9 Things You Can Work On In a Womb Surround Besides Birth Trauma
Most people have no idea what “Womb Surround” means. A Womb Surround is usually a multi-day workshop for 4-6 adult participants to heal early life trauma. I would like to share what is achievable in a Womb Surround. Over 17 years, I have personally participated in 28 of these workshops, and they have completely transformed my life. The truth is that being a human is difficult. The human experience is filled with various types of burdens and traumas. Most people desire more freedom, more ease, and support for their most personal psychological and pain body challenges. They also desire more choice in how they show up in their relationships and careers, how they react to life, and how they feel on a day-to-day basis.
What I have learned is that the way our life begins sets the tone for how our nervous system works, how our minds perceive the world and others, and establishes most habits of self-care or self-sabotage. And what happens at the beginning of our lives? For starters, when we grow inside of our mother, our nervous systems learn how to sleep, rest, process emotions, what is safe, what is unsafe, who is safe, and who is unsafe. We learn how to receive nourishment and the love of the world. We learn where we cannot receive love from life, and all these things shape who we are.
We absorb the undigested challenges of our parents and the unprocessed traumas of our ancestors. We take these on out of love and belonging and the non-optional need to survive in the family and culture we're born into. Then, when any major challenges in our childhood or later in our lives arise, we rely on these early survival strategies and imprints to respond to the challenge.
What I found is that I was more able to unwind and heal from later traumas in my life when I also worked on the earlier ones and the familial survival strategies. I am saying all of this to emphasize a few points:
All the things that happened to you and the things that you took on in your life from others can be transformed.
The human spirit and body are incredibly resilient, and underneath everything you think you are that you don't like about yourself or are suffering from is an untouchable, perfectly lovable essence of innocence and Godliness.
There are people in the world, containers, and communities that can hold you in that and help ease any suffering or pain you are experiencing.
The body keeps score, and you will have the most significant impact on transformation when you include your body and nervous system in your healing journey.
The Womb Surround format was created to support the healing of an infinite number of challenges. I am going to share some things that are outside the traditional box that people think of in Womb Surrounds, which can also be thought of as an Early Imprints or Complex Trauma Healing Workshop. The obvious things that Womb Surrounds can help with include birth trauma, embryological trauma, and ancestral trauma. And, there is so much more.
Womb Surrounds are a great place to work out the following issues:
Attachment style evolution: Transform anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles by working on the actual family and parent bond dynamics that created them.
Harmful and mis-attuned parenting: If one or both of your parents struggled with alcohol, mental health, or psychological disorders (such as bipolar, manic, depression, violence, abusiveness), were absent, or overly medicated, this would definitely affect your young inner parts and your adult life.
Family secrets: If there are disowned family members, shame-inducing or incestuous hidden events, and unspoken losses in your family history, they will impact your trust in and openness to life and relationships. They will also create internal fragmentation and self-secrecy.
Undigested ancestral trauma: If your parents, grandparents, or those further back survived or fought in a war, survived famine, immigration, genocide, etc., these experiences will impact your existential sense of safety.
Harmful and abusive siblings: If your siblings (biological, half, or step) were harmful or are a result of complex life situations, this will impact your intimate relationships, friendships and belonging in community.
Self-sabotage, self-hurt, and self-love challenges: When we aren't treated well or have experienced harm or neglect from others (even if we don't remember), we will re-enact our young experiences as adults upon ourselves.
Chronic body or nervous system challenges: Chronic pain or nervous system dysregulation patterns often begin inside the womb in a mother's body that is already challenged in similar ways. Plus, continuous family systemic stresses over the first 18+ years of life anchor these deeper.
Not wanting to be alive or thrive: Sometimes life begins in such a level of challenge or ancestral overwhelm that the core part of us gets imprinted with the strong desire to not be here. This existential trauma will impact how much we thrive and potentially leaves us feeling unexplainably numb or perpetually dissatisfied with life. Thoughts of suicide or actual attempts do not appear in a vacuum (ancestral and early history create the conditions for this).
Sexual dysfunction or challenges: When our inner baby nervous system experiences overwhelm or interventions, or there is childhood sexual abuse, it impacts our ability to experience pleasure and move life force through our bodies and our level of trust and safety.
Anything else, and I'll tell you why…
The actual secret of why Womb Surrounds are so versatile and powerful is that the form and structure model how incarnation works. That is, the steps we follow in a Womb Surround match how a Soul (or Spirit) enters a fertilized egg and forms it’s body and identity. Life creates itself over and over at every moment, and everything that happens is organized through intention. There are important developmental steps that happen one after the other. In a Womb Surround, facilitators invoke these natural processes and forces sequentially in a way that unlocks both what interrupted your development and the miraculous blueprint energies that created your particular identity and body. See, in the trauma is the life force that frees you. With attuned, skilled somatic facilitation, you are supported to evolve beyond the original imprints and land in the blueprint possibility of what you actually are. It may sound "woo-woo" to some, but it is also incredibly effective and practical.
In my first Womb Surround, I didn't work on anything that happened to me before three years old and didn't allow the facilitator to touch me. The facilitator, Ray Castellino—the creator of Womb Surround work—was totally awesome with it, and it created safety for me to be able to go at my pace.
The other special sauce of any good therapy and space-holding is to move at the pace of the nervous system.
I offer both group Womb Surrounds and personalized one-day experiences.
Ray Castellino and Elan Freydenson in 2015 during a Body In to Being training in Ojai, CA.
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