Developing emotional fluency for you, and your baby.
During pregnancy I often felt like an exposed nerve. Everything was heightened and expanded, including my range of emotions. I noticed about every six weeks or so another layer of grief would move through me for a few days to a week. I became friends with grief. I did not shy away from it. I allowed myself to grieve the places that had believed I was doing this journey of mamahood with a supportive partner. I grieved the heartbreak and the archetypal betrayal and abandonment I felt from the masculine. I learned to trust these cyclical waves of painful emotional clearing. I didn’t plug them up or bypass them, but allowed their mighty force to move through me. I did this for me, and for the baby growing inside of me. Not wanting grief to stay stuck in the tissue of me or my child while also letting my baby understand that incarnating as a human includes a huge range of feelings.
I developed a deeper level of emotional fluency. I removed labels of good or bad, right or wrong. Just being with. This emotional fluency that coursed such an expanse of emotional experience was not just grief and heart break but also joy, bliss and overwhelming streams of love.
"This emotional fluency that coursed such an expanse of emotional experience was not just grief and heart break but also joy, bliss and overwhelming streams of love."
I recognize now that in growing my own capacity for emotional fluency I was prepping my system to flow with my baby’s emotional ease. My baby moves through emotions in seconds. She has no story attached to anything she is feeling. She’s simply expressing her need through feeling. When she’s uncomfortable and needs something to shift she vocalizes this through sound, the same way she vocalizes contentment and enjoyment through a different sound. If I attune with her, I can discern what she needs and not get stuck in a story.
"If I attune with her, I can discern what she needs and not get stuck in a story."
This “hormonal” flux that occurs during pregnancy invites us to feel so deeply and broadly. It is increasing our own emotional capacity in preparation for what’s to come.
Towards the end of my pregnancy my system felt like one fluid body, everything softening and relaxing in preparation for birth. And now I realize for the afterbirth as well. This is just one of the many things pregnancy is teaching us. There is also a death of identity occurring to make space for the emergent identity
of mother. But that’s a writing for another post.
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