An important part of the Bio-Mystical Womb Healing journey is revisiting how we were born into this world and becoming aware of the energetic, physical, and emotional blueprints this potent moment created for us. Most humans alive today have suffered from traumatizing birthing practices that have created blueprints of stress and anxiety about our very right to exist. These practices have robbed us of essential developmental milestones that are meant to happen during the birth process and the moments thereafter. From the get go, we are playing with a damaged and incomplete deck of cards.
There have been many healing modalities developed over the years to address this collective wound. Some have been quite controversial as folks went a bit too far in attempting to reproduce the experience of being at the threshold between life and death and ended up re-traumatizing people. This is often the case with these types of deep wounds as we want so desperately to heal them that we assert and push ourselves too hard, repeating the same energetic pattern that caused the wounding in the first place.
My journey with Re-birthing has been gradual and gentle, revisiting those moments on many different occasions with different healing modalities and from different angles, reclaiming small pieces of my development that had been lost each time, slowly piecing my full potential back together little by little.
Much of this process has been supported by skilled energy healers and bodyworkers over the years, in collaboration with my own self reflection and somatic self healing practices. My mother has always nurtured this process, even unknowingly, with her retellings of my birth story every year on my birthday. She would prepare one of my favorite meals for dinner, often it was Cream of Mushroom Chicken and Rice, Fettuccini Alfredo, Chicken and Dumplings, or one time I asked for Salt en Boca, a labor intensive Italian family recipe. Then as we ate, she would tell the story of how she did not know she was going into labor at first.
As I was her first child, she was unfamiliar with the sensations. She had eaten donuts the night before and thought she was having indigestion at 4am. She was living with her mother, however, who had much more experience and knew to take her to the hospital. Sure enough, it was time.
At the hospital, she was confronted with a medical norm at the time of responding to birthing mothers with a host of routines and procedures often disconnected with what was actually going on. Because she was 17 years old and a first time mother, they insisted she have an epidural despite her objections. They rolled her on her side asking her to pull her knees into her chest to receive the needle into her spine right in the middle of a contraction. She would always share at this point in the story that the pain of the needle was more painful than the contractions were.
30 minutes later I was born. The epidural had not even taken effect yet. But because of procedure, now she was not allowed to hold me right away as she was required to spend the next 4 hours in the recovery room. I spent those 4 hours in the nursery. She often described her anger at the way this had been done. I could feel her fierceness every time she told the story. She described how throughout those 4 hours she insisted that they give her baby back. They finally relented, and against their medical recommendation, she brought me home.
There are many aspects of this story that created blueprints for me and influenced my life fundamentally. These include a deep longing for reunion with Mother and never truly feeling like I could connect with her as intimately as I would have liked, a deep distrust of doctors, hospitals, and invasive medical interventions, and also a sense of the fierce mother drawing me back to her. I have worked with all of these and more throughout my many years of exploring rebirthing.
The first actual re-birthing ceremony I participated in was with my first Womb Awakening Apprenticeship. In this ceremony, I had the opportunity to relive all of these aspects of my birth how it actually happened in a visceral way and was finally about to process many of the emotions involved that I had to stash away in my body as an infant as they were too much for my undeveloped capacities at the time. I was also able to re-imprint on Divine Mother as my birth mother, allowing her infinite love to fill in the gaps that my human mother could not fill. This was a powerful healing.
After participating in this ceremony several times with the Womb Awakening community, I felt drawn to bring this re-birthing healing into the water. I was studying warm water therapy with an excellent teacher and practitioner. This modality, called Waterdance, has methods of supporting the body to revisit the physical circumstances within the womb built in.
I had a powerful experience of a spontaneous re-birth during one of our classes. My teacher was demonstrating a movement called the Embryo with me. In this move the practitioner brings the receiver underwater into an embryonic body position, upside down, knees curled into the chest, with their back resting against the practitioner's belly and thighs. This position is held for a few silently profound moments, and then the receiver is slowly brought back up to the surface to breath. It naturally brings up somatic feelings about the birth experience due to its similarity to the physical realities of that moment.
During this particular demonstration of the Embryo move, when she brought me up, she could tell that some of these feelings were arising within me. She intuitively knew to call one of the male students in the class to come and hold me with her. I burst out in tears being held by both a man and a woman. This experience provided a deep healing for me as my father was not present at my birth or in my life at all.
I knew there was more Re-Birthing healing the warm water environment had to offer. I felt compelled to recreate the circumstances of my birth in a water session intentionally. I asked the teachers assistant in the class to do a session with me with that intention. He agreed and we explored how to reproduce the various physical components of the birthing process in the water. It was a powerful healing session.
One of the moments I remember most keenly was during the discussion afterwards in which the TA suggested that perhaps the nurses in the nursery were actually loving me quite sweetly and generously. Although that wouldn't make up for missing out on that golden hour after birth of bonding with my mother, I had never considered that those nurses might have added positive loving influences, giving my birth blueprint the gift of being able to receive healing and loving energy from people outside of my birth family.
Now, I feel blessed to be able to hold space for a wonderful group of apprentices in the Bio-Mystical Womb Healing Apprenticeship program. The first few phases of the program are focused on preparing for our Re-Birthing Ceremony. One of the participants, Jennifer Jarvis, felt called to do her own Re-Birthing ceremony at the very beginning of the apprenticeship as that was her birth month. When she shared her experience of this, I was so inspired by it that I asked if I could share it in the blog and book. She readily agreed. Here are her journal entries and photos of her ceremony:
"My bed.
The bowl of water with leaves and sand from my birth state.
Smaller bowl with items to add later in the ritual.
Lights on bed- womb lining & pink blanket for womb space.
Red blood; pink innocence
Roses and candles representative of the supportive energy of Magdalene and Jesus, union of Divine and Earth energy, sacred union of masculine and feminine.
Bath was running.
Music: bineural beats heart chakra
I placed a silver compass on the faucet. This was for navigation and another energy that was not yet revealed.
After full ceremony, a sister I shared the details of this with reminded me of the Goddess Ishtar.
Entering the Womb:
Music: Bineral Beats to support rebirth.
Prepared my birth arrival.
Dirt, leaves and pine needles spread on my floor. When I am to be born, Earth and these elements meaningful to me will be the forest to receive me.
On the floor the bowls. Poured ingredients from smaller into the large white bowl of water mix
Candle lit and pine salts for me to smell near the bowls.
I lay on my bed and continue journey.
The birthing is felt in my whole being. It's like a rewind, replay then ready to rebirth.
I wiggle and struggle to get off the bed like baby coming out.
I fall to the prepared Earth bed. I splash myself with the cold water, smell the pine, and keep dousing myself with the water from the bowl.
The primary emotion: liberation! Newly born! The way. The truth. My life. I was crying.
I was covered in leaves, sand, and water.
I gathered some of the Earth bed and returned to the darkened bathroom.
In the bathroom I felt a primal activation. It felt familiar. I moved on the floor with pieces of Earth all around and on me.
Yawp. Flail. Chaotic Breath. Self Sooth. Sound. Shiver. Down to calm.
When this felt complete, I took a warm shower with spices, evergreen, and floral salts and washes.
I shut off all music.
I rearranged lights on my bed to a heart.
I wrapped up in the pink blanket like a hug, then laid in the middle of the heart.
Love. Peace. Healing.
I slept.
Here is a podcast recording of a call with Jennifer Jarvis and other participants in the Bio-Mystical Womb Apprenticeship in which Jennifer shares about her Re-Birthing Ceremony:
I hope you are as inspired by Jennifer's powerful Re-Birthing Ceremony as I am. Please comment below if you are curious about how to create a re-birthing ceremony for yourself or if you would like to share about anything like this you have already experienced.
Sama Morningstar is the founder of the Womb Centered Healing Temple and is honored to be offering the Bio-Mystical Womb Apprenticeship as one of the Temple Gifts. If you would like to learn more about the Apprenticeship program, you can do so here: https://www.samamorningstar.com/bio-mystical-womb-healing-apprentic