Birth of the Sentient Child
It is not understood [in this era of human history] that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body's biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born.
Seth Speaks Books: The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
Please reach out if you want to discuss personal questions about birth psychology, parenting, self-exploration, and spiritual, telepathic or past-life experiences for yourself or your child.
Beginnings and Endings
Birth is a beginning and an ending of an infant's multidimensional journey to life. So we might ask, when does life begin and the pre-life journey end? Some say it begins at conception and some say at birth. However we see it, conception and birth are actually the "ending" of the soul's journey. At least a temporary one, as the soul transitions to physical life.
What we know of this transition --conception, prenatal development, and birth-- usually comes from the mother's perspective, not the child's. A mother may know intuitively when conception happens or she may be surprised and unaware. The prenatal experience is also a story told from the mother's point of view. The same with labor, delivery, and postpartum.
What do we know of the the infant's perspective? Do we even think to ask? What about the infant's experience of conception or the decision to reincarnate? What about the experience of journeying from discarnate soul to an explosion of cells residing in the mother's womb. And what of the life, death and spiritual interlude that preceded all of that? What is lost, yet remembered? Do we consider that journey or even honor it as we do at the end of life.
And what of life in utero? An experience that we assume the infant cannot remember? Or the birthing experience itself? And what of the experiences both local and non-local, i.e. inside and outside the womb, as the human body gestates. Muffled sounds, voices, conversations. The mother's spiking emotions. The awareness of the environment surrounding the womb. We don't generally consider the newborn's perspective in the birthing process, even though it is based entirely on first-hand experience.
A half century or more of research, clinical work, and reevaluation of the the newborn child by physicians, scientists, psychologists, birthing experts, and more has lifted the veil of ignorance around the question of the status of the newborn child. We now know that the newborn is fully sentient, knowing where they came from and how they experienced the physical and emotional transition to life.
Useful Resources
Human birth is merely the beginning of our journey on Earth. Pre-birth experiences and memories transport us beyond the materialistic idea that heredity and social environment explain human life. Our life's drama is planned long before birth.
[From the beginning of life] human beings are conscious, sentient, aware, and possess a sense of self.... [B]abies perceive, communicate, and learn, in ways that include an integration of mind-to-mind, energetic, and physical-sensorial capacities and ways of being.
Prenates learn constantly from their experiences in utero, regardless of the amount of brain matter they have at the time. We would probably be quicker to see and accept...aspects of human consciousness [in the newborn] if we had not been brainwashed that babies start from zero and have nothing to give or gain from life until they have all the necessary materiality.
Pre-Birth Memory
The Cosmic Cradle
Newborns, infants, and very young children recall much of life before conception. They emerge from previous realities full of experience and remembered pasts. They come into the world fully conscious. They are not blank slates as we have been taught. But neither are they jaded with beliefs or expectations or biases. They are "anew." They come into life knowing one overriding truth for certain: that we are of good intent.
How do we know that the journey to life begins before conception? Our children have told us. Parents, psychologists, researchers and others have shared their stories and extensively documented the spontaneous memories of very young children, including: past lives, life in between lives, conception, fetal development, pregnancy and birth. Some individuals maintain these memories through adulthood. Others can access these memories as adults in a number of ways, including hypnosis, regression, holotropic breathing, or expanded awareness using psychedelic drugs such as LSD.
Despite dramatic advances in quantum physics in the last century, a materialistic world view still guides our understanding of the fundamental nature of existence. The old Newtonian paradigm posits that we can only know the world through the five senses, that memory and self-awareness are contingent on development of the brain and nervous system, that biological conception is a chance event, and that heredity and environment explain human life.
Over the last several decades there has been a growing interest in integrating birth psychology with quantum physics. As a result, a newer paradigm posits that newborns are self-aware and can spontaneously recall life before conception and even at conception. And that consciousness is not contingent on brain matter. Consciousness exists at a cellular level. In fact, memory exists in primitive organisms that do not have a brain at all. And even more startling to traditional paradigms, memory is also possible without cells. It endures, while cells do not.
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Memory boundaries are enormously expanded by evidence of prenatal memory, gestation memory, and past-life memory... Memory does not begin at age 2 or 3 but stretches backward to include prenatal memories as well. In crossing this boundary, it is the unborn who are teaching us.
[Psychedelic research has shown that adults not only can relive episodes from infancy and birth but have had] memories of various stages of prenatal life, fast experiential replays of the entire embryo-genesis and even cellular memories of spermatozoids and ova during the period of fertilization.
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When you...emerge into physical life, not only is your mind not a blank slate...but you are already equipped with a memory bank far surpassing that of any computer. You face your first day on the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.
Pre-verbal Communication
How do Babies Communicate?
At birth, the newborn abruptly enters a reality that is disorienting at best and traumatic at worst. In fact, all birth is traumatic, not just in difficult or life threatening deliveries. Simply leaving the reality of the womb, suspended, floating, nourished, warm, in darkness and muffled sounds, in synchronicity with the mother's heartbeat, the child is literally squeezed through the eye of a needle and dropped into a sensory overload of sight, sound, cold, gravity, and groping.
How can the newborn relate the physical and emotional experience of birth? Without language, how is it possible? What is the child's memory of that abrupt and strenuous final step into a new physical reality and that first breath of a new beginning? We are told by physicians and psychologists that the child really has no memory of it. So even when they learn to talk, very young children have no way of sharing that experience. The mother's story of labor and delivery become the child's story.
For more than forty years, significant growth in the fields of birth psychology and prenatal/perinatal psychology has revolutionized our understanding of our earliest human experiences from preconception through a baby's first postnatal year. Contributions have come through extensive research and clinical experience from leading-edge fields like epigenetics, biodynamic embryology, infant mental health, attachment, early trauma, developmental neurosciences, consciousness studies and other new sciences.
The sentient child has emerged. We now know that even before birth babies have their own thoughts, feeling, and experiences. And they are anxious to share them with us. We are now able to understand our earliest relationship experiences from the baby's point of view. And now baby's are teaching us about their own journey to life.
As part of this extraordinary shift, a new paradigm of communication has also emerged, one which includes telepathy, empathic touch, mindfulness, and an honest appraisal by adult caretakers of their own beliefs, prejudices, and world views.
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Babies communicate through eye contact, facial expression, changes in where they place their attention and states of consciousness, body movements and gestures, physiological changes, breath and heart rates, vocalizations, crying and talking, through more primary changes in structure and rhythms and through energetic and telepathic means--e.e., a lot like adults do!
Babies are calling us to come into their multidimensional world and want to connect with us from pre-conception forward.