The Reflexes of Birth

I am going to talk to you about primitive reflexes, and I’m going to write as if we were moving together. Imagine yourself beautifully clothed in soft pants and cotton layers that allow movement to flow with ease. Gentle hands and smiling faces may guide you forward on a present-day birth journey—across woven blankets, through partial tunnels, over physio balls, and into mounds of colorful cushions.

The mature body employs the same reflexes as a birthing baby spiraling its way from the oceanic womb to the dense gravity of our earth’s succulent air.

These reflexes are like electrified elastic threads strung between constellations of stars.

When we were cellular, we would withdraw if stimulated, contracting toward our nuclear center. Then, as the environmental dust settled and it became safe, we expanded toward the periphery. As we evolved, we developed distinct body parts—head, tail, limbs, etc. Each of these has a relationship not only to its own center but also to the navel center and the spinal vertical midline center.

Our reflexes also orient us within our surrounding spatial environments.

Reflexes are essential for survival. Think of a hot stove. Now think of birth. Think about the greatest performance of your life!

You spent ten months training in the womb, and these reflexes were both your training program and your coach. They anticipated what you would need to survive on planet Earth and what you would need to move from living inside the womb to propelling yourself outward. Reflexes ensure that you leave the womb and can function outside it—breathing, swallowing, eating, pooping, bonding—every aspect of moving. They unify us in our biological imperative, which is why reintegrating them has a profound effect on psychophysical health.

Enfolded here is an invitation to embody the movements supported by the birthing reflexes that propel you through the birth canal.

Imagine if you could capture air in your hands and gently fold your fingers around its mass, drawing it inward toward your navel center, joint by folding joint. Do the same with your toes, feeling them move through silky mud, squeezing it out as you draw inward, folding your legs into fluid shapes close to the heart and the belly button. Head and tail, eyes and attention all withdraw inward—until they don’t. Then, like fish in sunlight, they swim gleaming to the surface and hold up the sky as they unfold and extend toward the sky and the earth. Think baby, think embryo, think flowers at dusk and dawn echoing giraffes and snails.

Enjoy it! It may feel awkward, clumsy, bumpy, etc. That’s because there are no myelinated neural pathways yet smoothing the journey from muscle memory. These will grow with practice.

My hope is that you experience and re-experience the reflexes of birth as a fantastic internal support in your life today. They are automatic and subcortical (beneath the level of thought), and they are stimulated as you practice them. You may feel lighter, more energized, happier, more purposeful, and more oriented both inside and outside.

Remember, you are dynamic elastic bands, strung between stars, being drawn into inner space and out to further galaxies. And, as always, it's the journey, not the destination.

Well, sort of… The exception is in birth. In birth, we biologically and psychologically need to get precisely where we are going!

It is ultimately life or death. So, every aspect—every single aspect of your experience as we explore our birth patterns through movement and reflexes—is vital information about how to transform your embodied experience on the planet. These are original movements. "Original" means "origin," movements that started with us from our first cell to the way we currently inhabit space and time as human animals.

You could say we humans make a grand entrance, birthing as many of us do through a machinery of obstacles.

But let’s redo it!

When we immerse ourselves in our original creative movements, sparking the dimensions of our opening dance—BIRTH—we renew.

Each opening, each unfolding, is a Cadillac with the top down, driving on a coastal highway, anticipating your entire anatomic life—windblown, stretched, and smiling in the fingers of sand-covered asphalt.

It’s the broad jump of somatic movement, this baby-embryo mishmash. It takes discipline to listen so closely to the cells dropping into gravitational fields inside.

And moving, moving, moving, moving, moving into still points that become constellations of us, now and then.