This turn of phrase strikes me as a bit funny. I imagine my womb wearing a suit of armor, like an over ambitious chastity belt. But the truth is, most of us naturally armor our whole bodies quite efficiently all the time. And our wombs are the organ that our bodies instinctively attempt to protect the most. Our wombs are also the organ that is most often under attack. So it is no surprise that our womb would be the area our body creates the most armor.
Our bodies armor themselves without us even trying or intending to. It is a natural response to stress and trauma. When we are under stress, our tissues harden. The fascia, a gelatinous web of tissue that weaves through all of our musculature, connecting, supporting, and holding us together, hardens under stress. Whether that stress is an acute physical trauma or a prolonged state of fight, flight, freeze, or faun mode, the effect is the same. As long as stress hormones are passing through our system, our fascia hardens.
Our muscles also adhere to each other under prolonged periods of stress in order to maintain strength and ability to perform when fatigued. And our tissues and organs all sustain damage when exposed to prolonged stress response hormones. I suspect part of the hardening that naturally occurs is to protect from these damaging effects.
The womb is the flower of the human body. As plants do, when we are under stress, we channel all of our energies to the flower to ensure the potential to pass on our genetic codes to the world. But unlike some plants that simply pump what juice they have left into blossoms and then developing seeds, allowing everything else to whither, humans must feel safe and supported enough to not only gestate a baby for 9 months and birth it into the world, but then breastfeed and rear that baby until it is self sufficient.
So instead of pumping all of the juice we have left into our reproductive function when under stress, we actually shut it down if we are unlikely to have the support and nourishment needed to bear and rear a child. The way we channel energy to the womb under stress is by armoring it. Shutting down the blossoming process and containing that energy deep within until the stress has passed and it is safe to blossom fully.
So the first step in de-armoring the womb is for our life circumstances to change in such a way that we feel safe and supported to fully blossom. If we do not feel this way, our body will naturally continue to armor our womb and every other part of our body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Only after these changes start to take place can we benefit from the various healing modalities designed to de-armor the womb.
Often, however, we are so accustomed to living in circumstances in which we do not feel safe and supported to truly blossom that we are not even aware that this is how we are living. We develop whole personalities full of coping mechanisms that we end up equating with our identities just to survive our unsafe, unsupported childhood development. We recreate the same unsafe, unsupported circumstances as adults as this is what is familiar and what constructs our identity.
Fortunately, the impulse to blossom pulses under our armor like a beacon, calling to us with the voice of desire, or perhaps the voice of discontent. Sometimes it calls with the voice of despair, pain, illness, or need. Sometimes we simply find ourselves changing in unexpected ways, unable to carry on as before and therefore simply taking a step onto a new path.
However this shift happens, one way or another, many of us realize that we are living from inside a very constricting suit of armor of our own body’s construction. It chafes. We become inflamed, irritated, dissatisfied with the way things are. We might want something for our lives that we cannot seem to achieve in our armored state. Intimacy, sexual satisfaction, fertility, creative fruition, a feeling of purpose, freedom from pain, joy.
So we start to explore ways to achieve these things. First we might use the same coping skills that worked to help us survive our unsafe and unsupported childhoods. But those very quickly prove to be only good at creating more of the same. It often feels like we must give up our identity in order to find a pathway towards fulfilling our desires. What we are really giving up is our armoring.
This is very hard to do when our life still feels unsafe and unsupported. But at least now we know that we feel unsafe and unsupported. So we start to explore how to feel more safe, how to create healthy boundaries, ask for what we want and need, let go of relationships that are not supportive, develop new relationships and life structures that are. The shedding of armor and this building of a new life go hand in hand.
One might even say that we build the new life structures out of that melted down armor, alchemized back into living tissue, that breathes and flows and allows for blossoming.
The caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly is an exquisite map for this type of change. The cocoon does not represent the armor, however. It represents a zone of safety that we must create around ourselves in order for our armor to dissolve and be reabsorbed, becoming new structures with new functions.
So as we seek to de-armor ourselves, our wombs, to achieve whatever desires are motivating us, we must ask what is needed to feel safe enough to allow our whole identity to dissolve and reform itself with a new blueprint? A blueprint of a life that is safe enough to blossom in?
A cocoon is a womb. Life is full of womb spaces that can hold us through transformation. May we all find our way back to Divine Mother’s womb to be born anew.
Sama Morningstar's Bio-Mystical Womb Apprenticeship program is designed to offer a supportive, safe environment for de-armoring. Learn more here: https://www.samamorningstar.com/bio-mystical-womb-healing-apprentic