In The Beginning

The path that has led me to where I am now has been long and certainly not straight. I've always disliked long, wide straight streets anyway: there is something profoundly uninteresting in staring straight down a line of sight where nothing is hidden, nothing can take you by surprise and where there is nothing to discover for yourself by taking a few twists and turns and interesting-looking side streets. Is it not more fun to wander around an old medieval hill top town, or some Greek village, not knowing what you'll find round the next corner - and then finding that all roads seem to lead to the central square which almost invariably has a church in it and, if you're lucky, a tempting looking bar or taverna? Life, in short, is not about seeing everything in plain sight from the moment you're born. Instead, it is about discovery. Of getting lost in those narrow twisting streets of life, learning from the experiences and growing as a person because of it. 

‘The wisdom of age’ is a familiar term, but when you were young, did you really pay it any attention? Youth is all about abundant energy, learning about the world with wide-eyed joy. Now, of course, this can quickly go wrong - life is not equal and life is not fair. Challenges come thick and fast - maybe even in the moment of birth, or within the womb. Any woman who has had miscarriages (as I have had too) will know this. A new life suddenly gone. Often without obvious reason. And even if you get through your development in the womb, arrival into the world can be fraught, traumatic - and sometimes fatal. One of my own daughters was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She arrived un-breathing, meconeum in her airways. Her birth was accompanied by silence, not newborn squeals as the baby gasps for air after a life of liquid, or rails at the passage into this cold, unknown new world. I heard the midwife’s running commentary as she taught her student - ‘We have to get this baby breathing. The cord is around her neck. Clear the meconeum in the airways!’ Urgent, yet calm, steady instructions. It seemed like an age before those first cries came, but came they did. Thank God, and thank the midwife. My child is a gutsy character, strong-minded and determined, and I swear it was this determination, combined with the right medical interventions, which helped win the day too. 

A traumatic birth can leave it’s energetic footprint - not just in the baby, but in the mother. I will call it, unscientifically, negative energy. At a deep cellular, particulate level, that trauma is trapped in the energetic system of your body. Indeed, even a tough pregnancy where the mother is perhaps going through difficult or stressful times; the break-up of a relationship; career or money worries; stress from trying to spin too many plates in our overly busy modern lives; the death of a relative or friend. There are so many experiences which will potentially reflect themselves in the aquatic environment of the womb and hence in the developing child. Many of these experiences of course will be fleeting and be more than made up for by all the joy and happiness going on in the mother’s life too. It is all about balance. However, I personally feel (and this is not currently medically proven or indeed supported as far as I am aware), that these more ‘esoteric’ aspects of life have a greater impact than the modern world is currently prepared to acknowledge. 

And so from birth to life. Every life is formed from a unique set of genetics and circumstances. Nature-nurture, that age-old debate. Again, I am not going to delve deeply into this - that is not my place - yet it is logical enough that some things are inherent within our genetic code, others are generated by our personal circumstances. Put both together and we have our own unique life experience - and it is this that will govern our health and wellbeing. Some things we cannot change, some things we can - and in doing so we can learn how interdependent nature-nurture is in the overall scheme of things.

My own appreciation of all this has only come with age. While I have been interested in all things medical and biological since my school days, agonising between studying medicine or following a more arts based career, it is only in my fourth and fifth decades that my life experiences truly came together and helped me find the way to where I am now. And where I am now is not always an easy place to be. It is sometimes very hard to explain what I do - I will hopefully try, over the coming posts - and I know that many will just dismiss it out of hand. That is their prerogative, of course. However, I hope there will be enough of you to come on the journey with me, opening your minds to things in the universe and in this life which cannot always be simply explained, and yet some of which are starting to have at least one foot in the world of modern science.