Mental Health Support

"I liked what Michael Meade said this morning. He wasn't talking directly about transition, but he also was. Something is born that has both form and sound together. Michael Meade's comments moved my thoughts into the whole idea of womb/tomb and birth. Humankind has observed routinely and, at times, numinously the major transition and liminal experience of new life emerging from the body of a pregnant woman. The pregnant woman who carries this new life is herself the cocoon, the carrier of that fluidity out of which grows a whole new life. The time comes when the new life is able to live outside of the mother. In the timing of birth there is the movement, shifting, labor pains, and the cervix that held all the fluid stretches and unblocks. The waters break and labor is initiated.

Well, labor is something that almost all of us have gone through. Cesarean section births cut short that usual process, but there is this experience that we've archetypally actually all lived out. Most of us came through labor, delivery, and the birth canal. There is a moment in the birth process which is called transition, and it is the most dangerous time of the delivery for both the baby and the mother. The head of the baby must pass underneath the pubic arch of the mother and enter the world. If this is going to work, if this baby is going to come out of the mother into the world, it has to go through that danger moment. This is often the most painful part of the labor for the mother. Mother and child go through this transition, which is a crisis, danger and opportunity. Then there is a new being that has never existed on earth before, but that has just come through the birth canal to the other side.

One of the fascinating things about the creative process and actually giving birth is that, not only have you brought something new into the world that wasn't there before, but when you go through this experience, you are changed. It affects you. Once you have delivered a baby you are no longer in the mother/maiden/crone archetypal form that women can go through physiologically. Your body has changed. You now have given birth to this child. Out of the darkness of your own creative process, out of the unconsciousness of your process, out of your labor has come new life."

I went through that very dangerous period over the weekend. The fact that I made it out to the other side I guess is a good sign even if I feel really bad right now.