The Healing Power of Birth and Rebirth

This book is Leonard’s account of his son and daughter’s spontaneous breathwork sessions shortly after their births. Profoundly informative about how therapeutic breathwork works. Of great value to anyone who is committed to healing their own birth trauma.

“Thoughts on Birth Trauma” Article by Leonard Orr

Birth trauma is totally abstract until we discover it in the feeling states of our daily life. For example, if we feel bad when we wake up in the morning, it could be from birth trauma or the way we were treated by our parents around getting to school on time. Connecting a cause and effect relationship of our feelings to a trauma can be a valuable insight that makes health, happiness, and success much easier.

Birth trauma has an impact on physical and emotional problems. The impact of birth causes many effects in our daily life, until we heal our memories – conscious or unconscious – of our birth trauma. It influences how we feel every morning when we wake up. 

Birth trauma is caused by the shock of going from the comfortable state that you have been in for nine months, into an environment that is totally unfamiliar. You've probably never stayed in one state that long since then, so it made a significant impression on your consciousness. In the womb, all of your needs are met. In fact, a symbolic description of the womb is heaven, where all of your needs are supplied and there is nothing to do. So, forsaking the comfort of the womb for this external environment can be quite an experience. Especially so since many birth professionals are plugged into their own birth trauma when they pull you out of there. The change can be smooth and can go in stages and be a joyful, happy experience, and it can also be a very painful experience. 

The trauma that the mother and the birth professionals are (re)experiencing is one basic factor that makes it painful. The infant gets plugged into this pain and fear and it stays in a corner of the mind for the rest of this individual's life, having an impact on the quality and quantity of their life. I know a few people whose lives were totally ruled by it. For most people, it is just one major significant factor. The impact consists of the generalized beliefs that each individual formed when they were born. 

We are immersed in water, enclosed in the womb for nine months. The impressions of this womb life are major impressions on both psyche and body that most people are never liberated from. The scriptures of all religions say that to become an immortal master, we have to become the unborn Eternal Spirit. Liberating our psyche and body from birth trauma is one of the biggest jobs of the human condition. 

Birth is the focal point in the transition from being a water animal to becoming a land and air animal. Perhaps most physical terminal diseases are caused at birth. Infancy memories stuck in the body are also a factor in the cause of most terminal diseases. They are terminal only because we use wrong methods for attempting to heal them. Most mental illnesses also begin at birth. Although birth trauma is caused to some extent by the ignorance and insensitivity of the adults present, birth is perhaps designed by nature to be somewhat traumatic: 

• The passage through the birth canal is a struggle for freedom. 

• There can be a significant change in temperature from being inside the womb to the temperature in the delivery room.

• It’s the first time that the skin is dry. 

• The first breath is taken.

• It’s both the first social experience, and the first time being alone. 

There is the physical struggle of the birth itself, plus the additional traumas caused by the birthing professionals' lack of sensitivity and ignorance of the needs of the baby. 

Birth is a series of magical stages like launching a spaceship to the moon. Birth is an irreversible change from the womb state that can only be restored through death and reincarnation. The descriptions of heaven in most religions are symbolic descriptions of the womb. This return to womb-like existence is perhaps the most attractive feature of physical death. 

Birth trauma includes the period from conception, in utero, birth, and early infancy. It is predominantly those feelings of helplessness and hopelessness at this time that can lead to a pattern of future life behaviors that the individual has no conscious knowledge of, and therefore no conscious control over. These feelings are core to subconscious patterns of behavior. 

Experience shows that if a mother has not overcome her own birth trauma, she may repeat similar complications when it is her time to give birth. Similarly for the father, if he has not dealt with his own birth trauma he will find difficulty in providing a presence of love and support. The parents, especially the mothers, may unknowingly give their power away to unconscious doctors instead of getting a good preparation for the birth – including overcoming their own birth trauma – thus missing the opportunity to become deeply connected with the baby, and to follow their own intuition.

Usually at the time when the mother should be supported with an atmosphere of calm and tranquility in preparation for the birth, instead there is a frenzy of equipment, injections, haste and complication with such things as oxytocin, episiotomies and anesthesia – for pain, or the fear of pain. Too often birth is treated in hospitals as a routine act, or even a pathology, with most of the supporting staff and equipment set up for the comfort of the professionals rather than for the security, support, and comfort of the mother and baby. The arrival of a new being into this world is a sacred moment, and it should be surrounded by love, security, respect, and support. 

One of the main reasons people sub-ventilate when they breathe is the result of repressing the fear experienced at birth. Birth trauma affects each of us every day, including our relationships and our money case. Rebirthing Breathwork is a fast way to heal this. Rebirthing Breathwork sessions can repair the physical and emotional damage caused at birth as a result of the first struggle for breath. 

— Excerpts from “Thoughts on Birth Trauma” article by Leonard Orr