Walking the edges of what we KNEW in Science to be fact

My willingness to explore and expand the edges of our personal and collective experience and to challenge the limits of what is known and accepted has lead me to this work and an exploration of the old and new scientific research. Pushing and challenging the edges is something a "forceps baby" (and now vacuum extraction) is gifted at sharing with the world.

Being willing to walk the edges of the old and the new ways of experiencing life, bridging what has been with what is emerging, allowing death to embrace all that no longer serves, creating space for new ideas, new ways, and new experiences to birth, is in the words of Carolyn Brent, an ”Edgewalking practice”.

I am an Edgewalker as I seek out the edges of contemporary beliefs and existing paradigms to move beyond them to expand and explore new territory, pushing beyond known edges into unexplored territory where new life and growth occur. I can do this only because of the previous scientific researchers and other Edgewalkers.

Each of us, not just pregnant women, has a responsibility to generations as yet unborn, whose names we do not know and whose faces we have not seen, to ensure that their lives are as healthy and fulfilled as possible. Only by knowing the way our bodies developed before birth and made their preparations for life after birth will we be able to optimally match the preparation we each made at this critical time of our lives in the womb with the world in which we now find ourselves living. We need to improve this match between past preparation and present function for our children by addressing the critical biological issues both during pregnancy and after it. Only by understanding the mechanisms that underlie programming of lifetime health and disease can we improve the health of tomorrow’s children.

--Peter Nathanielsz, Ph.D. (animal researcher), MD (Obstetrics) in. Author of Life in the Womb: the Origin of Health and Disease,, Prenatal Prescription and Life Before Birth: The Challenges of Fetal Development and Prenatal Prescription. I LOVE this man and his work. I carry Life in the Womb with me.

There is no other time in your child’s life when you have as much influence over his emotional development as during pregnancy. You and our unborn infant are connect in a most intimate way by the passage of neuropeptides across the placenta. These powerful molecules affect your unborn child’s prenatal emotional development by altering brain structure and setting this own neuroppetide concentrations. The behavior we see in our newborn infants in not simply a genetic expression; it is a combination of genetic expression and fetal experience. As the fetus progresses through its prenatal psychological development, the variety of behaviors narrows. Once a newborn child starts along a path of behavioral development, it becomes harder to change.

-- Frederick Wirth, MD, Ph.D. in Prenatal Parenting (www.PrenatalParenting.com)

His explanation of neuropeptides is based on the work of Candace Pert, PhD, author of Molecules of Emotion (www.candacepert.com) in which she shares her personal journey as an Edgewalker, as a female scientist in the seventies when she went against the status quo to research her questions. As a result, she identified the receptor site for opium and discovered receptor sites are throughout the body, not just in the brain. This discovery means that in order for the opium to work in the brain there has to be a receptor site. She concludes from this that IF the cell HAS the receptor site this means the substance can be made in the body, thus, the "runner's high" is explained as is the FACT that a woman has the ability in her body to MAKE the chemical that provides pain relief as opium would. She holds the patents for many of the medications that took the life sentence away from those with AIDS -- based on this receptor-site finding. Medications were developed that have the "key" to match with the "lock" on the cell. I presume this is how many engineered drugs work. It also why many of them have such severe side-effects. Candace Pert is one of my heroes for whom I have the greatest respect. I don't respect so much the status quo folks who are comfortable to stay in their positions of power and wealth at the expense of the baby, the soul coming into this world, who deserves a warm, loving, peaceful trip and experience of coming to the mother's breast untouched and unharmed by strangers.

The Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Programs specialize in the extraordinary new discoveries in research and in ground-breaking clinical work that examine this earliest of human developmental periods. Conception, life in the womb, birth and bonding, and the beginning experiences as an infant in the family shape our sense of self and our lives at all levels of our being--physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual. This program of study provides an exquisite opportunity for students to help mothers, fathers and infants/children have the most optimal early foundation available. The program also prepares students to work with individual adult clients, couples and families.
--From the website of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute (http://www.sbgi.edu/)

So, here’s what I think. Sometimes it's us, the non-doctor or nurse person (withOUT heavily ingrained beliefs systems and boot-camp indoctrination education who learns to do things one certain way and who learns to use the "science" to fortify their own beliefs and what they want to do and how they treat others) who can look at multiple pieces of the puzzle and formulate questions that will help find the missing pieces. We see the world and the "subject" from different eyes, often more open, more expansive, and more accurate. It's ok to walk the edge, be on the "fringe" as my friend's child's psychiatrist (anamored with my friend's ex-husband-- so much for her "transference training") refers to those physicians and psychologists who are against the use of Ritalin and practice "alternatives".

Evolutionarily and physiologically, during gestation the baby is being built to live in a certain environment, THAT physiological, emotional environment that the mother lives in DURING PREGNANCY. Violence, stress, harmony, protection, support, etc are critical factors in WHO one will be and HOW they will respond to their environment. Get involved with someone who was abused as a child and you'll get the picture. We all know a how an abused and neglected child can NOT receive and take in love and nurturing just because they are in a new environment. Research shows that violence during childhood causes a brain that is much smaller and sees, senses, and experiences the world differently than a child who is not abused.

Highly intelligent and educated research scientists (including their students and followers -- obstetricians, pediatricians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, therapists, educators, etc -- many of whom are abused children and that's WHY they are in their profession!) have not yet postulated that perhaps, by chance, it just might be the emotional, psychological, and physical conditions the mother experiences ALSO affect the conceiving organism and the gestating brain? Why don't the most educated and "scientific" get it? It doesn't make it unscientific that they haven’t thought of it and because they refuse to acknowledge the growing research AND because they refuse to deal with their own brains.

Seeing the emerging scientific evidence requires dealing with one's one prenatal, primal imprinting which requires not only personal change like with a lay-person, but it requires MONUMENTAL change in their beliefs and training and acknowledging what they have done to many, many people over their careers was ineffective at best and at worst is traumatic. I know, I went through it. I know doctors and nurses who have had the courage to face this -- attending the birth of thousands of a babies in a way that now we know is/was traumatic for the mother and baby. It is not easy in this situation to face internally what one has participated in. Whether it is the mother or the physician it is not easy to embrace the possibility that drugs and interventions are the cause of many of the physical, mental, and emotional issues of our culture.

Unfortunately, our education, training, and then our work comes to define who one is. When one can't separate who one is from what they do (and it is always about money and status and that inner pain), it is seemingly impossible for them to explore new possibilities that might also require them redefine their core Self and to change their behavior and heal their own soul - even as the scientific understanding clearly and obviously changes. Personally, and socially at work, it usually takes long battles or tragic, undeniable events in loss of life to make those in medicine to change. Unfortunately, the consequences of harm in psychology are less obvious and so psychology (and grossly ineffective systems and practices like talk-therapy) are allowed to plow through society like a run away train and we are, our babies are, in it's destructive path. Scientific understanding changes and grows all of the time. Those who refuse to re-consider and evaluate and integrate new findings and who hang on to the train for dear life (and the pay check and way of life) are also people stuck in their wounded prenatal patterns.

Scientific understanding is not chiseled in stone --- it is ever evolving. Like we all know the world is not flat. We know germs exist even though Pasteur was ostracized for his findings. Even after he used chemicals to disinfect and dramatically lowered maternal mortality rates obstetricians refused to believe it or use it. What's different now? The routine "in case" protocals for newborn resuscitation are shown to make no difference in meconium aspiration (which would be a very small percentage anyway) but still physicians insist and are allowed to traumatically resusciate every healthy baby -- "in case. " TODAY we have so over-used antibiotics that new bacteria is resistant to our cures -- and it was not so long ago doctors didn't know about bacteria and then refused the research. Science in progress. And, now the Newtonian theory upon which “modern” medicine and psychology is shown to be outdated. We have moved beyond that knowledge.

Medical beliefs are terribly outdated but enmeshed into a culturally, religion-based, indoctrinated belief system that is shamefully perpetrating damage upon humans from the cradle to the grave. Never in history is it the most revered scientists who were current and “authoritative” and “thinking of the next frontier” who discovered the new question. Those who clung to and insisted upon the “earth is flat” did everything they could within their power (and they had it) to prevent the new information from being studied. They killed to maintain their beliefs and status. People who claimed the earth was round were killed. Midwives were killed in the witch-hunts as medicine and men took over birth. We are more civilized, we are a democracy, and women have rights now. But, the resistance of the status quo, the power brokers, and the way of change, in the name of science with a religious underpinning is the same track the train has always run on. "Alternatives" and whistle-blowers are always held in disdain. Fortunately, a collective energy is happening within science and lay-people are intelligent, inner-connected, and educated and more people exist so that the Edgewalkers have a hungry audience.

Bruce Lipton, PhD., author of Biology of Belief, (http://www.brucelipton.com/) is a cellular biologist who for decades has been providing the foundation to explain the conception and prenatal period of development and conscious cellular memory. His studies of the cell – and theory applied to that one cell of us, the zygote, that first forms from two cells, the mother egg and the father sperm – discovered that we are not held hostage by our genes. If something is genetic, like cancer or alcoholism, it would be present from conception. He discusses the DNA and how genetics work IN RELATIONSHIP to the environment. We are not solid hunks of mass. Doctors learn on cutting up "dead hunks of meat" as Pert says, and are not taught that we are energetic beings as science now shows. Physicists and others are showing we are energetic right down to the cellular level and smaller and that we are all from the same source. From the moment of conception, when we form a totally new configuration of the two donating cells, we are ever growing and changing IN RELATIONSHIP to the environment and in connection with each other and everything.

It is amazing to me that the “old school” powers-that-be doctors, nurses, and psychologists who continue to “rule the roost” (those foxes guarding the hen house again!) are so unwilling to consider the new science. As we know from cellular biology, the one cell of us, and the billions and billions we come to be and are today so that you can read this, are ALWAYS in relationship to our environment. That is learned in Anatomy and Physiology 101. Why it was never applied to the whole human until recently by “outside the box” thinkers is curious to me. There is no more need for the bi-polar debate about “Nature vs Nurture” that dominated my undergraduate psychology studies in the late seventies and early 80’s and STILL UNDERLIES traditional teaching (brainwashing) in psychology, medicine, and nursing.

The ONE CELL of me and you, from conception, through cell division and differentiation to become three types of tissues, to every body part, structure, and system, is either in GROWTH or PROTECTION and THIS is DETERMINED by the ENVIRONMENT!! Recent studies show that the ATTITUDE, BELIEFS, and ENERGY of the RESEARCHER can influence the growth in the petri dish. The attitude and beliefs (that determine the energy field of a human being, a researcher) interacts with the energy field of the subject – just like people can know our buttons to push,)

Apply this to conception, gestation, and I did already apply this to birth with my story in the previous post.

Conception
Logically, socially, religiously, and psychologically we KNOW that a baby conceived during rape (ultimate state of protection) will be affected. We know that a conception between two partners, in-love and welcoming a soul to their union will be a happier, loving, and peaceful being. What about the millions of possibilities in between – the gray area of possibilities where most of us were conceived? Mother saying no in her head and dad having his way. Teenagers in the back seat of a car. A woman having an affair. Make-up sex after a fight. During separation and preparing to divorce. The possibilities are as endless as we are in numbers.

Apply this to gestation. Bruce Lipton writes:

During pregnancy, the parent’s perception of the environment is chemically communicated to the fetus through the placenta, the cellular barrier between the maternal and fetal blood. The mother’s blood-borne emotional chemicals cross the placenta and effect the same target cells in the fetus as those in the parent. Though the developing child is "unaware" of the details (i.e., the stories) evoking the mother’s emotional response, they are aware of the emotion’s physiological consequences and sensations.

While developing in the safety and confinement of the uterus, the child is provided a preview of the environment as it is defined by the parent’s perception and behavior. Parental behaviors are generally cyclic, and when repeated, they serve to habituate the developing behavioral chemistry in the fetus. Consequently, parental perceptions and responses to environmental stress are imparted to the offspring and serve in programming its behavioral expression.

Behavioral "memories" are in part related to the appearance of specialized cell and tissue protein receptors which serve as "filters" in remembering past signals. Behavioral "filters" acquired during pre-and perinatal "programming" are Nature’s way of preparing the neonate to function in the parent’s environment. Technically, these "learned" filters would enable the child to adapt more quickly and successfully to the home environment. The parents’ experiences help "preprogram" the behavior of the child, so that it may more effectively deal with environmental exigencies.

http://www.birthpsychology.com/lifebefore/early8.html.

You can read all about the prenatal period, hormones, and the developing fetus in Prenatal Parenting by Frederick Wirth, MD, a neonatalogist (http://www.prentalparenting.com/

Stay tuned .... for detailed info on the "good news", the ways we can reprogram ourselves and our babies ... rather than live mired in guilt, shame, and anger for how we experienced coming into this world and/or birthed our babies the "best we knew how at the time."