Musings on My Journey
Reflections From the Womb
It seems as if I have returned to the place where I first arrived in this world, a place that was not safe the first time around. Seventy years ago, my experience in the womb taught me that the world I was coming into was not a hospitable one. It was a place in which I would not be welcomed with open arms. I can just imagine what it must have felt like, growing and becoming who I was going to be with the awareness that I was going to emerge in that way. It makes perfect sense that I would have fear imprinted in my DNA.
Here I am 70 years later back in the womb, only this time I have control over the environment I am swimming in. At first I was alarmed being back here and it triggered tremendous fear. Being nothing with no control and no future to focus on, felt like death. And in a lot of ways it was. I was back in a place where there was no past and no future, only the present. I was floating in limbo, witnessing all that I had built as an identity slip away. Actually I was terrified.
Over these weeks and months, releasing the old me, the identity I had created and rooted myself in, has brought me a bit of peace. Being back in this space again is now more comforting than I imagined it would be. My womb space is not inhospitable as my mother’s was. I am not unwanted nor am I afraid of what the world holds when it’s time for my rebirth. The difference in here is that it is of my own creation. I chose to be here and I am the one creating the environment I need in order to develop fully before my birth. I am being the mother I never had and enjoying being pregnant. My destiny in this lifetime was to give birth to myself, to learn to love and cherish myself, and to help myself grow into who I was always meant to become. Who that is might not be anything I have ever been before or thought I would be, but I know it will be true this time. I know that who I become will be my own creation based on listening to the guidance of my soul’s call rather than dictated by what others told me I needed to be.
Here in the womb it is quiet and peaceful. It’s a safe space to just be without the pressure of having to be anything in particular or do anything special. I don’t have to be productive or earn my right to be alive. Just being is enough. This is a sacred time in my life and that knowledge allows me to give myself permission to let go of everything else in favor of honoring this gift. I no longer know what my life will look like going forward, what I will be doing or if I will be identifying as anything in particular. Am I an artist? A writer? An athlete? I used to identify as those things. Maybe I will still make art and write and use my body in ways that are considered athletic. However, identifying myself with those labels as who I am might go by the wayside. I follow a Shamanic path spiritually but am I a Shaman? Maybe going forward I will simply be a woman, a human being who loves certain things and does what she loves.
In the womb I am listening to the call of my heart and allowing myself to follow whatever it calls me to. Some days I write. Some days I design clothing. Some days I have painted. And more than not, I’ve done very little of anything that I would call productive. I am in the act of becoming here in the womb, just like a fetus does as it is gestating. This is my gestation time, one that cannot be rushed. There is no value in being born prematurely. Nature will know when it’s time for me to emerge and I imagine it will happen naturally. It might be painful. It might not. I have no clue.
The process of returning to the womb was painful and difficult, but my actual birth might not be. As you can tell, I know very little these days.
Looking out from my womb space I find that I would rather be in here than out there at this time. Instinctively I know what I need and it can’t be found outside this sacred space where I am protected and nurtured with exactly what I need to grow. I feel the stress of the outside world from in here, but I don’t feel a part of it now. I am mothering myself in a way I never could before because deep within me lies the sense that this is exactly what I came here to do and this is exactly the time to do it. There is nothing more pressing than this in my life right now. Nothing I should be doing or focusing on that holds greater importance than this.
From this sacred space I have imagined a life on the outside, a life of freedom to be who I truly am. I’ve dreamt of the things I want to include, the ways in which I want to live and experience life. But when I attempt steps, even tiny ones, towards those visions, I find myself stopping in my tracks and returning home to the nothingness of my womb. This is not the time to step into anything. Being no-thing at this time IS my vision. The freedom to be nothing and to allow myself to float, that feels heavenly, because truly, I don’t know what I really want going forward. I speak of freedom and that’s the only word that can describe my soul’s yearning. The details of what freedom looks like in real life terms is yet to be determined. I know enough to admit that I don’t have a clue at this time and I want to give myself the space to have it materialize in some new and unexpected ways. What if I turn out to love something that I did as a kid and never gave myself the opportunity to explore? What if I pursue something that has nothing to do with anything I have ever done before this? I don’t want to limit myself by envisioning what I already know. I want to explore new territories and open new possibilities. That can only happen from this place of nothing.
That brings me back to where I am in the present moment, the womb, a place where the seeds have been planted and yet to be born. A place where the only thing necessary is nurtu ring and love. I never gave birth to a child in this lifetime. My son is adopted. Somehow I instinctively knew that the only one I needed to be pregnant with this time around was myself. And as the painting “Pandora’s Box”, reflects, when I do give birth, there is no telling what will emerge!
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04/2023
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