The Human Continuum-The Brilliance of Being Human
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
The Human Continuum is the biological, environmental, parental, familial and social matrix that optimizes human well-being in ways that are maximally supportive to humans and the environment they inhabit, as developed over hundreds of thousands of years hand-in-hand with the emergence of our species. Each species has a multiplicity of ways that truly maximize the full development of their offspring into the adventure that each of us represents in the adventure of consciousness.
If an animal gives birth, its continuum in-forms it how to raise its young in a way that optimizes their survival. A mother fox or bear doesn’t need a so-called expert to tell her how to raise her young or give birth to them, she is in-formed by her continuum. But in the animal kingdom we see increased confusion about such natural matters in direct proportion to the amount that animals have been domesticated and imprinted by human beings. In the human species we have even more problems with birth and raising our little ones.
And yet that’s not the norm of human experiences across all cultures. Discovering this was surprising to me. With respect to human beings, there are a lot of presumptions that we often make about our species that seem virtually self-evident. The entirety of our experience within our culture of origin and even in many other cultures does little else but confirm it. Here are a few examples of such apparently “obvious” things that we believe we “know” about humans:
• Newborn babies typically cry during many hours of the day and night, waking their parents. We’ve all know how new parents, mothers and fathers, are easily identified by their look of being sleep-deprived.
• Young children, say 2-4 year olds, demand constant parental attention and we all know that it is virtually impossible to hold a conversation with parents of children that age if the children are in the same room due to the constant interruption.
• Good parenting requires consistent guidance & disciplining of children, correcting their errors, guiding their steps and keeping them out of harm’s way.
• Adolescents want to be around other adolescents and as far away from their parents and other adults as possible.
Now, to most Westerners and increasingly around the world, these observations are so commonplace as to become truisms. To suggest that in many cultures infants, young children and adolescents or their parents DON’T behave this way seems pretty far-fetched. To suggest that we can just adopt somebody else’s culture is even more far-fetched and not the point. And yet there is something to learn, not just from other people, but daring to open and expand our relationship to our experience.
Imagine my surprise, while spending time in Zapotec and Balinese communities, with lots of children around, in discovering infants that weren’t crying hours a day, young children sat quietly with their parents while they talked with friends (even two-year-olds), parents and entire cultures that don’t say “no” to children or interfere much with what they’re doing, and adolescents love being around their parents and routinely bring their friends home to spend time with their parents, laugh, talk and enjoy each other’s company. I spent time with people who showed no alarm when 18 month-olds played with sharp, adult machetes poking in live fires, for example, and saw toddlers confidently and competently using sharp tools in ways that caused me to become alarmed, until I calmed down, observed, and discovered surprisingly “precocious” abilities to be the norm when children aren’t continually interfered with.
When I share this with Westerners, some people get defensive or protective of the way we do things. I am not bringing this up to criticize anybody. That is not the point. The point is that we adapt to and accentuate the environment we grow up in. What is apparent and backed by research is that there is a level of stress, of neurosis, of inter-generational alienation, loneliness and mental illness in the West that is surprising to people in other parts of the world. If you, on the other hand, are feeling some of the general uneasiness in your society and in your life, the invitation here is in discovering some of the ways that it arises and our options for being more comfortable.
The hallmark of the developmental requirements of newborns and of human beings in general, whatever their age, is one of CONNECTION. Consider for a moment that much of our existence as Homo sapiens has occurred in natural environments with predators. When a child is born, the natural expectation is that as soon as it is born it will land immediately upon his mother’s abdomen, hear his mother’s heartbeat, nurse and bond visually with the person whom he has known from within her very being for the previous nine months. Any other experience signals to the newborn that something is radically disrupted in his connection to Source, in this case his mother. The umbilical cord should not be cut until it stops pulsating, given the fact that a significant amount of the newborn’s blood supply is still in the cord and get shunted to his body gradually. To cut the cord prematurely stresses the newborn with oxygen deprivation, potentiating all kinds of development problems in the future. Spanking a newborn, putting eyedrops in its eyes, or circumcising it are forms of violence that prevent the stress hormones that circulate in the newborn’s body after birth from coming down and actually causing them to increase. It has now been demonstrated that the newborn’s experience in the first hour of life after birth leads to profound developmental choices in that child’s life: they will either gear up to thrive in connection or to survive in a fight-or-flight world, a world where mothers are not present even at birth to ensure connection during the first hour of life.
Why would we care? Because the difference between a continuum-appropriate birth and a violent, interventionist medical birth is one of profound delays in neurological development and determines whether certain developmental milestones will be achieved, whether they’ll be delayed, incomplete or unattained for a lifetime. One such example is that, if you read the typical medical literature, it is stated that the infant’s capacity to recognize her mother’s face and smile takes about 10 weeks to develop. But such capacities have been documented on the day of birth with natural homebirths. So here we are talking about a child achieving the connections within their nervous system prompted by connection with their mother, family and world the first day of their life, or whether this will take two and a half months to be accomplished. If the child’s mother is not able to respond appropriately to the child’s needs, delays simply get compounded.
That entire societies could show such generalized delays and evolve cultures built around retarded neurological and social development has already been amply noted by the work of numerous neuro-anatomists, child development psychologists, and educators. Jane Healey, author of the book entitled Endangered Minds, documents the kind of developmental retardation that is now common in the United States and spreading world-wide. What is surprising is that cultures where developmental delays proliferate aren’t necessarily aware that this is the case. Almost every individual is obliged to adapt and to internalize the culture, regardless of how much of a threat it is to the biology of the individual adapting or the world he lives in.
In a disrupted continuum, expectations are placed on newborns, infants, children and adolescents that are totally inappropriate to their developmental stage and adaptive capacities. For example, the other day I was in the library and there was a young mother with a small infant, accompanied by her friend. The infant was crying, the young mother was at the computer rocking her child’s baby carrier/car seat absent-mindedly with her foot and her friend said to her, “It looks like he needs some attention.” The mother said to her friend, “Oh no, I want to get him trained early.”
This is misguided parenting yet the mother is innocent of it. If she delivered her child in one of the many hospitals where I have worked, she may have even been told by a nurse of obstetrician to “let the child cry. It’s good for them to cry and helps develop their lungs.” This is the kind of nonsense that is propounded by medical “experts” in our society and goes contrary to a mother’s natural instinct to cuddle and nurse a crying baby. But anyone who has gone through the many years of alienated schooling typical of our society has been well conditioned to ignore their natural instincts and desires and to surrender to an external authority, especially to people with initials after their name, uniforms or white coats signaling their belonging to a certain priesthood of “experts.”
In ancient and still-vibrant ways of life, such as those of my Indonesian and Zapotec friends, babies are never left alone and are always ON somebody’s body: their mother’s, their father’s, grand-parents, aunts and uncles and siblings together care for newborns and infants and let them know that they connected to themselves and to their loved ones continually. This is the feedback appropriate for an infant during the first six months of life and beyond and supports the maximal expression of that child’s potential.
In the upcoming Deep Freedom, Deep Connection course, we not only explore our own personal journeys on the Human Continuum, but learn how to enrich our internal and external connections in a way that affirms our capacity for connected, vital, abundant living from the core of our experience.
©2009 Olivier Tryba
Tags: Adolescence, alienation, Bali, Childhood, Connection, Endangered Minds, Human Continuum, Human Development, Indonesian, Jane Healey, mental illness, natural birth, Parenting, schooling, terrible twos, umbilical cord, Well-Being, Zapotec
September 14th, 2009 at 12:37 am
Olivier, I encourage you to look at Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova’s work, http://birthintobeing.com. Her work with mothers and family in the pregnancy and birth process is based on the Shamanic work of a Siberian Shaman, Igor Charkovsky. Her presence and embodiment of this shamanic work is amazing. There are a number of film clips on the website. Notice that the babies have their eyes open looking before they emerge fully from the birth canal and they do not cry when they are born.
September 14th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Thanks Carla! Truly inspiring and a great resource.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Olivier, will discuss this more in CO but just a short note to let you know that I’ve always been fascinated with this topic and felt your writing to be brilliant and thought provoking. As a mother of two sons, now 21 and 24, I believe that who i am in relationship with/for them, beyond title, may be one of the few gifts i have to offer in this lifetime.
Look forward to meeting you in “person”.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Pat, thanks for taking the time to read this and comment. Mothers are some of the greatest gifts we can receive in this lifetime and, as we grow, hopefully we grow to discover increasing dimensions of both motherhood and birth. I look forward to receiving your wisdom as a mother, a woman, and expression of the Beauty and Mystery of Being.
September 19th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Olivier,
your comment leaves me weeping…… never, ever thought of my self as an expression of Beauty and Mystery of Being.
March 13th, 2010 at 10:41 am
My home country Holland is in many ways an overorganized, hyper-capitalist country. But the way natural childbirth has been encouraged and facilitated here for the last decades, is very beautiful. It possibly also has something to do with the puritan calvinism that constitutes the roots of our contemporary culture. (Besides in the very south of Holland, even our catholics are calvinist.)
Our health care system provides all facilities to give birth at home when there are no medical complications. It even encourages it: when you choose to give birth in hospital without medical necessity, it costs you way more money.
We have a vast quantity of midwife practices, and they counsel you all through your pregnancy and assist in giving birth at home. Most midwifes accept and support it when you choose to give birth in an ‘alternative’ way, such as in water or on a stool.
Both my kids were born without any medical intervention, and my daughter even here at home. I praise my children and myself lucky for it: when your baby finally pops up after 9 months, all you want to do as a mother, is to hold it in your arms, close to your heart, and sooth it in all its tiny wetness and nakedness.
I’ve had many discussions, even arguments, about this with foreign friends who are vehemently in favour of being sedated and hospitalised when giving birth, and who proclame you an irresponsible idiot when choosing to give birth in a natural way and a safe and warm home environment.
There is an unlucky tendancy these days to blame the relatively high rate of child death at birth in Holland to this ‘puritan’ system. I’m more inclined to think it is partly due to the huge amount of economic stress our society generates, and the way this is liable to alienate future mothers from their primary instinct to know what is going on with there womb child in their own body. Some other factors are the mounting age of future mothers in Holland due to the necessity to party and make a career before becoming a mother, and the fact that taking the pill for years increases the risk of birth complications and having twins.
April 5th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Dear Jevgenia,
Thank you for sharing in your experience in childbirth and how things are done in Holland. Joseph Chilton Pearce has compiled the research literature in a very accessible format in his later books and study after study indicate that maternal stress during and after pregnancy have direct repercussions on child survival and health. So much of our educational system programs us into the sort of self-alienation that you speak of as mothers no longer knowing what is going on with their child in their womb.
At the same time, the gift that the 30% of Dutch mothers delivering at home are giving to their children will have profound impact on society there. I believe that it is the next generation of children who have been allowed to grow into the fullness of their humanity who will show us what’s possible.
Thank you so much for your contribution to our human awakening!
July 10th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
This rings SO TRUE, it is so deep down in the fabric and into the cells of my being common sense, how do we have 10s of millions of people deluded to such an obvous fact of reality, AND fighting for it, struggling for it, killing themselves for it!?!?
When I started to re-awaken from the great dreaded human comotose a few years back now, such things as you highlight here seemed so increidbly obvious, YET, the mere mention of them was enough to incite incredible reactions, so I just stopped doing it.
I really do not believe informing people is enough, it can help in some cases though I sense we’re way past evidence and details now - in my experience - as that can be argued with for all eternity, only the full and true dawning will do it, people actually waking up and seeing/feeling sense, directly, in a way that cannot be argued with.
It seems that only comes ordinarily when people become so incredibly fedup with the state of play that they spark into awakening as there is no other option left.
There has got to be a better way than that, less brutal, right? Or is it simply that this is what it takes to do it, this is in a sense the mirror we need in order to trigger us back into pure reality? Just plain life sense?
It certianly seems to be so…
Peace
Sean
July 12th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Sean, we are deluded to the obvious, Experiential, fact of reality for the simple reason that peoples who have undergone conquest become first of all subjected to all kinds of violence, humiliation, subjugation and self-alienation. To the degree that they FEEL that, they might actually rebel, retaliate against their oppressors, etc. In Western history every rebellion has been coopted into just a further entrenchment into a deeper form of domination.
In the West we also, and hand-in-hand with domination, develop a “spiritual” hypnosis which uses refrains of “light, all love, etc.,” anything but the actual, felt texture of life on Earth.
My experience of awakening certainly had NONE of the romantic hallmarks sold by many so-called “spiritual” scoundrels. As a matter of fact, I awoke first of all to how much pain I had suppressed and how my “spirituality” had actually served as an anesthetic, as a way of suppressing, repressing and expressing pain, but always as if there was a separation between me and then “this experience of pain.” When that wall came crashing in, my primary experience was of profound discomfort, not only personal discomfort but also how that discomfort AND the acculturation to NOT feeling it has been passed on by both sides of my family. I also became profoundly aware of the shame that I felt at even feeling discomfort, as if I was betraying precious family secrets (and I was and refuse to be beholden to them), not only of my own family, but of Western culture at large.
So, no, “informing” people by giving people more information is NOT enough. How I work with people is taking them into-the-form of how they are holding and replicating culture in the very shape they hold, and one which is largely immune to their “spiritual” cosmetology of replacing their dysfunctional judeo-christianity with “shamanism” or “tantra” or whatever fashionable anesthetic looms large on their mediated consciousness.
Consider for a moment that in cultures that are post-conquest and have ADAPTED to and NORMALIZED the post-traumatic state, the greatest taboo is to actually access your FELT experience without rushing to remedy any and every sensation that falls outside of the culturally-sanctioned range of “comfortable.” To open to one’s ACTUAL experience without rushing to make it cultural acceptable, i.e. to “FIX” it, i.e to make it possible for the people around you to NOT feel THEIR own discomfort.
To see how this works, just go to your local playground and watch how parents continually censor and try to amend their children’s emotions, because so many of their child’s emotions, expressions and behavior are uncomfortable FOR THE PARENTS. It’s truly fascinating. To even question this in Western culture is considered generally nuts. What made me begin to call it in question was spending extended periods of time with people who do NOT relate to children, and thus to themselves and each other, in this way.