You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.