It’s not unusual to associate the new year with a newborn baby. We instinctively know that this new beginning is like a new birth. It offers potential. There is a whole year, like a whole lifetime, of the unknown awaiting us. What is less often acknowledged is that every new beginning is like a birth and is a time when we often unconsciously re-enact how our birth was.
If you are someone who sets new years’ resolutions for yourself, how often to you live them out? Or do you disappoint yourself by going back to whatever habit it is you are trying to break? Without awareness, we tend to perpetually re-live our history.
Birth and Transitions
Birth, as our first major transition in life, tends to establish tendencies for how we encounter transitions. These include transitioning out of an old year and into a new one, but we engage in transitions everyday throughout the day.
For example, how is it for you to get out of the bed in the morning? Do you jump out
of bed, excited and ready for the new day? Do you lie in bed for as long as possible, delaying the inevitable for just a bit longer? Do you feel groggy, and grope your way out of bed feeling like you really aren’t ready?
Any of these experiences could reflect your birth. Perhaps you were ready and excited for this new life and were supported in emerging in your own timing with your body being allowed to find its way. Perhaps your birth was induced, and you were forced to emerge before you felt ready. Or you may have been held back because the doctor hadn’t arrived yet or someone thought your due date hadn’t come yet. You might have been groggy due to anesthesia administered to your mother, which also affected you.
Babies Remember Birth
How is it for you to read about these birth possibilities? Do you resonate with any of them? What are you aware of in your body as you read this? Do you know enough about your birth to know what it was actually like?
If you can ask your mother or others who might have been present about your birth, you may find yourself recognizing certain patterns in your behaviors. You may also feel that you have a different idea about what happened than what you have been told.
Babies remember their birth. One of the pioneers of pre- and perinatal psychology, David Chamberlain, described in his book, Babies Remember Birth (later published as The Mind of Your Newborn Baby), his research in this area. He used hypnosis to take mothers and their adult children back to the child’s birth. In most cases, their memories and descriptions matched. Where they didn’t and it was possible to check the facts with medical records, the children were generally more accurate!
What does this tell you about your sense of your birth?
The Metaphor of Birth in Every Moment
We can learn about how we were born in part from how we are in transitions. Besides getting up in the morning and celebrating a new year, we transition from one activity to another, one room to another, indoors to outdoors, in and out of relationships, jobs, schools, etc. Transitions are everywhere! How is it for you to complete a project or activity or relationship?
The metaphor of birth also presents in other ways, including our language (I can’t get through this!), our body posture and movement patterns, our sense of timing and punctuality. Are you one of those people who procrastinates until the pressure of a deadline forces you to complete?
Enquiring into our own birth history can be enlightening and liberating. We can also practice meeting birth in every moment, being mindful of how this moment is different from the last and from the next, this breath is filling me now and then is emptying, this doorway is a transition from that room to this one. This year is different (hopefully!) from last year!
How can we embrace this newness? How can we be more present in this moment for what is birthing now?
May this new year remind us all of the amazing potential available with each new birth.
