Journey to a New Life

During my pregnancy, I tried to prepare myself the best as I could by reading up as much as I could on taking care of a baby/child and parenting and went to a pre-natal class to get some last questions answered. You’d think that after 9 months of reading that I’d be pretty well informed and confident to walking the actual practical process of taking care of a baby. Truth was that on the day we got released from the hospital and we were busy leaving the parking lot, I was thinking to myself: “Oh cr*p, can’t someone give me a manual on how to do this thing?”


Having an actual baby and going through the daily process, more questions came up. As I would nurse Cesar, I’d be reading up in more books, looking more things up on the internet. I wanted to be informed about every single point or question I came across. Because every time a point opened up that was new, I was faced with uncertainty – and that was not something I liked in relation to having a new born lol.

So from that perspective – finding all the information and making sure I was informed on all points so I knew what practical steps to take if ‘this’ or ‘that’ were to happen – was a supportive action.

But then, I found myself researching the same points over and over – and finding the same answers over and over – and found an anxiety that started generating and accumulating each time I participated in ‘let me just look this point up one more time’ or ‘maybe there’s something I’ve missed’. Because the evidence was clear: there was no new information coming up whatsoever; so there was no practical reason to continue looking, I already knew what I had to know.

So now within having reached a point of ‘knowing all there is to know’, I knew that the next step was to actually walk the practical process of applying the information, when the need for it would arise. Here I got scared because, I wanted to hold on to ‘being in preparation mode’ and still being busy gathering information as being in that process, I found a sense of safety knowing I do not yet have to trust myself, I can still pretend that I ‘don’t yet know’ and that I need more time to figure things out.

So when there was nothing left to figure out / look up and I got faced over and over with the same answers and information – this would each time re-enforce the self-belief that ‘I cannot trust myself’ in the sense of applying the information, and each time I would look things up again, I could feel myself being disempowered over and over.

So one night during one of our many nursing sessions, and noticing how totally unpleasant the process of looking things up and educating myself had become (which at that point wasn’t educational anymore but merely obsessive) – I put down my tablet which I would use to google things, turned it off and just breathed. Because I realised that what I was doing, was no longer practical but had become compulsive behaviour to excuse why I was putting off trusting myself, within knowing that I would be able to draw from my repertoire of knowledge I had accumulated, and actually put it to the test. Where as long as I was still ‘researching’ and something would happen, I could still ‘claim ignorance’.

So I just sat there nursing, breathing and letting go of all the fears and anxieties. After all, if a point would open up like some form of emergency, it was not going to help me to be in a state of anxiety and insecurity as I’ve seen in the past that this disables me within being able to clearly assess what is going on and what I exactly need to do, as I then within anxiety start to doubt myself and mix up information. So the best thing I could do was just to let go, trust myself and not let myself be tempted to look things up just ‘one more time’ as this would only turn into paranoia about me not being able to practically walk the reality of taking care of a baby.

As I was looking at my previous blog about ‘being a mother’ and ‘redefining mother’ – I remember a point I faced here, which also links back into the Fairness point I have been walking in some of my other blogs.

And the point which opened up/that I am looking at is how being a mother is a very specific point, a very specific role. And in the beginning when I just started out walking this role – I had a lot of reactions towards my husband/father of the baby.

This was because I was comparing my role and what I was doing compared to what he was doing. The first 2-3 weeks he was at home and would help out but soon after that he was gone working for prolonged times and I would not see much of him. At times that he was home, I would react if he wasn’t helping out or resting because he was tired of work – and so by implication not being available to help with the baby.

I created a lot of inner conflict and friction about how much he would or would not help out and how he was living his life vs how I was living my life. My life was very restricted to moving from my bed to Cesar’s cot to the rocking chair where I would feed him – with occasional trips to the bathroom. His life on the other hand hadn’t changed much and when the nights were too rough he’d sleep somewhere else so he could still be functional the next day for work.

So there the thoughts started creeping in about ‘how it’s not fair that I am stuck here and can’t go anywhere/do anything’ and ‘he can just go sleep somewhere else, I don’t have that luxury’ and ‘he can go rest when he is tired, and I have to be on constant stand by for the baby no matter how tired I am’, ‘I am sure his work/job is not as intensive as what I am doing with the baby – it’s not fair that he wants to rest and doesn’t help me’ and so on and so on…

This made me be in a snidely mood whenever my husband was around where I was constantly, chronically comparing my situation with his – and we’d easily fall into stupid little arguments/reactions because of this, as my entire attitude was becoming hostile towards him within following the thoughts and energies.

Taking care of a new-born being strenuous on my body, I quickly had enough of the added strain I was creating for myself within myself and in my body within participating in this mind-job so I had a sit down with myself to see what is going on and what I was missing that left me playing out this mind pattern.

To be continued

In my last blog I established how having a baby in your world is an ‘out of the ordinary’ experience. Your world gets thrown upside down and you spend your every moment taking care of another.

This is intense, and something most people I would say, are not used to – and this goes on for quite some time (a few months in such a routine pretty much feels like forever). Things in my reality were hectic, in terms of my body recuperating from pregnancy, birth and getting used to breastfeeding and then spending every moment either tending to the baby or sleeping. Additionally, I was limited to living in my rocking chair, bed and diaper space with the occasional 2 min trip to the bathroom for my potty break. I would eat while breastfeeding and sometimes my partner had to feed me while I was feeding the baby lol.

So my whole reality was just the baby and I in our room – there was not much to my life. So when I would have a reaction, thought, emotion/feeling that would come up – it was very overwhelming and prominent. I didn’t have all that much going on in terms of just repeating the same tasks in the same room over and over – and so any point that triggered a reaction, my mind was ON it and exploiting the opportunity to get some energy going. So even the slightest point would become an intense experience – and with either being busy with the baby or sleeping, the experience would be in my face and start affecting me in every moment with everything that I do, where the slightest negative reaction for instance would have me soon down in tears. Because you’re just busy and busy and busy and then there’s this experience the whole time that just doesn’t go away and since the reaction got triggered in your direct environment which is with/around your baby and you don’t get a change of scenery that can distract you or where other points get triggered – whatever triggered the reaction / is the source point of the reaction also remains ‘in your face’ (whether you’re conscious of it or not) and unless you take the reaction on right then and there – things just get worse or you find ways to suppress it.

So here, I had to work with taking reactions out asap – where during breastfeeding/resting I would apply Self Forgiveness out loud and sound my commitment statements to stabilise myself and who I was in relation to having a baby/taking care of a baby.

The main point I faced here, was that even though taking care of a baby is intense, extreme and challenging – it doesn’t mean that I have to react to the design of the situation in an energetic equivalent way. Meaning, it’s not because a situation is out of the ordinary that you’re entitled to experience yourself energetically out of the ordinary. Where for instance, after having x amount of sleepless nights and your body still being in pain from the pregnancy/birth process, that it is okay to now go and ‘feel depressed’ and really sulk about the situation you’re in – because it’s not ‘about you’, what is happening is not personal – it’s just a bad design. In the same line, you’re also not entitled to ‘feel good’ or be all ‘chuffed’ about yourself for ‘doing all these extreme things’/living this ‘extreme lifestyle’ for a moment – because again, it’s not about you – it’s just the design of the situation. Where in essence, you ‘going the extra-mile’ – where you’re doing something you otherwise would not have done – becomes personal, where you either victimize yourself or glorify yourself within ‘going the extra-mile’. While, there isn’t anything ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about having to go the extra mile, when this is what is required to be done/walked. If this is what needs to be done, well, then you just do it, and then that’s the end of the story. And taking care of a Baby, is definitely a situation of ‘going the extra mile’ – all the time. But because we’re not used to ‘going for the extra mile’ or stepping way out of our comfort zone – we make it something ‘special’ and this special then translates into either a negative or positive experience (or both really).

Now, the reason why it is so important to take these type of reactions out as soon as possible, is because it is very easy for the mind to start creating a link/relationship from the negative/positive experience as a reaction to the unfortunate nature of the situation you’re in as the physically challenging task of taking care of a new-born -- to your new-born specifically. Where instead of seeing/realising that what you are going through is just because of the general design of things, one starts to tie what one is going through, to your baby personally, where it is your baby who is personally responsible for how the situation is set up (which is when you look at it – quite ludicrous, because I’m pretty sure that if any baby had the choice they’d skip the new-born/baby phase and get straight to walking and talking as the toddler-phase. In the end, your baby is just as much of a victim/hero as you are in the design of things). So what happens then is that in your mind, = your baby is the reason for your sleepless nights, your baby is the reason for your burnout, your baby is the reason why your body aches – where you basically start holding your baby personally accountable for everything that is happening to and within you.

These reactions, then start framing ‘who you are’ in relation to taking care of your baby, in relation to ‘going the extra mile’ that goes with taking care of a baby. And while your baby may only be an infant that can’t do much more than lying on its back, eating, crying and sleeping – the energetic experience you hold within yourself as you are going about your baby-tending, resonates and imprint unto the baby. And while they are pretty helpless while you’re going through this experience and thus can’t ‘act’ on it – it still affects them, and will show its consequential face later in their life.

 To be continued

My only previous experience with feeding babies was that of feeding baby birds. With them, I had to feed them every 20-40 min depending on their age from sunrise to sunset. So I thought – if I can feed baby birds, feeding baby human shouldn’t be so bad? Turns out that the ‘feeding only during daylight hours’ makes a BIG difference.

So here I was, at home, feeding my little baby pretty much every hour during the day… and night. The first three nights were pretty horrid. I was still in a general state of fatigue from the whole hospital happening and not getting much sleep was quite the punch . The exhaustion and pain from the c-section combined reached a stage where I couldn’t keep myself together anymore and had a big cry-out, just from the physical intensity. I then changed my sleeping strategy as it was obviously not working out. I started lying down during the day when he would sleep and changed my approach towards sleeping. Previously I would lay down with the intention to now ‘get some sleep’. What would happen then was that I would be lying in bed and by the time I’m almost asleep Cesar would make noise to announce his next feed and I’d still be tired as no sleeping occurred. I then changed my starting point in lying down, to not be ‘to get some sleep’ – but rather ‘to get some rest’. I would just lay and apply the 4-count breathing method. By the time Cesar announced his next feed, I was immediately up and about and did not experience myself has being worn out and my body actually felt pretty good. It’s like I went to sleep inside my body while my body was still awake. This strategy worked out much better.

Sometimes when there was more than an hour between feeds, I would fall sleep after doing the 4 count breath for a while, and then I would suddenly wake up – and as I wake up and open my eyes, I am immediately here, wide awake and would experience a form of pressure and presence within my chest area – and then a minute later Cesar would wake up for feeding.

While my body was still recuperating from the c-section, I could feel myself getting headaches with every little reaction, every little thought that would come up during the day. Sunette explained that since my body’s resources were all being directed towards healing the cut, there weren’t many resources left to stand as a form of buffer for the mind, which made my body very sensitive to any mind activity which I would feel almost as the reactions happened. She also said that I did not want to experience any particular pain or headache for more than day, as this would mean that the point wasn’t sorted out. So as I spend my days in my room with Cesar and a reaction and discomfort would come up (which was usually something like “WHaaaaat – he’s hungry agaaaain??!!”)– I would apply Self Forgiveness out loud until the pain/discomfort was gone.

So the first few days to a week were very intense physically but at the same time also very cool to see how I was able to direct myself and assist and support myself through this.

Another point that was quite cool, was that with the baby almost constantly needing tending, was that my life was driven to a point of zero-choice. It was as if every moment was determined by the baby – and whether you like it or not, you have to walk every moment as it comes. The days that I centered myself quite effectively were very cool in this regard. It was quite fascinating really, that if you allow yourself to be here and make the decision to walk every moment as it comes and do what needs to be done, then there’s actually an experience of Freedom in the point of No-Choice. Because – here you are, leading a life where you have no choice whatsoever, yet you are able to fully direct who you are within every moment and you fully decide how you are going to experience yourself. So to then in every moment will yourself to be here and simply walk as things unfold – is actually quite enjoyable and some nights I really had a blast, because it’s quite entertaining to see that you can actually be quite fine and ‘normal’ in a somewhat abnormal situation and to see that you can actually go beyond your accepted limitations.

And it’s all in those little moments, where you for instance wake up from a noise and know it’s time for the next feed. Where you can either draw back within yourself, cringe and resist getting up – or – you hear the noise and you get up because it’s the common sensical thing to do. Either way – you’re going to be getting up to feed your baby, there’s no choice in that – what you do have a choice in, is how you’re going to feel about it and how you’re going to experience yourself, and this really, is the only decision that matters.