidt (1) discovered through his research that we are uniquely human from the earliest moments of conception and that there is no biological stage in that development which is ‘non human’. We are complete as ourselves from the moment of conception.
As microspically tiny human beings we are about to undertake a miraculous journey. Implantation is a phenomenon not understood and should biologically be impossible. The maternal immune system should be hostile to human blastocyst, since it is an invader having the genetic material of the father. Implantation in the womb is our first home. It creates safety and order from danger and chaos. As a human blastocyst we are immensely vulnerable. A baby is more fragile than an adult, and a blastocyst even more liable to suffer.
We have a week to make this perilous journey down the fallopian tube to the womb. The only ‘food’ available is the uterine milk which firstly we can absorb through our cellular membrane. As we increase in size the inner cluster of cells begin to suffer ‘core starvation’ since the milk cannot be passed through to the centre. It becomes imperative that we reach the womb and implant before we die of starvation. Finally we ‘fall’ into the womb and have to ‘hatch’ out of the membrane surrounding our cellular self. We have little time left to survive and our mother’s body may not be welcoming. Our mother’s emotional state and well being, her degree of nutrition or the amount of pollutants she may be contaminated with, the amount or support from our father and her larger family can all have a profound affect on how she is able to receive us. We may experience her womb as being ‘barren’ or ‘frigid’, ‘arid’, ‘hard’ or ‘toxic’. If we are fortunate it will be ‘lush’, fertile alive and enlightening. We enter a dance of relationship as we begin to send our roots into the uterine wall.
This is our first ever contact. Is it shocking? Do we recoil? Or do we surrender blissfully into the contact? This experience becomes somatized into our developing bodies. If we recoiled, did we have the experience of almost dying of starvation as a blastocyst and then desperate to feed and survive we discovered that our mother was contaminated with alcohol or emotional toxicity. Does this set up a pattern of recoiling against intimacy because it is ‘not safe.’ If we manage to survive this initial toxic contact and get what we need do we establish a pattern of ‘persistence and patience giving a reward of life’.
At each moment our human cells are experiencing, learning and growing. Who we are is formed directly from our experiences with each challenge that we face; each transition is a result of a chemical and cellular process. Bruce Lipton (2) has documented how cells analyze and learn from thousands of stimuli from their microenvironment. They choose behaviour which determines their survival. Human beings are vastly complex organisms and yet we are driven by the same needs to survive as the single cell.
A vast body of personal research through pre-natal regression suggests that such deeply painful psycho-emotional problems such as addiction, eating disorders, poverty consciousness can be have their roots in these early biochemical challenges. The beauty of this research is that we have now the means to change or re-pattern this early behaviour. We can become free from our bonds and become conscious human beings. We can choose abundance and nourishing relationships and exist together in love and harmony, recognizing that these early patterns of suffering wrought through deep vulnerability are history which does not have to be recapitulated.
(1) Eric Blechschmidt – The Ontological Basis of Human Anatomy
(2) Bruce Lipton – The Biology of Belief
If you would like an opportunity to heal these deeply embedded patterns that originated in the earliest moments or your life, Julia Duthie and myself are offering a powerful 2 day work shop on February 14th & 15th. This workshop will be run again at a later date.
Healing Birth Wounds Heals Your Life
Jullet Yelverton