It seems that everything I engage in these days draws me to orient to the space between. It comes up in classes I teach, somatic practice, supervision and client sessions. I can see such a need in our world today to develop tolerance for and skill in relationship to the space between.
Our modern world seems to be built on polarities. Male Female. Brain Body. Conscious Unconscious. Human/synthetic Nature. Nature Nurture. Right Left.
The list could go on. Endlessly.
Why are these held as polarities? In every case, it is possible to discover a spectrum with degrees present of each so-called opposite quality.
We can witness the polarities in our world being increasingly strongly expressed, which can easily seduce us into their particular focus. If we examine these polar positions in the world today, I suspect we could categorize them all as coming from a relative state of fear. Yet, between them somewhere is space, which I perceive as a state of love. I want to support all of us in being able to orient to love, which includes acknowledging how we are all connected and interdependent.
Being with Uncertainty
The space between is something different from an exacting definition of reality. Our left brain particularly excels at this analytical, descriptive approach. But without the wholistic perception of our right brain, something important is inevitably neglected and missing from the commonly accepted picture of HOW IT IS.
Humans don’t tend to do well with uncertainty, a quality offered by the space between. We like to know HOW IT IS. A sentence ending with a question mark begs to be answered. We seek resolution. We are driven by resolution.
Our drive doesn’t care about who might be trampled upon in the process of achieving a satisfying answer. Where is the boundary of our country? Who has the right to live here? Who is better? Who is smarter? Who is deserving of this job, of work, of respect, of inclusion?
Do you recognize any of these questions? What happens in your body when your read those questions or the one I just asked. Does it feel more settled or is there some impulse to seek something? This might arise as an energy rising in the body, as heat, as a sense of wanting to move, maybe even to run. I need to get there! Wherever there may be.
This can also be a trauma response. I need to get away from what is uncomfortable. I will fight it with all my might. Or I will run away as fast and far as I can. I may even deny the issue exists. I may collapse in on myself, withdrawing from the discomfort (of uncertainty) because it reminds my autonomic (automatic) nervous system of something that happened long ago, perhaps before I had the ability to put my experience into words. And back then, I was perhaps too little to fight or to flee. My only option was to shut down.
My words stop here.
Our Earliest Experiences
I remember being shut down. This was probably the first thirty or so years of my life.
There was much in my childhood to contribute to this state. I continue to take fascinating, informative trauma courses and learn about the ways we can react to trauma and how this might affect us throughout our lives. What almost always seems to be missing is the acknowledgment that these patterns may not have started when mommy was crying instead of feeding me or daddy was yelling at her. They may have begun earlier, even before the effects could be so visible. They may have begun before birth. These postnatal experiences are often just reinforcing what we learned in the womb.
Prenatal Preparation
Consider the little one in the womb, exquisitely sensitive to their surrounding context, preparing to live in their mother’s world. If daddy is yelling at her, the fetus in the womb cringes. There may be a surge in cortisol, if that has developed yet. There is a cellular response to the message of danger or threat arriving umbilically as well as energetically.
Experiences, learning, and memories of this prenatal time are not recorded in conscious, verbal memory, because this is not yet available. We also know that the parts of the brain involved in forming conscious, verbal memory may go offline in trauma. For the little one in the womb, extreme or ongoing maternal stress, such as abuse from her partner, is registered as highly threatening because of their complete dependence on mother for their survival. If she is afraid or upset, the prenate may be in danger.
Differentiating and Resourcing
I encourage you to take note of what you are aware of in your own body as you read this. Are you aware of your body? Little ones easily slip out of body awareness into dissociative states, where they don’t have to directly experience overwhelming pain, terror, or uncertainty.
If this reaction has arisen for you, I suggest taking a moment, or several, to pause, take a breath, if possible, look around the room you are in, remember you actual current age today as you have been reading this. What happens when you acknowledge your current age? I find that often people who are activated as if they were a little one can suddenly snap out of that helpless state and return to the potential resource available to them here and now as an adult.
This more mature state enables the possibility of beginning to rest in the space between. I may be aware of my feelings or experience as a little one, but I can witness it from the resourced, capable place of being an adult who has already survived that early time. The distance between my current state and what I experienced as a little one is the space between. As I witness, I can increasingly sense that space.
This is different from becoming the traumatized little one. Babies in the womb and after birth don’t have the ability to differentiate between what was back then and what is now. They simply experience directly whatever arises. Preverbal memories, stored in the body, emotions, and behaviors, arise as what we call implicit memory. This is unconscious, often more automatic memory. When it is triggered by an event or stimulus in present time, it feels like the memory is happening now. I may return to the terror of daddy yelling at mommy. I feel like a dependent little one in extreme danger. I then react to the current situation or people around me as if they are the cause of my fear.
Remembering our current age can extract us somewhat from that potentially overwhelming implicit surge. As I remember how old I am now, I feel more space. I discover myself spontaneously taking a breath. I begin to sense the support of Mama Earth under my feet. I feel my feet again! I realize how I had separated from my body sensations and have now returned. From this place, I can feel for the little one I once was instead of becoming that little one. I might even find it in myself to offer support to the little one. Does she want to be held? Can I hold her in my heart?
Again questions may stimulate uncertainty. How do they want to be answered in this moment? Or is there a possibility of being with the questions? Can we let them inform us?
Imagine if we met the major problems in the world in this way? What if we paused to listen?
Pre-Birth as a Space Between
Spirit coming into form, arriving from somewhere/something vast, perhaps unnamable, into a more compressed, smaller shape, that oozes and transfigures into what we recognize as human form.
Of course, infancy and childhood might also be seen as spaces between, a state of not quite yet hereness. I observe that these postnatal states have had much more attention. Our time before birth is seldom considered, despite involving numerous significant developmental stages and the learning associated with them. These prepare us to live outside the womb. This preparation does not negate the profundity of the experience before birth.
The space between may involve an experience or need or longing for connection. Our time in the womb, intended in the original blueprint for development to be a time of mother and baby being attuned (at one), bi-directional communication, establishing a template for relationship after birth.
Our arrival involves resonating with and learning from not only our mother’s individual physiology and psychology, but also all that influences that. We are not isolated individuals attempting to live within a void, even if it may sometimes or to some people feel like that. We are an interconnected web of being. Mother, like every individual, is influenced by her intimate relationship, family, ancestral traumas and resiliencies, as well as those of the culture or cultures they breathe and move within. We have many relationships, even before birth.
Pollution, climate change, war, racism, discrimination, violence, poverty, colonialism, and all their devastating effects become part of the field of influence for birthing families, as well as everyone else. The baby is arriving into an intergenerational field of influence. What did their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, endure and pass on with their genes and traditions? Were they slaves, refugees, immigrants, orphans, victims of torture, terror, or undeserved hatred? And more…How did they survive these insults at least enough to result in this baby being able to arrive now?
Resilience in our Field
We all have our ways of adapting to what is challenging. These adaptations may later be judged as sick or bad, but they will have been attempts, successful or not, to meet their context at the time they emerged. This is also true for mothers and their babies.
Little ones in the womb are adapting to the context they are growing in. This space between is their introduction to their probable future. They intelligently prepare for it.
Consider that the little one in the womb is also closer to Source or Cosmos, whatever you choose to call it, having so recently engaged in squeezing this vaster state of being into a little physical body. They occupy a space between the Mystery from whence we come and the beautiful, yet conflictual, and often overwhelming world into which we arrive.
We can profoundly affect our probable future as a human species by acknowledging the importance of the prenatal space between and making it a priority to provide essential support, nourishment, love, safety, protection, etc. Babies, mothers, and the entire inter-relational field they are part of can benefit.
If this thought touches you, I encourage you to take some time to breathe, allow your body to move if that feels helpful, journal, do some artwork, and, for more insights and information, read my new book, The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Traumas Experienced Before and at Birth.
Thank you for reading this. I’d love to know how you are touched.
