Birth should not be taken out of the context of Life. Birth is like a hologram, it reflects everything that happened in a woman’s life. It reflects her cultural background, her family history, her relationships with men, with the world in general and with herself.
Which brings me to my second main point:
Most birth complications are preventable. If the roots of possible complications are not nutritional or mechanical in nature, due to some specific injury or medical condition, then, most likely, it will be of an emotional nature. We have a good chance of finding the roots of upcoming complications in a pregnant woman’s behavioral patterns, in her belief system, her female lineage history, and in her sexual history. If we look at her holistically, we can help her take care of those unresolved issues that are lingering around her and then complications in birth simply don’t arise.
In preparation for birth, it’s important to look at things like: is she ready to have a baby or hesitant; if she is hesitant, then why?; does she have enough support in her life, - if she doesn’t, - then, why? does she love herself, her baby, the father of the baby. If not, then, why? What kind of family dynamic did she grow up with, and mainly how she, herself, was born. As it turns out, all of those things contribute to the quality of her experience in the delivery of her baby. I have been in service to the Birthing Field for the last 37 years, since 1982, and I am speaking from my personal experience with thousands of women around the world.
So, why do we have complications in birth? They are really against the common sense of Nature. Nature is very logical. The Power, which created life on this planet, whatever we chose to call it, is pretty intelligent. Our bodies are extremely sophisticated, way beyond our comprehension. That Power didn’t just forget to install a simple way of self-replication, which is generously provided for every species, including humans.
Our bodies have everything they need to successfully thrive on this planet.
Procreation can not be a war against Nature. According to the Great Law of Life, fighting against the body in birth is a great violation! We took birth out of the context of Life, and we are paying for it dearly.
There were reasons for it:
Thousands of years ago, our bodies were resilient, strong, able to endure a wide range of temperatures, eat very moderate amounts of seasonal foods, able to climb trees, run long distances all day. Over a period of a few millennia, we have changed in many ways and lost many of our physical abilities. Humankind got engaged in the perpetual activity of self-destruction about six thousand years ago. Men started behaving like no other species on Earth - killing and enslaving each other. Archeologists say, there is no empirical evidence of war activity prior to 6 thousand years ago, they find just some household and religious items. We don’t know what happened back then, when humans turned against each other. We can only speculate about it.
But it’s not really relevant. It would be great to know our real history, but it won’t help us to get out of this drama. History shows that knowing history doesn’t prevent it from repeating itself. I believe, this is when women lost their ability to give birth as Nature intended, when the constant stress of expecting violence interfered with the flow of female hormones in labor. Right now, what is most relevant for us is not to look back, trying to explain why exactly we are in such a mess, but to create new ways of looking forward. If we want to learn to thrive as a species on this planet, we have to let go of our addiction to pain. This is where I came into working with the Birthing Field. 37 years ago I realized that the only way to create a different quality of Life, is to delete the notion that women should suffer in childbirth. Because that is where our addiction to suffering starts.
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It is very understandable even from what we do know. For thousands of years, women’s lives were pretty hard, due to wars, famine, diseases, domestic violence, subservient social position, - all of it interfered with the natural ability to relax in labor.
Women were rarely treated well in the recorded history. They were routinely sold into marriage, raped, and disrespected in every way. Women were not educated and had no voting power until recently in the Western countries. Given our understanding of neurobiology, we know that all of this abuse is within a woman's genetic memory, it's in our bones and blood, in our family lineage. We got it from our foremothers, as they got it from theirs,- our collective subconscious still carries the agony from being burnt at the stake, burying our babies because there was no food or water for them, being gang raped by the soldiers and beaten by our fathers and husbands, memories of having to hide our pregnancies from the men we loved, only because we were obligated to have a joyless marriage with men we didn’t. And for thousands of years, we lived in fear of a distant and punitive God. I estimate the value of any culture or religion by the place it assigns to women and children. The picture is not very bright. Most of the traditions around the world are not very compassionate to women and children.
As a result of our bloody history, women forgot how to give birth. There is too much stress hormone in our collective blood stream. Not enough dopamine and oxytocin for an easy, natural delivery, as Nature intended.
In Service to the Greater Good of Humanity, I can honestly testify, with a clear mind, that there is no way around it, - the pivotal point in the effort to improve the quality of life on this planet is through reclaiming our people-making Power. It is in the creation of a healthy environment for women to carry the new generation of human beings gracefully through the entire formative period, starting with a few months prior to conception and through the few first years of life. This will establish the proper basic settings in our collective nervous system to finally experience a healthy, happy, creative life, so we can finally learn to love each other.
Our ABILITY to THRIVE and LOVE is either established during the formative period or not. If it is not established early, it’s very, very difficult to learn it later. Sometimes, impossible. And the cost of our collective inability to love is obvious,- it’s a very big mess we, the people, have created on this planet.
So, what exactly is stopping us from being able to love? On one hand, love is our natural state of being. When babies don’t experience sensory overload during their formative period, they are very relaxed, open and loving. It’s plainly visible. Of course, every rule has an exception, but we are not discussing exceptions right now.
On the other hand, love is the greatest mystery, never being experienced by the great majority of our population. One of the difficulties of talking about love, is that in English, it’s just one word, describing love of chicken soup, or activity, or a person. We don’t have a mentality or a vocabulary to understand that great mystery. Love is a very new notion on our Planet of Tears. There are also many feelings and sensations that can be mistaken for love. Like lust, for example. Or simply being comfortable with someone, or the need to be ‘completed’ by somebody else. There is a lot of confusion on that subject. Everybody wants it, but very few actually have it.
If you have a question ‘Why are we talking about love at a birth conference?’ I’ll explain: from everything I understand about birth at this point, love is the main ingredient that allows birth to happen beautifully, as Nature intended. It probably has to do with a woman’s capacity for producing sufficient amount of Oxytocin, because the ability to love has it’s hormonal formula.
But as I mentioned before, there are many flavors of Love and love-like substitutes, some of which are actually counter indicated for a good birth, because they are way too stressful.
From what I see, there are four main types of ‘Love' between partners. I’m not looking at all types of Love right now, those are many; but right now, in the context of childbirth, I’m looking at the love between the parents of a new baby: 1. unconditional love, of course 2. loving oneself within one’s relationship with another person,- when one loves the way he or she feels when they are with their partner. Which means that they don’t really know that other person they think they love, nor they are very interested in getting to know them. It’s a one-way interaction. 3. loving an 'idea' of someone - which means that it’s not as self-centered as the second type, but is also a one-way interaction, when the beloved is not really seen for who they truly are, but being objectified and projected upon of what one desires them to be. 4. love under social obligation. A very popular form of love, as a specific form of comfort zone, a habit of a sort, when social structure requires loving connection, but if given a choice it would not be sustainable on it’s own. Again, these are the four types of loving relationships between sexual partners, not all the types of relationships.
The first one, the unconditional love, is a constant, self-sustainable flood of oxytocin and dopamine, the other three are associated with spikes of stress hormones, literally, a form of chemical dependency, when the internal chemistry depends on the partner being reliably available, with expected behaviors, predictable, and in close proximity. When they are leaving or ‘mis-behaving’, it causes a severe withdrawal. But even when they are not leaving, it's still pretty stressful, because, on some level, they both understand that it's not really sustainable to be caught in this dynamic. When people are under an obligation to fulfill somebody else's expectations, mostly, at the expense of their happiness, it's bound to accumulate high levels of resentment, which can escalate into an explosion of epic proportions at any moment. It is an addiction of a sort, with everything it implies - control issues, lack of trust on one side, and depression on the other.
In childbirth, anything less than an unconditional love will create a pause in the process of opening. If there are lots of issues around love, there will be lots of pauses.
So, the difference between the stressful types of loving and unconditional love is mainly in how it affects both people and their environment. Unconditional love is a constant, strong flow of energy. The well-being of a person who is capable of it, does not depend on where that other person is, what they do or don’t do. It’s not even about any specific circumstances, it’s about the innate ability to experience that feeling. The greatest gift of the ability to love is a reward in it’s own right. It allows people to see clearly and accept others just the way they are, without demands of neediness for somebody to be different. When a woman can love like that, she is able to surrender and open in birth from a place of deep sensuality, confidence and courage.
It makes women stronger, healthier, much more creative, independent, perceptive, etc. In the hierarchy of human experiences, the ability to love is on the very top and is also known by another name - Enlightenment. All the other kinds of love, leave women in a turmoil, in different degrees of depression, uncertainty, indecisiveness, low self esteem, etc. It’s very difficult to give birth without Love, as it’s hard to thrive in life without it, in general.
A woman has a much greater chance for a short and easy delivery if she is giving birth from a place of complete alignment within her own systems. Of course, there are no guarantees, there are many other dimensions that may interfere, but, again, I’m not talking about the exceptions right now.
So, what does it mean, - alignment within her own systems? I mean that all of her three parts of the brain, - cortex, limbic and reptilian, responsible respectively for mental, emotional and physiological functions, are on the same page about having this baby and neither one of the three objects to it.
Very often we have women really fragmented about being pregnant. For example a woman may believe that she wants a baby, - and in her heart and in her mind it can be very true. But her body might be completely terrified of it, due to her own birth trauma.
A woman learns about giving birth by being born. Her own birth is registered deep in her cellular memory. It’s called Limbic Imprint. It’s an innate function of the nervous system to automatically absorb and memorize all of the sensory experiences during our formative period, starting from the early stages of gestation. A quick overview: the Reptilian brain governs our physiology, the pre-cognitive function of the body. It digests food, pumps the blood, governs breathing, elimination, sex drive, etc. It’s our ‘inner child and inner teenager’, with all the basic physical needs: to eat, rest, procreate, to feel physically safe. It’s our raw, primal instincts and surviving power.
Cortex - is our mental power, logic, skills, our ability to plan, organize, communicate, be responsible, - it’s our ‘inner adult’. The needs of the cortex are: certainty, financial security, predictability, organizational structure, loyalty, respect, etc.
The Limbic system of the brain non-cognitively governs our emotions and feelings. Until it’s activated as our inner ‘elder’, the wise one, it’s left to act out our original limbic imprint, which we get from the formative period, whatever it was we were conditioned into. The needs of the Limbic brain are intimacy, joy and Love.
When the needs of any of these parts of the brain are consistently not met, that part starts acting out, like any child who's needs are not met. Either our inner child or inner parent becomes our tyrannical aspect, trying to get attention any way it can, and tries to high-jack the whole system. If the reptilian brain wins, a person’s behaviors become childlike - they can’t be responsible, drop out of school, become reckless, promiscuous, etc. If the cortex wins, a person becomes a workaholic, - joyless, dry, overwhelmed with responsibilities. Neither one of them can offer a person a harmonious way of living. Running away from responsibilities might sound like fun for a while, but it’s not what we are born for. And it also means that somebody would have to provide for us, with everything that implies. Because if we are siding with our reptilian needs and cortex is ignored, we can’t pay our bills.
On the other hand, if we are stuck in our cortex, we can get a lot done, but our health will suffer greatly. Because health is a reptilian function. If it gets consistently overlooked, it gives up on us. So, the only way to have a harmonious life is when they work together. One of the processes in my healing modality is called ‘The Tri-brain’. It’s designed specifically for that purpose, - to defragment the hard drive, to put all the bits and pieces into one big picture. And that is done by activating the ‘inner Elder’, the limbic brain, which is the common denominator that has the power to connect physiology and intellect and make them stop canceling each other’s impulses. The only Power there is that can bring us into harmony - is through the opening of the heart, which is the limbic function.
Historically, we have a glaring absence of role models of wise elders in our culture. Social emphasis has been for a while now predominantly on physical and mental strength, vs wisdom and compassion. We have many clever and physically strong old people in our society, in general, but not that many kind people.
Wisdom doesn’t always show up with age. Age has been showing up alone for a while… Now, the time has come for us to step up, conjure up the institution of the Elders, becoming ones, if we have the capacity for it; so we, as a society, can cultivate taste and respect towards wise choices and behaviors. I’m not talking about a group of people who would just start looking self-important, demanding respect. True Elders, actually, don’t take themselves very seriously, so they can move through life gracefully and light-heartedly. Besides, respect is not something that can be demanded. It has to be earned.
And when I say ‘Elder’, I do not mean ‘old’. To me, it, first of all, means to be compassionate, understanding, accepting, to have skills of communication, great sense of humor. Which means that Elders can be very young. I’ve seen 5 year old elders among those non-traumatized children I was honored to work with.
When a pregnant woman gets her inner elder activated, she becomes very powerful, capable, and attractive.
Giving birth in that state of being is very profound and beautiful. It makes a huge difference! It might seem like not a very easy step to take, because we often don’t have a reference point for it, but living not in that state is much more difficult. It takes a lot more energy and time to run in circles, when we don’t have a clear sense of direction and purpose that our inner elder can afford us.
So! It’s time to create new reference points in our collective nervous system, because without them life is very confusing. Bringing our babies into this level of confusion is counterproductive. Our counter-intentions are always stronger than our intentions, they cancel each other. When all three parts of the brain are functioning properly, supporting each other, cooperating instead of competing, women can give birth really well, and those who are not pregnant can have a very efficient way of running their energy, to have a more fulfilling, meaningful life. Allowing ourselves to experience our own Wholeness and Harmony is a true gift that we can offer to ourselves. There are many ways to go about it. The Birth Into Being Method offers one of them in a very efficient process, called Tri-Brain.
Pregnancy activates a woman’s cellular memory of her own birth. If she was born well, all that is necessary for her to have a good birth is to be left undisturbed.
But for women who were not born well, being left alone can be pretty scary.
Their bodies, literally, don’t remember what they are supposed to know about birth. The terror of their own birth, their mother’s birth, their grandmother’s birth, is surfacing strongly, overpowering the call of Nature, occupying that place in their psyche where the natural ability to procreate is supposed to reside.
I believe that it is exactly what Bible refers to, when it talks about the ‘original sin’ - it’s the automatic transmission of the bad habit of suffering that women inherited from their foremothers and automatically hand down to their daughters. The baby absorbs the pain and with it, comes an enormous guilt of hurting the mother so much, - it becomes a multi-dimensional pathway of replicating the guilt-driven victim mentality.
If a woman learns to deeply relax, then everything will happen by itself in labor. But, unfortunately, most women don’t have a reference point for the state of relaxation necessary for a successful delivery. Without it, the cervix simply wouldn’t open. If in her whole life a woman lived with a high stress level, her idea of relaxation is not sufficient enough for childbirth.
Every cat knows how to give birth. Genetically, a female cat and a woman have a difference of only about 300 genes out of 30,000. And that difference in 300 genes would not come at the expense of such an important aspect to our survival as procreation. So, theoretically, a woman should be able to give birth, like any cat. But if her own birth trauma was not neutralized, even if she reads all the right books, eats well, exercises, creates a peaceful environment for her delivery, all the good books put together are not going to be able to open her Cervix, because the books are read by her cortex, which governs her mental process and was developed years after her birth trauma was registered in her nervous system. Opening of the Cervix is a function of the reptilian brain, which might be still in a state of shock from her own birth. So if a woman is ready to have a baby in her mind and her heart, but her physiology is not on the same page, it is bound to create complications.
Then, there can be the opposite dilemma,- a woman who is not interested in a child, neither mentally, or emotionally, but her body is ripe and ready for it. So she gets pregnant at the first opportunity and then struggles with it just the same. It doesn’t matter which part of her brain is not agreeing with having a baby, the actual state of disagreement within her is the most powerful source of various complications in birth. The good news is that it’s possible to overcome this fragmentation, and intelligently align all three aspects, and have a beautiful delivery.
For years I was outraged about medical professionals pushing women towards interventions, but by now I’ve heard enough from both sides and while there are inexcusable amount of terrible situations in the maternity wards generated by the hospital delivery teams all over the globe, still, a great number of traumatized babies are the result of maternal ignorance. Which is easily avoidable in this age of information and internet. I’ve heard many times doctors complaining that they are trying to encourage women to have a natural birth, only to hear women saying that they will have to switch doctors to get their elective c-section. Doctors have so much power in the delivery room because we, the women, let them have it. Education, education, education! This is our job description these days.
One more important piece: I was talking about women needing to neutralize their birth trauma, but the same is true for the entire delivery team.
If anyone present at birth has a conscious or unconscious anxiety about their own birth, it’s bound to affect the Birthing Field in the room, and make it longer and more difficult for a woman. Family members, midwives, doctors need to start working on their own birth trauma, in order to prevent projecting it into the deliveries they attend. Energy moves in spirals. The energy of creation, the Birthing Field, whether a galaxy is being birthed, a sea shell or a baby, is a spiraling vortex. Whatever the ingredients are brought into it by those in attendance, they will all blend together.
The way we discovered it in Moscow, in 1983, was when we had a meeting to brainstorm some logistics with birth preparation classes. Tatiana Sargunas, the woman in my film that gives birth alone in a plexiglass tank, was called to a birth in the middle of the meeting. While trying to figure out when we could resume, I asked her if she could estimate how long the birth will be. Her answer inspired a good look at our policy about who should be invited to births. She said: ‘well, the woman is well prepared, she really can give birth in a couple of hours; but her mother will be there, so add another 10 hours maybe’. I looked at her in astonishment and said ‘well, I noticed it too, they give birth the minute moms leave the room’.
We looked into it more carefully and from then on, it became our official policy - only those who were willing to make an effort to neutralize their own birth trauma and their relationships issues were invited to be present at births.
Medical doctors and midwives attending births need to do it for themselves, because first of all, their experience of attendance will become much more satisfying, they can avoid a burnout if their own birth trauma is not triggered by every birth they attend, and it’s a big relief to stop being a source of distress for a laboring woman.
The other factors of emotional nature that may cause complications in birth are:
- woman's history of sexual and/or emotional abuse - the complexity of her relationships with herself, with the baby, with the father of the baby, with her parents, with the world in general and, as I mentioned already, attendant’s skills and their quality of presence, whether it’s negatively affected by their own birth trauma or not.
If we take care of all of those issues that might possibly generate birth complications, then complications simply don’t arise. In the past, when I was sharing about our birth camps at the Black Sea, I was often asked 'what if something went wrong?' I was told many times that it was really irresponsible to take people into the middle of nowhere to birth their babies, etc. May be… But first of all, those people would not want to miss it for anything; it was always at their own accord, nobody was pulling or pushing them. Secondly, only couples who attended all of the preparation classes during winter in Moscow were invited to come. People who didn’t feel like they can do it, would simply not entertain this idea in the first place. It was certainly not open for everybody. It was, sort of, the Russian birthing Olympics, and like with any Olympics, it was only for those who felt strong and healthy enough to embark on this journey. It was never about convincing somebody to do it. There was no convincing at all. In fact, some people, who joined the class too late in their pregnancy for completing the course, were turned down. I don’t even know how people were finding out about us. In my estimation, in those days, only about 20% of women were interested in hearing about alternatives. Only half of them would be interested in trying something, and only about half of those would actually follow through, which leaves us with about 5%. Nothing is really good for everybody. Even with stuff that is objectively good, there is always somebody, who responds to it negatively.
That’s why I was never promoting water birth, or any kind of specific birth.
I was always promoting bringing more consciousness into the whole process of people-making, what ever form it would take, and tuning more into the baby’s needs, letting the baby make this choice of the delivery type, which sometimes can be very different from the mother’s choice. There were even a few times in those days in Russia, when a baby was born at home on the morning of the flight to the Black Sea, preventing parents from going there, even though the parents had a strong intention to go. And a couple of times, when a pregnant woman would be at the camp for a long time, waiting for the birth, and finally having to fly back home still pregnant to deliver immediately upon arrival. Babies do have their voting power in birth that should not be argued with.
At the Black Sea, we had 100% success, with no complications at all, which is an answer by itself to those who were upset about that idea. To summarize: if you properly prepare, chances are nothing bad will happen.
It is not always possible to tell, just by observation, if a woman is running some counter productive programs in her nervous system. Sometimes it is obvious that she had a tough life, low self-esteem and health issues. But with some women, I would have never guessed, because they look beautiful, healthy, strong, assertive. Then, given an opportunity to take down her guards and actually look at what exactly she is guarding, the huge volume of deep rage and sadness might surprise anyone.
The most important factor in bringing real healing into that place in her, is her willingness to free herself from it, which eliminates about half of the women right here. Too many women have built their identity around the issues of their victim mentality, so for them to let go of their pain sometimes means to go into an identity crisis, they might not know who they are without their pain, so are not really ready to part with it.
If a woman is in a good place in her life to explore her options, in this age of internet, she can easily find out where she can go for help. We have such a vast variety of alternative practitioners these days, that all it takes is to be willing to look for them. I am doing my part in offering a pretty comprehensive program, which I have been putting together for years and now it has been condensed to 40 very effective processes. They are very different from each other, but have a few commonalities.
Some of them have a cathartic part to them, but are not focused on the catharsis. The focus is, instead, on creating an experience of victoriously getting out of suffering. The cathartic part is very short, it might last only about a minute or a few, so the emphasis is on the creating a new reference point of leaving the pain behind. It is necessary for healing to go deeply into the pain body, but not for the sake of getting there, but for the sake of creating an alternative route out of that exact tight spot. In my healing modality, we don’t let the client get re-traumatized. It’s necessary to have an experience of opening that Pandora’s box and allow the feelings to be felt, - may be, it’s deep loneliness, sense of betrayal, may be it is an overwhelming sensation of being unloveable, or not good enough… Most of us have our own specific ways of giving our power away, that we adopted very early in life, so early that it became our false identity, we don’t remember ourselves without it, any other way. It plays out in everything we do - in our relationships, in our business, in the way we give birth (and in the way we attend birth).
So, I suggest to leave no rocks unturned and give a good look at the whole situation the woman is in.
The earlier in pregnancy the better, but in the best case scenario, all of this should be done way before she is pregnant. The full program of 40 processes, designed to help her from 40 different angles to sort out all of her unresolved issues with the world, with herself, with her pregnancy, with her fears, relationships, desires, etc. Some of the processes are done as a whole group, some - one-on-one with a facilitator, some are in groups of 3 or 4, or 5, or 7 people, very different format for all of them, but one thing is in common - it’s not about looking back, it’s about seeing beyond the story, into the essence of the Spirit’s intention to embody, which brought her to this body in the first place. It puts things into perspective. It activates her true identity, not the one that she was conditioned into, but the one that is invincible and eternal, which can not be harmed. It helps to shift her attention from victimhood to a simple and deep realization, that she is not what happened to her. That at any given moment, she has a choice to step out of the drama and experience Life directly, from the place of intimate, innate connection with the Source.
From everything I’ve learned about healing in the last 34 years of working with thousands of people, re-traumatizing ourselves by re-experiencing the original birth trauma over and over again, is counter-productive. People remain symptomatic, no matter how many cathartic experiences they had and how much they understand why exactly they are symptomatic. Understanding does not allow the energy to shift, it doesn’t bring the healing, even though it feels really good to be able to articulate the feelings from the past, to figure out what exactly happened, how and why, and be able to explain our present dysfunctions in modern psychological terminology. In my observation, it’s actually re-enforcing the existing trauma. It feeds on our attention to it, becoming more tyrannical.
What brings the healing is the creation of an alternative reference point of an actual real-time experience of being held, of deep intimacy, loving touch, empathy, love, safety and direct heart-to-heart connection in the nervous system, - that’s what has the power to bring an actual shift into the original limbic imprint. Catharsis is very good, but in homeopathic doses. In my processes, we do get to that point of extreme pain sometimes, but it’s very short. To get there takes about 1-3 minutes and getting out of there can take another 5-10 minutes. That’s all. In the BIB Method, it’s considered counter-productive to indulge in misery. Facilitators are instructed to NOT FEED THE DRAMA!
The process doesn’t have to be short, sometimes it can take as long as necessary, even an hour, I never suggest any time frame. It can be as intense and cathartic as the ‘client’ feels necessary, and it can be as short and graceful as they are willing to imagine, like with everything in life. There is no way of knowing ahead. Sometimes the client has a very strong built-in meme ‘no pain no gain’, so they won’t go for an easy way. It’s usually the situation with a lot of early trauma when their very identity was formed around a specific sensation. So it’s not easy for them to let go of it.
I firmly believe that healing comes from a visceral, kinesthetic realization that we are not what happened to us. Owning our history, accepting it, forgiving it, but not giving it the power to continue being our false identity. It’s in realization that we are much bigger and much more complex than anything that was ever done to us. I call it ‘harvesting the story’. Learning from it, all that is possible to be learned, and releasing it with gratitude for showing us the pieces that needed our attention. This is the bottom line of the healing process in my understanding.
One of the main Birth Into Being ‘signature’ processes is a one-on-one process called the Core Cry. This Process takes a maximum of 1hr, and the feedback is consistent that years of therapy did not add up to a fraction of it’s effect. It’s done in a slightly altered state, which is achieved by specific way of breathing and moving, before the process starts.
The key to it’s effectiveness is the integration afterwards, when the achieved desired state of being is lovingly guided into the physical body, into the flesh and bones. The client is held in a supportive circle of people for integration, while deeply breathing, being gently touched, whispered to empowering affirmations, - the body is being helped to accept the new order of things. All the insights and emotional high points achieved in the process are guided to land in the tissues of the body, so it does not remain as another mental construction, but becomes a part of the nervous system. It’s an incredible experience to have! The whispering is activating the cortex, the touch is activating the reptilian brain and the deep breath is activating the limbic system, all parts equally, at the same time. That, by itself, creates a state of absolute bliss.
The outcome of any process is completely unpredictable: for most people, it’s very blissful, but a few times people were activated in their basic resentment to Life. Either one of the responses are a necessary step - to activate what’s there waiting to be activated. It has to start somewhere!
I have a nickname for my course. I call it ‘Magical Theater of Second Chances’: It’s not about what happened in our personal history, it’s about finally getting what we needed to experience back then, saying what needed to be said when we could not say it. It is not a ‘family constellation’ method, if you are familiar with it, and might recognize some similar elements of playing stuff out in some of the processes, as there is no focus on what historically happened.
The point of it all is to raise the reading on our ‘live-o-stat’ (it’s like a thermostat, only it measures our life force). If you close your eyes and imagine something like a thermometer, with a scale between 0 to 10. With 0 being tired, sick, unhappy, and 10 being vibrant, full of energy, feeling sexy and creative.
Right now, take a deep breath and allow yourself to see what number is your ‘zest for life’. (Honestly, - you don’t have to tell it to anyone). What number are you on?
So, if you are not 10, - what’s holding you back from being a 10?
I just finished my 16 day Facilitator training in Germany. Every training for me is a mystery. None of them was ever the same. I don’t have a schedule or a structure of how the days unfold, I just follow the group’s energy. Every day I’m in an Uncharted territory. I have the list of processes, of course, but there is no way of knowing in what order they will be called forth and what happens in between. This training was absolutely magical, I’m still high from it, two months later… On the pictures from it on my site, you can see the level of connection and intimacy between the participants, who were from 24 countries and were complete strangers to each other just a few days before the pictures were taken. That’s how the Birthing Field works, you can never know what will happen. It keeps me interested in doing this work. With so many workshops that I’ve done, I would have gotten really overwhelmed and bored to do the same thing over and over. So I had to be creative in order to keep myself interested in keeping on. That’s the whole point of this process - to improvise and practice the quality of presence, awareness, mindfulness within the high level of uncertainty. But wait, that’s how the Birthing Field works! You never know what and when will happen! As in the proverbial famous task from the Russian fairy tales: ‘Go there, I don’t really know where, and bring me that, which I don’t know what’, - a task that a hero must accomplish to get the girl, which really means for him the only thing anyone ever really wants - to experience love.
Our culture habitually takes pregnancy for granted, we are very disconnected from that event being deeply mystical, and highly unlikely. From everything science knows about conception, there should not be any people on Earth. If we take into consideration the unbelievable complexity of a long chain of micro events that leads to the birth of a baby, we can understand that it’s nothing short of a miracle, really. A pregnant woman is engaged in a deeply Shamanic process, conjuring up something that did not exist before. While it is still being a purely anatomical event, at the same time, who can really say that they understand what makes our anatomy work so well?
We know what different stages of gestation look like, but we really know nothing about what’s really going on in there, why and how the life form is being called forth out of non-existence. What power is guiding an epic journey of the sperm and an egg to meet each other and then surrender to each other against all odds, and then for the egg to embark on an Odyssey to find the womb and attach itself securely inside of it. At any given point of this very complex task, it can be lost. To my understanding, we have to employ some higher powers in order to explain the existence of a body. It can not simply happen by a random fluctuation of chemicals and molecules just bumping into each other. I do believe that Conception is called forth by a speck of consciousness, the Spirit, of a future human being. I don’t see how we can go around it and dismiss that notion… And from the Spirit’s perspective, every living human being is a great success story, just because they are alive. All the drama that happens between one moment of non-existence and the next moment of non-existence, is man-made, and we can intelligently addressed it.
The main drama of our life happens in the sphere of our relationships.
Because our relationships are inevitably built on our projections, we are rarely able to see people for who and what they really are. We perceive others through the lenses of our previous experiences, expectations, needs, our social and religious upbringing. It’s very difficult to maintain the sufficient level of awareness, where our relationships are real, and where they slip into a ‘theater of projections’. For example, we rarely know our parents as people. We know them through the story of how we felt growing up in their care, but what kind of people they are and what relationships would be possible with them if they were not our parents, is sometimes hard to imagine. Same is true with most of our family members, we have many layers of emotional memories that interfere with our ability to relate to people directly. Some Processes that I offer are geared towards helping people sort relationships out and free the frozen energy from old stories. It is very important to do this kind of work before the due date, because sometimes, the old stories keep a lot of energy on hold, and it’s not available for when a woman needs it in labor. Unresolved situations are extremely energy consuming. Especially if she experienced sexual trauma.
Whether a woman is pregnant or not, sexual abuse is greatly affecting her quality of life.
If she is pregnant, it will, most likely, show up during delivery as some form of complications. It is very difficult to relax and open in birth if the Vagina is associated with pain, shame, guilt, or any kind of abuse. Stats on rape vary from country to country, but are really high everywhere. It is vitally important to do as much as she possibly can to neutralize the emotional impact of that experience. We have a few processes in the BIB Method to help with sexual trauma. As well as with healing the trauma from previous deliveries, stillbirths, miscarriages, infertility. I find it vitally important to neutralize the negative emotional impact from as many painful past experiences as possible.
We are constantly bombarded by all kinds of confusing messages. Human beings are by default highly suggestible. It’s really important to create healthy boundaries with social memes. It takes very little for a negative message to enter our nervous system. Suffering in childbirth is a form of self-hypnosis that has continued for thousands of years from the infamous phrase in the Bible that women should suffer in birth. It’s against our very Nature, but it’s so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche, and is such a strong habit at this point, that we accept it as norm. A new mother, by the time she is about to give birth, is exposed to, on average, over a hundred horrible, terrifying birth scenes from the movies, her family and friends, even from her school education.
When I was young, living in Siberia, within a very harsh social structure, seeing the devastation of the ecological destruction of one of the most beautiful places in the world, which was even then, in the 70's and 80's, pretty much out of control, don’t get me started on that! I was pretty depressed. I was deeply ashamed of being human, of being a part of a contributing factor that was hurting this beautiful being, our planet Earth. I felt that humankind was sort of a parasite on the surface of this planet, like a ring worm, digging and digging under her skin, annoying her. So I was getting involved with the many groups of activists trying to find the answers to what can be done to stop this path of devastation.
And in all of my searches, I kept coming back to the same answer - we need to start making people differently, so they are not prone to self-destruction.
When I learned to meditate and go deep into my own direct connection with the Source, I got a very clear understanding that humankind was not a parasitic species after all. I had a beautiful vision of human beings as the nervous system of this planet, with each individual being like a nerve ending, responsible for collecting and delivering all of the sensory experiences into the collective morphogenetic field, helping this young, beautiful being we call Earth to get to know herself, to evolve into whatever she needs to evolve into.
That vision evaporated my depression. It was gone in a heartbeat, I knew what I’m going to do with my life. I realized that the reason why there is so much suffering around me was because most people were not feeling much, that there is some sort of a contagious condition of mass numbness. And if we are to be responsible for the function of the nervous system of the Earth, we need to be able to activate and sharpen our senses as much as we can. Our own sensory apparatus is of critical importance, following that logic! So if we keep ourselves desensitized, hiding from Life, we are wasting our precious time here on Earth.
Then I noticed an incongruence of such an enormous task of being a feeling antennae and being equipped with only 5 senses. It seemed like an unreasonable supply. So I started looking into it, and found so many senses that we habitually don’t account for! First, I found 7 more, then I found another dozen, then another, - every time I focused on it, I found more. So now I have a list of 120 senses, which I actually have on my website, but I’m sure if I would try again, I’ll find more. Please, chip in if you are interested in this subject and will come up with a new sense that is not listed on my site.
The main obstacle is that those senses need to be activated pretty early in life. It gets much more difficult later, as we mature and our basic settings solidify. If nobody activated those senses for us, we don’t know that we have them and we can not activate them for our children. We basically have the same sensory capacity as all mammals out there put together, but in the wild, their survival depends on their senses, they get to use them. With our cultural norms of raising children, we don’t depend on our senses to survive. So, like with everything in the body - use it or lose it. So we lose them.
This is where my attention turned to birth. Because it is apparently where we lose our main capacity and desire to feel. Due to the sensory overload at birth, we shift into the state of permanent dissociation and go through life barely noticing it. It takes a very skillful, tender, loving welcome into the body for a baby to relax into it, and very skillful parenting afterwards. Otherwise, we get what we have all around us, - a culture where Love is very rare, because it’s very difficult to really love while in a state of dissociation.
The good news is that now we are talking about it and will find the many ways of activating our senses as much as we can and help our children enjoy many more of theirs.
Good birth is not only much easier on the women, my main interest in it was inspired by searching for ways of helping the new generation stay intact with their intention to walk the Earth. So they don’t have to deal with the amnesia, not remembering who they are and why they are here.
Sometimes, I get really frustrated. I’ve been saying all of those things for 34 years and still feel like I’m not getting too far… I know, we are much further into the game than where the mass mentality was in the early 80s, when I got involved. I actually know that the critical mass of human beings is well aware of our predicament and are able and willing to do their part in the spiritual evolution of our species. But also, I am quietly resolved to not be pushing it, and wait patiently for the right timing. I witness many people actively, subconsciously resist their own healing as a way of hiding from Life, and avoiding responsibilities that the greater Freedom offers in Life.
Free Will is our birthright, but also it is our greatest challenge.
In the hierarchy of life’s challenges, Freedom is probably on the very top. That’s why we see so little of it. Many people talk about wanting it, but few are actually willing to claim it. On some level, everyone is aware that Freedom is the true Power but it is also the greatest responsibility to fully show up in Life. That is exactly why so many people carefully avoid it; avoid freedom from their pain and resist healing. Because Pain is the perfect excuse for not being engaged with Life. And It’s a very necessary and clever strategy to survive until the Soul is ready to meet the challenge of exercising the Free Will, which is one of the greatest Mysteries of our life. It’s our ‘magic wand’, our ‘remote control’ that allows us to switch channels and create our own reality, suitable to our liking.
Popular interpretation of Freedom is as permission to do nothing. It can’t be further away from Truth. Most ‘spiritual’ modalities promote the notion of detachment and emotional un-involvement. But that’s not what called our Spirits to walk the Earth. We can be detached for eons while we are not in the body. But something inspired us to own this body now, for a short while, so we could truly experience it in the thick of Life. So it only makes sense to me to use this time of having a body wisely and do everything that we can only do when we have a body. We can’t hold hands and kiss, if we don’t have a body, right? - we can’t run barefoot in the grass, eat delicious fruit, play with our children. All of that requires us to have a body and the ability to feel and love, so we can really enjoy this journey in this 3D reality.
There is a huge gap between a true experience of Joy and Happiness and merely a comfort zone. In a survival mode, we are willing to settle for comfort instead of finding out what Joy really means to us. And there is time in life when it’s fine, as long as we are aware of it and consciously choose to settle. But most of the time, comfort zones are contraindicated to finding Joy in Life. Happiness is not when nothing bad is going on. It’s when we have a meaningful life, filled with friendships, lovers, music, great food, children’s laughter! I‘ll dance to that!
Spiraling
Spiraling - is the way the energy moves in the Universe. Energy can’t move straight forward, it can only spiral forward. If something looks like waves, it means we simply don’t see the whole picture. We can consciously align our own rhythms and movements of the body to the Greater Rhythm of Life Force Pulsation. It’s a powerful healing modality by itself. It feels fantastic and charges the body with a lot of energy.
It’s not a mechanical ‘belly dance’ hip rotation, even though the hip rotation is also a very good exercise, but it’s not what I’m talking about right now. I am suggesting the deep listening to the pulse and motion of the energy of the planet and allowing each impulse to move the body. There is no ‘doing’ in that experience, only allowing it.
Through the body the energy moves in both directions, up and down, like in a DNA string. One stream of energy moves from the Center of the Earth into our feet, up, around the spinal cord, out of the Crown Chakra, spiraling upward into the Source of One’s Spirit; and the downward stream of energy spirals from there straight into the crown chakra, around the spinal cord, down the legs, out from the feet into the Center of the Earth. If we cultivate our awareness of this constant dance of two spiraling streams of energy through our body, we become much more resilient to the challenges that the body encounters throughout our lifetime. And it is extremely helpful during childbirth.
Now, a bit about infertility: We discovered that in the workshops, we had amazing success with infertility. I never promoted or announced that it can have that effect, firstly because I didn’t know. But then it was never a goal of mine to get some specific results and to promise them. I trust the overall process and firmly believe that when a person is completely aligned with their desire, everything happens for the greater good. So, at some point I noticed that only one woman who struggled with conceiving, out of all the women who ever came to my workshops with this issue was not able to conceive. That one woman was 52 by the time she came to me, I think that might have been a factor. Countless others got pregnant naturally shortly after attending the course. I believe, that the number one reason for infertility is the woman’s own birth trauma, and secondly, the confusion within her system about what part of her wants the child, and which aspects of her are absolutely terrified of that idea.
It can be that some part of her that is terrified of the possibility of giving birth is overpowering her God-given anatomy and keeps her from conceiving. And, of course there are mechanical issues. But, there are so many modalities that are addressing the physicality, the chemistry, that I just mentioned, but the unique niche of Birth Into Being is connecting the dots and helping a woman align within her own systems, so she could really understand herself and what she wants.
It also happened a few times that at the beginning of the workshop that a woman would say that she is struggling with infertility, and even paid a great deal of money for a few attempts with artificial insemination, but by the end of the workshop she would realize that she actually doesn’t want a child. Thank goodness that she did not get pregnant, because she would first get a clear understanding that it was safe to want it, because, on some level, she knew she can’t have it; it was her unconscious way of giving away her power by feeling victimized, not having something that she could be having. The desire was mainly driven by the social factors, like the pressure from family members, or because her girlfriends had their babies already, - for all the wrong reasons, in other words.
So, she realized that her desire never passed the need to fit into the ‘Mommy Club’, and that she never actually thought that after having a child, there she would have it! 24/7! In that level of dissociation, it feels like giving birth is the end of the story… From what I gathered, many women struggling with infertility rarely thought about that past giving birth, that the child will be there to stay, for the rest of their lives. And that comes as a shock sometimes, as a surprise. And it’s more common than not. But it’s really a necessary first step in healing - realization of what is behind of what we think we want. There is so much attention on preparing for birth, and very few classes that are actually informing a woman that her life is never going to be the same after it.
Still, on some level, even if only unconsciously, a woman who struggles with infertility, does know that. And it plays a big part into the issue. And that’s the part that prevents her from getting pregnant.
Ideally, if a woman wants to have a child, she needs to be completely conscious in her choice. That it’s not something that is worth doing from the place of mis-alignment because so much drama can come out from artificial insemination.
When a woman mechanically bypasses her inability to have a baby, it does not address the issue. It just makes the baby’s body bypassing the logic of the Birthing Field. The bottom line is, that most of the times, when the underlying emotional and psychological issues were addressed, conception happened naturally. Having said all of that, I’m not saying that it never should be done. Because, in some cases, there are exceptions to the rule. I’m not making a blank statement that IVF is not a good thing. I am saying that there is a big part of the issue that is tied into the emotional confusion around quintessential existential relationships with Life itself, that are better to resolve before getting artificially inseminated and bypassing that road block.
An example of IVF being a good thing is when there is some kind of pre-incarnational agreement between a woman’s soul and the soul of her baby that the physical incarnation will be through her, for some specific reason. But, some kind of mechanical or environmental damage happened to her physiology, in spite of her connection with the soul of that child and now she can’t conceive. In such a case, I believe, it’s a blessing that we have this technology of IVF now. But if a woman is trying to conceive mechanically, creating a body without a Soul waiting to come through her, it’s a Russian roulette times a hundredfold.
With infertility issues, like with most of our issues, one of the main things to do is to neutralize birth trauma. It’s a number one deal breaker, in my book. If a woman was not born well, her body can be still in shock from her own birth and doesn’t want to budge. But also, it’s not just about her. Many times, it was her husband’s birth trauma and his consequential fear of fatherhood that prevented pregnancy. In a few situations, the men were able to work with their issues and that was a successful strategy; in other cases, women got immediately pregnant with different partners. But that doesn’t take away the number one medicine for infertility - connection with the soul of the baby, so a woman knows for sure that someone is waiting to come through her. Then everything will happen beautifully. I’ve taken my own medicine. In fact, it exists only because I was searching for healing of my own early trauma. And now, I have put together everything that worked for me in my own search of my true identity, dismembered at birth.
My mother’s experience of my conception, birth and then postpartum with me was really terrible for her. When I tune into what she went through to give me life, I can’t help but wonder how in the world we even survived… I grew up hearing the many miserable stories… how much she didn’t want a baby, how hard her life was when she was pregnant, how inhumane the delivery was, how she had to stand in long lines for the artificial milk, how impossibly painful it was for her to put her nipple into my mouth after the milk inside got stagnant while I was taken away for 5 days after my birth. Now, my mom has a clear memory of breastfeeding me! I nearly fell off backwards when she casually mentioned it! I actually had no idea it can work that way! I mean, literally, she now thinks that I was breastfed!!! Of course, she is 84 now, but she has a very clear mind, still remembers everybody’s birthdays and phone numbers. I’ve done so much work reprogramming my own nervous system, that now she has a real, vivid, beautiful memory of a happy postpartum with me!
The two of us spent long hours packing her stuff in Russia, when I was moving her to live with me in CA, going thru family archives, photo albums, etc, - that's when it came out. I was so surprised at her remarks, so I gently asked some more questions around this subject, - yep! As far as she is concerned, I was breastfed!
I guess, all of the times I had visualized this experience, accumulated to such degree that my mother's memory was replaced by association. ...what do you know... I will never cease to be surprised with this work!
The bottom line:
1. It is vitally important for us to create a new cultural norm for the wholesome, safe, dignified childbirth and disregard the notion that women should suffer in birth. We need to educate young people about it and heal our own birth trauma, so we don’t bring our own anxiety into the way we teach the young. 2. I believe that most complications in birth have emotional origins and are preventable. 3. I believe that healing can not happen if we focus on all the wrongs we have endured. I have witnessed thousands of times that real healing happens when we are able to bring love into that place where pain was, and create new reference points in the nervous system, harvesting our painful experiences, transmuting them, expanding our horizons to see a bigger picture, letting go of our victim identity and addiction to pain. 4. Healing is in recovery of our true identity as Embodied Spirits, who came to this planet to love, play, grow gardens, dance, sing, swim with dolphins, and raise our children to be an integral part of the eco-system of the Earth.
Thank you for receiving my message!
In Love and Service, Elena