Embryo as Context

As an embryo, you faced many challenges. You survived each one, or you wouldn’t be here now reading this! How easy or difficult it was to meet each challenge depended on the context you found yourself in, as is also true now. Little ones in the womb are completely dependent on their mother for their survival. They need her to provide food and shelter as the bare necessities. Beyond that, little ones also require connection, which is also true now, whatever age you are now.

When we are little, a sense of connection and being welcomed lets us know we are safe. We can relax our guard enough to grow. We need this to thrive.

Babies deprived of loving touch usually do not survive and certainly don’t thrive. Think of the orphans you have probably heard of from overcrowded, under-staffed orphanages in places like Romania or China. Those babies that survive tend to be developmentally delayed and have difficulty establishing secure attachment even when they are later welcomed by a loving family.

In the womb, your context included how safe and supported or stressed or threatened your mother felt. Where a mother experiences extreme or chronic stress, the little one preparing to be born into the mother’s world develops a hyper-sensitivity to stress with altered levels of stress hormones. This lays the foundation for an array of psychological and physiological issues that many of us suffer from.

The Context of Our World Today

Today our modern world is inherently stressful, with climate change threatening our future, a pandemic lurking with ongoing uncertainties regarding health, travel, socializing and even everyday activities like shopping and commuting. Many people also experience a persistent background of racism and discrimination, with their related fear and threat. Often, we have inherited this experience and its effects from our ancestors as we attempt to thrive in communal fields of intergenerational and collective trauma. These are part of the context we form in as embryos and throughout our lives.

How we react to our current context may echo how we coped in the womb or early in our life. These patterns that enabled us to survive back then may or may not be useful or appropriate now.

Creating a Different Context

Fortunately, we can take action now to alter our context, to create different influences. Our actions may not obliterate the background, but we can begin to create for ourselves and each other a sense of safety and welcome. This creates a new context.

When we feel safe enough, we can begin to dissolve some of the patterning established early in our lives or in response to later trauma. We can then re-form in relation to the new context.

In this way, developing awareness of our earliest experiences can enable us to become less identified with them. We can begin to witness ourselves behaving or reacting as if we were still a very dependent little one, instead of identifying with that often fear-driven part of ourselves.

We can then make different choices and interact with our current circumstances with the wisdom and resources we have developed as adults. This can include finding ways to offer the little one within us, or the little one that we once were, what they need to feel safe and welcome. This can be a poignant place of healing, where we begin to return to the original potential of the embryo to develop into anything. A world of possibility can open to us that was previously occluded by our early patterning.

If you feel touched by these words and are curious about how your own early history may be influencing you now, I invite you to read more in my new book, Spirit into Form: Exploring Embryological Potential and Prenatal Psychology. If you would like my guidance as you read the book, please consider joining my new course, Spirit into Form: Being with the Book. It has already started but you are welcome to join and watch the video of the class you missed.