-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel
Quickening is active labor—rapid, thundering contractions with fetus squeezed in a sealed womb, cervix undilated. This is the current birthing stage of our world, reflected in the climatic, environmental, political and social dimensions of life in Gaia’s womb. This is planet Earth now. No exit, no escape.
The survival instinct defense of the human psyche normalizes these traumatic conditions to maintain stability, the way the body regulates its temperature to the ideal of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of external temperature. This defense automatically distracts us from the truth of our emotional reactions to the tensions of now, enabling us to carry on with a false sense of normalcy.
However, the law of compensation insists that the emotional energy we are spared must be converted and experienced somewhere else. One possibility is in an intense obsession, like a cause that consumes our attention with the energy equivalent to our unfelt feelings.
A variation would be a projection, where we might hate someone; again, with the same quantity of energy we avoid in our projected emotions. Perhaps the most common defense is repression, where the disavowed feeling takes up residence in the body and manifests as a somatic issue, like severe back pain. This is the root of psychosomatic illness.
For a time, Jan’s childhood doctor was Dr. John Sarno. Her grandmother revered him. He was a neighbor and Jan has memories of him making house calls. She still has warm feelings about this humble man to this day.
If you google the question: Who is America’s most famous back doctor, the answer you will receive is, Dr. John Sarno. This gentle, soft spoken, 5’3″ man healed Senator John Harkin, John Stossel, Anne Bancroft and Howard Stern of severe back issues by simply educating them about how the psyche distracts us from repressed feelings by creating physical symptoms.
Dr. Sarno’s main treatment was to have his patients read his book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. For 95% of Dr. Sarno’s patients the knowledge alone of this automatic defensive operation led to a cure. The remaining 5% he referred to a psychotherapist to address repressed trauma. I would strongly recommend the documentary, All the Rage: Saved by Sarno for an in-depth exposition of his method.*
I emphasize Dr. Sarno’s work here to suggest that we, the people of the world, are most likely being spared the full impact of our emotional reactions to the hair-trigger, eve-of-destruction, state of the world we live in, through converted somatic distractions. This knowledge alone, as Dr. Sarno discovered, may be enough to relieve psychosomatic symptoms in many cases.
To enhance the effectiveness of this knowledge we can make the suggestion to the subconscious to not displace our emotions, but, to the contrary, to deliver us directly our feelings. To acknowledge the truth, and allow ourselves to feel, relieves the body of the tensions that generate the tightness and constriction in our muscles, tendons and nerves, giving rise to many medical diagnoses.
The deeper truth that we might consider is the condition I opened this post with, what Stan Grof has labeled Basic Perinatal Matrix II. BPM II is the no-exit stage of active labor, prior to cervix dilation. Gaia is birthing a new world and we are all part of it, cells of that fetus, currently feeling the terror of extreme contraction, constriction and annihilation. These contractions are real, but they are just that, contractions promising new life.
The impact of our extreme containment is actually facilitating the gradual opening that will birth forth a new world in harmony with the truth.
Best advice for this time is to be aligned inwardly with the truth of the heart and, as they teach in birthing classes: Just Breathe!
Breathing in truth,
Chuck
Please Note: As Dr. Sarno always advised, anyone dealing with physical symptoms should avail themselves of conventional medical consultation.