Journey to a New Life

GnaGnaGna!

In my previous blog I ended off with a scenario where you are still in the days where taking care of a baby is an extensive job, and where in those moments where you find yourself ‘going the extra mile’ within taking care of your baby – that it is easy to create a negative/bad energetic experience within yourself, where you’re carrying out the task of tending to your baby but carry an experience of dislike/resistance where one would rather not be doing what one is doing. I also wrote how babies pick up on these inner-conflict experiences and in essence witness the parent(s) going through an ‘inner-tantrum’ and within doing so, learn that it is okay/acceptable/alright to bring up and express emotion turmoil when ‘things are not the way I want them to be/would have liked them to be’.

So now, your baby has had many opportunities to observe you in your inner-tantrum (from a little nagging experience to very loud backchat – the size of the tantrum doesn’t matter) when things are not going ‘the way you would have liked them to go’. Each time baby witnesses you in that state - that is the behaviour that is being taught to the child. As time goes by, the baby grows up and is able to do more things and be more independent. Here you’re at a stage where taking care of a baby is still intensive and extensive – but not at the ‘hardcore’ levels as when the baby was very small and completely vulnerable – not being able to do anything without an adults help.

Now an interesting thing develops because the demandingness of taking care of the baby is relaxing and suddenly there is space for ‘choice’ again (‘Again’ – meaning, where prior to you having the baby you had quite a bit of space in terms of having time set towards responsibilities but also having space/time towards your own where you can indulge in what you like to do or find important, whereas once the baby comes, there’s only the baby and everything ‘you’ or ‘personal’ disappears for a while). The baby is able to entertain itself for a bit, doesn’t need to be fed constantly so feedings aren’t as pressing/can be more flexible, the baby doesn’t poop himself every hour so his diaper can be on for a bit longer,… So the amount of time that you spend/dedicate towards your baby becomes less and a margin of time starts emerging here and there where you can start doing things ‘for yourself’ or pick up on things that you did before you had the baby.

With having been constricted to only taking care of your baby for such a long time, this ‘me time’ can be considered to be precious and this then creates an opportunity for compromise to creep in. Since the baby is now ‘out of immediate danger’ in terms of not needing constant adult handling, some baby related things can be delayed for a bit while you can extend your ‘personal time’. What I found with myself is that this ‘space’ that opens up can be tricky, where I could catch myself delaying something for just a bit too long, wanting to hold on to ‘my time’ or where I would kind of ‘huff and puff’ within having to ‘give up’ my ‘me time’ to tend to the baby.

It’s quite interesting how the developmental cycle of babies is set up, because it seems to go through cycles where you for a period of time have to spend all / most of your time towards the baby – where it then eases off a bit and you have more space/time to do other things as well – to then again spending all / most of your time taking care of your baby directly. It’s a nice testing ground in a way, where for some time you get to practice taking care of another and doing what needs to be done without having any space for yourself – to then doing the same but have some margin of space for yourself to check whether you can still be diligent and responsible within taking care of your baby without getting distracted/tempted by the ‘personal space’ that opens up – where one dips one’s toes ‘too deep’ and allow yourself to get carried away by this ‘freedom’ and start compromising towards your baby instead of keeping a balance between tending to your baby to the best of your ability and enjoying your ‘me time’ when it is here without wanting to hold on to it/creating it at the expense of your baby.

I’d for instance be working on something while Cesar would be entertaining himself and being content just roaming and exploring the room on his own with me still keeping an eye on him – to where all of a sudden discomfort comes up and he requires some assistance stabilizing himself where I would kind of go ‘Oh no’ inside myself because ‘I am working on this now’ and ‘I want to finish this’ / ‘Let me just round it up’ – where I am wanting to hold on to this ‘me time’/’what I am doing’ and will delay or want to delay getting to Cesar because what he is doing/going through is ‘incompatible’ with my desired situation/circumstance of ‘me working on this document’ / ‘me finishing this task’ – where instead of being here in every moment and being flexible – tending to Cesar when I need to and tending to my points when there is space to; easily letting go and moving around from point to point; – I am holding on to a mental projection of how I think/believe time should go/how the situation should go and want reality to adapt to my mental composition rather than me adapting to physical reality.

So this would be an example where one would compromise within slipping in self-interest where you for a moment place more value on a mental idea/ one’s desires rather than directly, common sensically move self to tend to the baby. So here you also have a scenario where the baby ‘needs something’ from you but you don’t give it. And in being aware that you’re dipping your toes in the pool of self-interest within holding on to your desire – guilt starts to brew inside yourself.

What happens then is that at some other time you are playing with the baby and now the baby is doing something/playing with something/ eating something that it actually shouldn’t or that could be consequential if it becomes a habit – and where in that moment, you should actually direct the baby and intervene, and maybe you do try and intervene and now it’s the baby that is upset and throwing a tantrum because ‘it’s not getting what he/she wants’ (just like me, the adult in the previous example, throwing a little inner tantrum because I wasn’t getting what I wanted within having to stop what I was doing and get to Cesar – starting to see how this pattern plays out?) and within having guilt existent within you for having robbed your child/baby previously of that moment where he/she needed you – you will now ‘give in’ and ‘let it slide’ where you will allow your baby his/her happiness point because you allowed yourself to hold on to your happiness point on previous occasion(s).

This is where the Baby Economicus starts to emerge – where a silent agreement starts developing between the parent and child that ‘if you allow me my indulgence for a moment, I will let you get yours as well later’. So now you start building a relationship with your baby based on perpetuate compromise where you can only keep things ‘happy’ and apparently ‘stable’ by each one giving in to each other’s’ little self-gratifications. If this is allowed to continue you slowly but surely move away from conducting yourself in a way that’s best for your baby/child to what’s best for our ‘trade relationship’. Because you’re then in essence trading moments: “if you give me this moment for my self interest, then I will give you that moment for your self-interest” – and oh boy if you forget your end of the deal, your baby/child will gladly and theatrically remind you of your ‘trade agreement’. The first thing Baby Economicus learns about human behaviour is: if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

So all in all, while one was trying to keep self from having to ‘sacrifice’ – where you don’t want to sacrifice your moment for the sake of what’s best for the baby, you end up doing exactly that – constantly sacrificing, but sacrificing the reverse where you sacrifice what’s best for your baby for the sake of the mind. So we end up sacrificing in the wrong moments in the wrong way. Where we will not intervene/direct our child/baby when we have to and intervene/manipulate the child when we shouldn’t – because it’s all done within the starting point of maintaining one’s self interest and within doing so, in extension building and maintaining the baby’s/child’s self interest.

I’ve decided to from now on throw in some ‘practical’ blogs in between my more ‘inner-process’ related blogs. After all, it’s easier to sit down to reflect on your process and yourself when your physical reality is relatively stable (eg. You’re not sleep deprived, your baby isn’t unnecessarily uncomfortable, your baby is in general not driving you insane).

Here I will share things that I’ve tried out and tested with Cesar which worked for us – and so may be of help for others.

So as the title suggests, the first practical point I want to share came from working with horses.

At the farm, we work with horses in close alignment with principles and methods of Natural Horsemanship. One of these points is that of ‘rhythmic motion’. Horses move within rhythmic motion, and through drawing on rhythmic motion ourselves, we are able to direct the horse. Besides using it as a form of communication, I also noticed that if my horse Charlie, was unsettles, was that rhythmic motion, sound and touch would settle him – from which I would be better able to direct him.

While this point of ‘rhythmic motion’ initially opened up with the horses, I have found that this point pretty much present with most animals, humans included.

When Cesar was very, very small – the only type of ‘rhythmic motion’ I would use, was that of me breathing. When he was upset, in pain or didn’t know what to do with himself, I would just hold him and breathe. I would first start of breathing normally and then slow down the pace – to which Cesar would then responding and get in sync. He didn’t breathe exactly in sync with me, because his lung capacity forces him to have to breathe more regularly than adults, but he would slow down proportionally with me. [As an FYI, according to some studies done on breathing with your child, the results show that breathing with your child in times of sickness helps accelerate healing]

Then, as he got older and a bit sturdier – I would start using my hands to make rhythmic motions and sounds (while all the while also just being aware of my breath, going with the rhythm).

I remember the one night he was up till 1-2 o’clock and just wouldn’t settle down, where the adrenaline that came with the teething had him going a bit nutty.

I then instinctively started using rhythmic motion on the mattress, tapping in a way to get a nice, low sound (he loves bassy sounds over high pitches) and finding the right rhythm. It’s quite interesting, because you’ll be playing with different speeds of tapping, and when you find ‘the one’, it’s like it just ‘catches’ them, and his whole being just settles down and centres. Then, I would keep tapping at that speed so he could really sink into the motion, and then slow down gradually. He was in crawling position on the mattress, and he his body sank down ever so slightly with each tap, until eventually he was lying down on his belly and then repositioned himself unto his side and then with the last tap just moved his head to a comfortable position.

Other variations I have done is where I am tapping him gently on his chest, or if he’s really ‘all over the place’ and not knowing what to do with himself, I would lay next to him on my side and put his legs in between mine so that I could ‘keep him in place’, which he initially would not like but after a few moments would then calm down and centre himself and then move himself to sleep with the tapping.

On other occasions, where the procedure was taking rather long or where I was already really tired when I started and my arm couldn’t hold much longer, I would utilize a metronome. When I was in music school we’d use a metronome which is a little gadget that you can use to set the ‘beats per minute’, where it either flashes a light or makes a sound (or both) so that it would assist in maintaining your rhythm/beats per minute. These days if you have a smartphone like an Android or iPhone – you can download a free metronome app and use your phone to do this. I would set it to x-amount of bpm (beats per minute), and would select a sound that Cesar responded to and would then once in a while set the amount of bpm lower and lower (while hiding it under my pillow).

This method is something I have found effective in times when Cesar overexerted himself (going overboard with standing/crawling or whatever – where he is not patient enough but straining his body) or was in a lot of pain where he would be in a state of ‘not knowing what to do with himself’, where the rhythmic motion gives him something to anchor to and direct his attention.

So when you’re all out of ideas, and your little one still won’t sleep = it’s worth a try!

One of the first points I faced with Cesar that I knew I had to deal with – was reacting to him crying.
In the beginning he didn’t cry much – but the reactions inside myself were obvious, and I knew that this was just going to be the beginning. Because when a baby cries and you react, every second that you hear the baby cry – the reaction just compounds and compounds and compounds – where you either pop to release the energy of the reaction, or where you suppress it to let it come out in other ways later.

I experienced both, where at some point all the crying was getting to me that I just cried with him lol. I first just got angry because I didn’t know what to do and then just felt powerless/helpless at which point I just cried it all out. This was when he cried really intensely for a long time.

Then I remember that he had some short cries, but frequently throughout the day/night. It didn’t hit as ‘hard’ because of the short duration, but it was as if with each cry I was getting ‘buzzed’ – but since it was so short, I didn’t think much of it and “let it go”. Then after a while of on and off crying – I found myself thinking ‘I am not going to check up on you now, I am tired of this’ when he would cry again. And I mean, it was weird because I was finding myself in this weird icky, mean mood when I was thinking this and deciding to just leave him instead of going to him. And then when I check where this was coming from, it was basically from a sense of ‘wanting payback’ like ‘you know what you did to me, now you take that’. And then I asked myself: Seriously? You want this little baby ‘to pay’ for what ‘he did to me’? I mean he didn’t do anything really. He’s uncomfortable – he’s expressing his discomfort in the only way he knows: crying. I am the one reacting to the crying, I am the one generating the experience of negativity in relation to the crying, I am the one creating the sensation that ‘I am tired of this’. He’s not doing anything ‘to me’ – this is just freaking unacceptable. And then I cried, but that was more because of the shame of the monster I had just allowed myself to become than reacting to his cries.

So here I saw how easy it would be to react to a baby crying, where you just suppress what you experience and then later do little mean things to your baby ‘to get back at him’ without you really knowing why you’re doing it. And with ‘mean things’ – I am referring to quite a broad spectrum of ‘meanness’ because for instance not being very considerate when changing his diaper or when you are changing his clothes where you are kind of rushing it to just ‘get it done’ could be one of those little points that are ‘seemingly innocent’ – but where if you trace back the internal steps behind that action, it’s actually coming from a point of payback.

So several nights in a row I applied Self Forgiveness on my reactions. I started with the immediate reactions as the experience that would run through my solar plexus as a form of anxiety and then went into memories of myself where I found myself in situations where crying was present, either me crying or someone else and how other people had responded to this which formed the basis of my ‘opinion’/relationship towards crying and how I would respond/react to it later in life.

The main memory the stood out for me was a memory of me crying on the street next to my mother. She told me to ‘stop it’ and that ‘look, everyone’s watching you!!’. I remember looking around and no-one was really watching me / interested in what was going on with us. What ‘struck’ me the most – quite literally – was my mother’s panic. It was like electric sparks of fear and anxiety within a general sense of ‘not knowing what to do’ that was flickering off of her unto me– and this was now the exact same experience I found myself having when Cesar would cry – and generally the thought pattern that was paired with it was ‘what will other people think of me and him when he’s crying’ and ‘I don’t know what to do’. So I could see how I had effectively internalized that memory, that experience with my mother and used it form an energetic relationship to the point of crying and had become my mother in that aspect.

It’s quite interesting how we find ourselves in these moments, experiencing ourselves a particular way and then believe that ‘this experience is me’, ‘this experience is genuine’ – and not at all question where this experience comes from, but just accept it as ‘this is me’. While all the while, you’re just playing out an experience you picked up somewhere long time ago, where in a single moment you established a link, a connection – without even being aware of it, and then filed it away for future use. And then when the file as the memory and the connection that was established gets used in a ‘suitable setting’ – it’s as if it’s ‘a brand new experience’ that just ‘came out of nowhere’.

Anyway - I would say that the most important point to remember and remind yourself of when you find that you are reacting – that it is you reacting. The baby is not doing anything to you, he’s just communicating with you in the only way he knows: crying. Sure, it’s not pleasant that the baby is crying, and really the person for whom it’s most unpleasant is the baby itself – otherwise he wouldn’t be crying – but by reacting to the baby crying you are only turning an unfortunate situation into something really unpleasant, by your own doing.

And I mean, crying doesn’t have to be ‘a bad thing’ or something that ‘must be avoided at all cost’ or ‘must be remediated ’. Crying can just be a point of physical expression, a nice way to just ‘let it all out’ and way of releasing physical pressure/strain.

If you’re always going to react within a point of negativity towards your baby crying, the baby’s soon going to figure out that crying is ‘disliked’ no matter why you cry, which later in life can become a point of suppression where you’ve now incorporated crying into your morality system and not allow yourself to go there because ‘it’s bad’/’wrong’.

So the simplest and best way to go about it, for your baby and yourself – is to take responsibility for your experience, get a grip on it and direct yourself in those moments that you are reacting to your baby. Just within practicing this one point over and over, each time as your baby cries – you are showing your baby that you are able to change from mind reaction to self-direction here – so that when it does happen that your baby cries out of a point of reaction – now or later when he/she’s older -- you are already showing and teaching him by example that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ and that self is actually able to direct oneself in such situations to a point of stability and hereness. But unless you yourself practice this movement of change and direct yourself out of the mind, your baby/child has no reason to stop crying if the crying is coming from a point of reaction, and things will just escalate as your reactions will feed the baby’s reaction and vice versa.

At the same time I would also suggest to be careful and attentive to who you are and how you move yourself in moments where you hear that your baby starts crying, where it is easy to go into an 'alert'-reaction from which you then rush yourself to the baby to quickly pick him up and tend to him. Here if you allow yourself to go into this response-pattern, the baby learns that crying =  parent comes to me quickly -- which can then be integrated as a manipulation technique later on. So instead of suddenly rushing and moving faster, to just take note of the baby crying and move to the baby at the same pace you were already doing things/walking your day, being consistent, stable within yourself -- so that the baby learns that crying does not trigger any particular energetic response pattern in you which gets you to go into 'acceleration' to give the baby attention.

So there is both a negative and positive reaction pattern to be aware of, where you can either respond negatively to your baby where you don't want him to cry, or where you can respond positively by quickly wanting to show your baby some love -- where either of these can have repercussions in how the baby develops and what kind of relationship the baby creates around the point of crying.

The interview below gives some cool insights and perspectives one may not have considered in terms of why babies cry, and is definitely a must if you have a baby yourself or find yourself in the presence of one.

Crying Babies - Perfecting the Human Race - Parenting - Part 35

Why do we tend to react to the sound of babies’ cries? Why was the sound of babies’ cries not pre-programmed in the Mind and how does this contribute to us reacting to their cries? How are memories involved with contributing to us reacting to babies’ cries? How can we assist and support ourselves to remain stable and not react to babies’ cries?