What if the way you entered this world still shapes how you breathe, move, and feel today and how you can transform it
Your first breath isn’t just the start of life outside the womb of your mother, it’s the blueprint for how you meet every beginning, challenge, transition, ending.
What do you remember about your first breath? What do you remember about your birth? Or what stories have you been told?
You don’t consciously recall it — but your body does. By working with your body, especially with the powerful Extraordinary Vessels, memories may rise into your conscious to be transformed.
What are birth imprints?
You hold the memory in your body of the movements you made during birth and your first breath. This memory is held in your nervous system patterns. It is stored in the way you breathe, your posture, emotional reflexes and much more.
Since your brain is still forming, much of this memory is unconscious, but through working with your body through movement, breathwork or bodywork such as massage or Shiatsu, memories may rise to the surface. I first became aware of this through working with babies after birth and when I began to include the Extraordinary Vessels in my shiatsu and massage work.
The ancient Chinese stressed the importance of a calm environment for birth, understanding that your first breath and the way you enter the world imprints on you deeply. However until relatively recently psychologists didn’t even believe that babies felt pain. Now there is a whole field of pre and perinatal psychology.
Different types of birth imprint differently. If your birth is gentle and supported, you tend to breath in trust and safety. If your birth is rushed or traumatic you are imprinted with fear and anxiety. However it is not as simple as a medicalised birth is stressful and a natural birth is relaxing. Babies may get stuck during a physiological birth and they made be relieved that they being helped out through a Caesarean or ventouse. Whatever kind of birth, if a mother remains aware of what is happening for her baby as well as herself and communicates with them through her breath, her touch, and even her sounds and words, she can support her baby integrate whatever happens. I am always amazed how easily babies process what from outside can seem traumatic births if we listen to them and respond to their needs.
How Do Birth Imprints Show Up After Birth and Even Later in Life
If a baby is calm after birth and you sense they trust in you and in life, you know that they have integrated their birth. If a baby is agitated, cries a lot and can’t calm easily, or have digestive issues and experience colic, then perhaps they are holding fear and anxiety from birth.
If your mother was given artificial hormones to start birth you may have not felt ready. If these hormones were given to strengthen contractions, you may have felt disconnected. As an adult, you may find you get stressed, easily agitated and dispersed when you begin new projects. You might find you become overly adrenalised and that it is difficult find your own rhythms.
Perhaps you were rushed at the end of birth, by being pulled out by forceps or Caesarean section You might have tension in your head from the forceps, or have a sense of lack of boundaries. Your immune system may be weak. You may find it hard to complete projects.
The ancient Chinese felt that your first breath affects your corporeal soul (Po) which is held in your Lungs. Lungs affect your basic sense of identity, your borders, your skin, as well as your nose and how you breathe and digest. You may find that you hold your breath, or don’t feel safe in stressful situations. It may impact on how you relate to people. The changes in circulation between your Lungs directly affect your Heart and any shock at birth affects you emotionally. All the Extraordinary Vessels support your Heart and the main Yin midline of Conception Vessel is regulated by a Lung point.
How Can You Repattern Stressful Beginnings?
It is relatively easy to help a new born integrate their birth. Everything is new and things haven’t become so fixed in their body, their brain and body are growing, and plastic,
The good news is that parents can support their baby immediately after birth by loving them and helping them feel safe. Simply holding your baby skin to skin Yin to Yin is powerful. Breath is perhaps the most simple and powerful tool. Each in breath is an invitation into a new moment. With each out breath you can let go of the past
Parents can help a baby immediately after birth to rediscover their rhythm by giving them space and listening to their needs. The Stepping Vessels are great for this.
As they grow, let them move as they need to. Don’t restrict their movements and give them plenty of opportunity to move. Simply carrying your baby in a sling offers lots of movement because they move as you move. Give them space to initiate and complete things in their own time as much as possible.
Another tool I find is the power of touch. Foundation touch is the most basic touch we receive when we are in the womb: a womb surround touch. By connecting with this womb touch we can recreate our journey into the space outside.
“An eight-week baby came to a student clinic with her two parents. She was red in the face and screaming intensely. Her brow was furrowed. Her parents were stressed and exhausted because she had been crying almost non-stop since she had been born by ventouse, after a long and stressful birth. My students showed them some relaxing exercises before guiding them to work on their baby. Mum sat with baby while dad held baby’s feet (GB41 (Girdle), BL62 and KD6 (Stepping Vessels), Kidney 1 (Penetrating)). This settled her a little. Dad palmed down her legs and held around Girdle Vessel. As he held GV4 baby settled more. With dad holding Girdle, back and front, mum held her hands about a foot away from baby’s head. Baby stayed calm. As mum approached her hands closer, baby started screaming again. Mum moved her hands away a little. Over the course of ten minutes mum was able to slowly approach and finally gently touch the head. Baby’s face was now a normal colour. Her brow softened. She smiled. The whole family relaxed.”
Although if there is something physical blocked you may need to see a specialist baby worker.
If parents are stressed themselves by birth, then they need support so that they can heal and then they can support their baby better. The ancient Chinese also said, if there is something the baby needs to heal, first support the mother.
With an adult, if the pattern hasn’t been addressed at birth, it will take longer. Although the gateways of change offer opportunities. While birth is your first transition and can impact future life transitions you can use future life transitions to repattern your birth. These include puberty, giving birth yourself, menopause and even grieving and ageing.
In the workshops I teach on birth, I guide my students through a birth experience. The aim is not to retraumatise, if there has been trauma, but to find ways of accessing resources in the current moment the resources that you would have wanted during our birth: safe touch, love, being able to move in your own rhythm and time. These tools in the moment help to repattern the experience of birth.
I have created a movement practice which helps to repattern birth movements
I have also created a visualisation on meeting your mother after birth and I will soon be posting a visualisation on the birth blueprint.
One of my favourite books in this field is “Babies remember birth” – David Chamberlain,Ballantine Books 1989. I have studied with some of the teachers in this field: William Emerson and Karlton Terry, and Cherionna Menzam Sills who recently wrote “The Prenatal Shadow: Healing the Traumas Experienced Before and at Birth”. With Cherionna we worked with the” womb surround” an experience developed by Ray Castellino in 1992 . Rebirthing is another way of repatterning your birth through breath movements.
Remember: You can always transform :
It’s never too late to take a new first breath.
Connect to the cycle of life: breath is the threshold between birth and death, and each inhalation is a renewal.
Even if your first breath was stressful, you are not fixed by it. The body is adaptable. Through breath, movement, and touch practices, we can re-pattern those early imprints.”
What do you remember about your birth?
I would love to hear your feedback on this post: things you have found useful, other ideas you have, your reflections on what I have written.
