Conscious Pro-Creation as a Pathway to Freedom from Addictions
In my many interviews, I’ve described the mechanism of correlation between the way we were born and the quality of our emotional life as adults. Limbic imprint is an inborn capacity of the nervous system to absorb and memorize non-cognitively all of the information from the surrounding environment during the pre-verbal formative period from conception, through gestation, birth, and the first few years of life.
It means that if the baby was predominantly saturated with mother’s ‘Love Hormones’,
Oxytocin and other dopamines, the baby grows well and feels safe about coming into this family. If, on the other hand, the baby was exposed to predominantly stressful experiences, that would mean adopting negative sensory overload as the norm by the baby’s limbic brain and nervous system. Against any logic, loneliness and suffering would register as ‘comfort zone’, as the cortex (logic) is not developed yet and cannot cognitively rationalize that it’s not a desirable experience.
It is no coincidence that the drug culture of the 1960’s exploded after medical drugs were introduced into delivery rooms during the 1940’s. It set up the whole generation to depend on chemicals as a way of dealing with life. The greatest irony is that it is our inherent desire to feel good, about ourselves and the world around us, to find that ‘paradise lost’ – the sense of belonging to some omnipresent loving Source –it is exactly what drives the unskilled search towards the quick fix of addictive behaviors.
Ramana, one of the legendary yogis of India, once said that when he experienced Enlightenment, it lasted for 15 seconds, but it had enough impact on him to spend the rest of his life in devotion to this moment. For women, this kind of experience of Enlightenment is biologically available every time they go into labor to deliver a baby. The amount of Oxytocin her brain is capable of releasing would be sufficient for her to enter that state of being.
It is the natural bliss that is supposed to become the baby’s emotional ‘basic settings’.
When a woman’s body is doing its work without interference from her own anxiety, she is capable of experiencing pure ecstasy during delivery. Her hormones ‘dialogue’ with the baby’s hormones, ‘wiring’ the baby’s ‘settings’ onto a deep sense of well-being and fearless attitude towards life and melded in sweet connection with the mother, who is felt by the baby as a nurturing, loving Source of Existence. That is the most basic sensation every one of us has the right to experience at birth, because that is how female procreational neuro-biology and hormonal landscape is supposed to function.
Unfortunately, so far, it is only a privilege of so few...
Because if a woman was not born well herself, her body doesn’t know that it knows how to produce enough oxytocin during delivery. The good news is that it’s possible to re-train our nervous system to the sufficient production of oxytocin by writing a new script for our own birth and triggering the creation of new reference points that includes feelings of safety and nurture.
We can learn to be truly kind to ourselves. It’s, in most cases, harder than learning to walk or speak, if we were imprinted on suffering from the beginning of times... This is exactly why the longest journey one will ever undertake is the journey from the head to the heart. Because if the feelings are emotionally disconnected from physiology, one cannot tell the difference between love and lust, with no reference point of what it’s supposed to feel like – be safe, loved, respected.