The postpartum of rebirthing.
Rebirthing is not a flip of a light switch.
The process of rebirthing moves in waves. Sometimes the entirety of the whole cycle is faster than others, more painful or joyful, but it’s always a process.
Rebirthing is not just letting go of the old and immediately becoming the new. Sometimes it’s slow and grueling. Uncomfortable, confusing, and unclear. Other times, it’s ecstatic and surreal.
When rebirthing begins, you sense the first inkling of death upon you.
Things start to get uncomfortable, change is calling. You begin to realize what is either no longer working, or that something big is changing — whether you want it to or not. Depending on how much you resist, the discomfort will vary. If you don’t surrender, you may be forced a bit more harshly into the dark, uncomfortable, and constricted birth canal.
Either way, there is only one way out — it’s through.
What I think we forget most when it comes to rebirthing is that there is no hard line of clarity.
When you come out the other side, it can be somewhat of a shock. Things are different. They are definitely different. But there may be a morning mist of confusion or that gangly feeling of a newborn animal struggling to walk or stand up for the first time. It’s in their DNA, but it’s hard.
This renewal doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not A to B. It’s a faded transition. It takes practice to rewire, to nourish the new neural pathways. There is a postpartum period. So much rest, reflection, and integration are needed to fully embody the new.
Sometimes we are forced to stop. We were forced to look, question, reflect, and awaken. Sometimes we are forced into that birth canal.
Rebirthing so often feels like failure or death until we come out the other side and can see the whole picture.
We lose touch with all that we know, all that’s comfortable. Just like a newborn leaving the waters of the womb.
Once we are out the other side, we are fragile in a sense. Our beings are in a state of shock, recalibration, and a bit of confusion. Maybe grief, maybe excitement. Everything may feel different, but it somewhat looks the same. We are different, but we are still moving with certain aspects of what was. We dance back and forth, being able to see the beauty of the new and then feel like we have taken three steps back — this is the recalibration.
If we can remember this, we can start to more easily recognize these moments and these thresholds that we cross through life. This awareness can ease the process tremendously. We can much more easily find gratitude, patience, and soak up the beauty instead of being destabilized by the unknown.
We always rise from the ashes, and we will inevitably turn to dust again.
If we don’t recognize the dance, we may endure a lot more suffering than necessary. We have the potential to embrace the confusion, seek excitement when we feel a sense of panic, and we can do everything in our power to choose trust over fear.
In the postpartum period of rebirthing, we may feel like what we released or left behind comes back to haunt us at times, but this is the swinging of the pendulum that happens as we recalibrate.
Rebirthing is usually slower than we think.
When you find yourself in this place, in these transitions and transmutations, make a point, and muster the discipline to up your self-care and assure you’re receiving pleasure, whatever that looks to you — hot baths, art, sex, wearing bright colors, singing at the top of your lungs in the car, anything.
Remind yourself of what you're grateful to yourself for, what you're proud of, and what changes have been made inside. Reflect on what insights have come. Make sure you see your growth and remind yourself, it’s okay to be fumbling with the old, as we grasp to embody the new.
We are always walking forward blindly in life, unsure of what will come next. The most suffering in life comes from when we think we should be better than we are.
This is the medicine of rebirthing. The process of life, becoming, and being is unending.
Rebirthing is not clear-cut. It takes time to adjust. And we are always at one point in the cycle between death and birth. Always.
We are constantly growing, we are constantly learning, we are constantly moving forward in time with the rest of the collective. Even though this is true, our wheel of death and rebirth may keep spinning the same cycle if we don’t pay attention to what needs to be released. If we refuse to let go, and we cling to what’s shedding, we will keep cycling this same death over and over again until we surrender. You’ll always shed something, you’ll always gain something, but the more we can surrender to death, the more we can live.
Everything is forever changing, everything is forever birthing, and everything is forever dying. Change is the only constant. And if we can celebrate this change, and celebrate death and life, we can find so much more joy, and we can live so much more fully.
The medicine at the root of rebirthing is that nothing is permanent, nothing is linear, nothing is black and white, and there is no end point — it’s all a continuum.
It’s so easy to see this when you are in your greatest heights of joy on the other side of the struggle, and you are viscerally experiencing the high of life that death has granted you. The test is remembering this when we are in the dark, in the underworld, and the birth canal, unable to see, or move, or breathe.
When we are feeling the heights of death, remember that life and death and bound — it’s a continuum, and rebirth is reminding us of the control we never had.
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It’d be lovely to have you.
May we wake the women.
With love,
Abby
