Exploring Our Earliest Stress

The reliving of this prebirth experience described in the last blog posting, The Spirit Speaks of The Soul, took place within the walls of a quaint and cozy white-clapboard farmhouse set in the beautiful foothills of the Berkshires. Stephen was attending a workshop held in Southern New England in the early summer of 1995. A small group of individuals participated in a modern version of a shamanic healing session. For nearly three hours, he lay on a rubber mat, breathing deeply, and listening to high-powered music. Shamans used drumming and breathing techniques to achieve altered states of consciousness. While in this state, a person could receive the healing he or she needed physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The altered state of consciousness he achieved through the breathing and music helped him relive and heal an early trauma. In addition, with these shamanic techniques, he accessed these buried prebirth memories.

For Stephen, these memories confirmed that the essential being of each human has three core elements as Saint Paul described: “your whole being—spirit, soul, and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). A dozen years after this experience in the womb, he was astonished to hear Protestant minister Arthur Burk say of the soul and spirit in the womb: “the soul is inoperative . . . it is the spirit that hears, understands, and remembers.” However, to say the soul is inoperative is not to say it does not feel such things as hunger and fear.

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Curiously, his experience of me was followed by one of the most controversial murder trials in the history of American justice. The night of June 17, 1995, when Stephen was reliving his soul memory of speeding through space, was the night that news footage of O. J. Simpson was broadcast nationwide. He was fleeing from the police in his white Bronco. It was interesting to Stephen how a spiritual experience was paired with a depraved one. The sacred was punctuated by the profane. There was a connection he didn’t see at the time. What each event had in common was that both revealed the intense hungers, desires, emotions, and passions that all embodied souls must face. Of course, in saying this, I am setting aside the criminal verdict of Simpson’s innocence, and considering the guilt assigned in the Goldman family’s civil suit.

With the passage of time, Stephen would revisit the experience in the womb, mulling it over again and again. Gradually, he would deepen his understanding of what happened that night when he was seized by the primal fear and hunger involved in being human.

He felt his mind reeling as he struggled to make sense of what had happened. It seemed to him that what he had experienced had taken place in a realm existing in between inner and outer space. And yet, it somehow seemed to merge them into one space. Subjective. Objective. Real. Symbolic. It was all of these and more. He realized he had been speeding through a place where the starry heavens of both outer and inner space converge. . . .
Stephen recalled Rod Serling introducing the 1960s TV show, The Twilight Zone:

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."

He then reviewed what happened after passing through the portal of the dark doorway hanging in space, and he realized that he and I had entered his mother’s womb and seemed to separate. He went inside the tiny fetal body while I remained connected to him as I hovered alongside. Like a suit of clothes hanging in the closet waiting to be worn, the little body was waiting there in the womb all ready for him to begin wearing.

Clearly, the liquid he felt his little body floating in, his tiny hands groping for something to stabilize him, was the amniotic fluid of his mother’s womb. That he was greeted by hunger seemed to be a fitting introduction to life in the body. Stephen thought that perhaps his mother had not eaten recently so that no nourishment was coming to the tiny body. He was transitioning from the formless freedom of the spiritual realm to being in the world of form. What a contrast he was experiencing between total spiritual freedom and total physical dependency.

To Stephen, this hunger was a mirror of the dependency of the body on matter in the form of food. Stephen thought of the Latin word mater, and concluded that human beings first depend on matter in the form of mater (mother). It is in her womb and, after birth, in her arms, that embodied souls experience the beginning of the all-too-human love affair with matter, the material world. These mysterious moments in the womb marked his most intensely dramatic encounter with me. He came to realize I afforded him a higher and wider view of his life. To deepen his understanding of the nature of our relationship, I often utilize people and circumstances to illustrate what I want to convey.

For example, this very morning, after he wrote the above, I seeded the idea of taking a break and going to the local coffee shop. Once there, I nudged him to notice a mother and child. A small brown-haired boy in the toddler phase was in his mother’s arms. Suddenly, he saw a cookie. He squirmed in her arms and, with a sense of urgency, began pointing to the object of his desire. Insistent on grabbing and consuming the cookie, he struggled in her containing embrace. Remaining relaxed, his mother calmly rocked him a bit and quietly coaxed him with no trace of irritation, saying, “Relax.”

When Stephen felt fear in those first moments in that tiny fetal body, I held him in the arms of my awareness as a mother holds and comforts her distressed baby. This comforting larger consciousness of the sidereal self is available to all embodied souls; they just have to take steps to stop and still their body and mind.

• Today, when stress arises, relax into the arms of the higher, wider, and deeper awareness ofof your sidereal self, your spirit. Begin by taking some slow, deep breathing. Remind yourself that the peace of your spirit is just a breath away. I will be blog absent until the beginning of August. Stay cool!