A Surrendered Reckoning: Nature Decides

Heeding my Deeper Desire and Receiving a Message in the Pine Forest

After Mich the “rebirthing seed-planter” left my place in Ganado the beginning of May, I felt determined to complete my rebirthing training in June as I had planned with Leonard Orr in Sierraville, California, despite Mich’s denial that I was pregnant with his baby as well as his attempts to discourage me from coming. When I arrived, I found out that Ora — his other “rebirthing seed plant” — was also expecting since she and Mich had patched things up. I ended up staying at Consciousness Village for about a month.

My intention was to see if Ora and I could find a way to have Mich’s babies together since we were due close to the same time. I naively assumed Consciousness Village operated on a higher level of awareness and there would be healing from integrating birth trauma patterns with each other. After I arrived that summer, Michael left for close to two weeks, and Ora and I began to build connection and — I hoped —trust.

After finding out Mich had an alcohol dependency pattern, I felt “oh shit, not this again.” His unconscious behavior appeared similar to my father’s and I was clear I did not want to be in a romantic relationship with him. This realization clarified more than ever that I am here to heal with rebirthing, become a certified rebirther and to have an underwater birth with support since I am a single mother to be. But Ora, a fellow Leo with an apparent competitive possessive nature couldn’t let go of me getting pregnant first, became fixated on having her baby first.

I attempted to become a part of and contribute my gifts to create “more conscious community“; however my efforts and values became clouded and overwhelmed by rebirthers smoking outdoors every day. I only connected with one older woman who tended the garden and made ghee. She was tender and kind. I felt how she had healed inner wounds that manifested a loving patient presence she shared with me freely. She showed me how she prepared her ghee and I enjoyed helping her weed in the garden and harvest the carrots.

Ora was the main manager in charge of the Village and main rebirth trainer, under Leonard Orr. She had had sex with Mich during his first rebirthing experience with her as his rebirther, even though she was responsible for holding a safe space for him, the rebirthee, to go deeper inside himself and allow his breath to expand his awareness.

From my perspective, the dynamics of professional pretense and power dominating egoic concerns overshadowed the healing frequency I had anticipated would be in this beautiful part of the Sierras with hot springs and meadows galore.

Ora didn’t want to share having underwater births at the same time and she really was upset that I conceived before her. She was determined to deliver first.

Mich continued to struggle with the circumstances of siring two babies. Even though he acknowledged he had fulfilled my affirmation to meet a rebirther I could have a child with, he demonstrated in many ways that he didn’t want me to stay and he wasn’t going to help me in any way to make it through the winter.

I couldn’t stay at Consciousness Village and have the baby unless I wanted to fight or be in an ongoing power struggle while pregnant with Ora and have Mich not willing to help me make it through the winter in Sierraville Hot Springs, thirty miles north of Lake Tahoe.

I asked my one gardening friend to let Leonard know I was leaving and likely returning to Arizona. He actually walked into the garden after rebirthing himself all morning in the hotsprings to say good bye. He mentioned he was planning to come to Hopiland late August or September to offer an advanced rebirthing course and said I was welcome to join him.

Crone Wisdom coming through concerning the tension of this triad between you, Ora, Mich, and your former husband.

Continue to re-birth yourself through this deep desire to live free of ancient patterns of powerplays.

Immerse more deeply into silence inside and relax in the stillpoint between your inhale and your exhale.

Listen more to your body and to nature that surrenders to Source. Simply return to nature, re-align with natural law. It lies in the deepest place of ease and relaxation in your body, the pulse of life. Live in trust of your body’s roots in the Earth, nature herself and the inter-relatedness of all beings. This real support takes you where you need to be.

I drove over to the coast to San Francisco and stopped to visit my friend and lover, Satykam. He had two roommates in a nice house in S.F. Satykam was willing to let me stay for a while. He was attending CIIS, California Institute of Integrated Studies completing his masters degree, where I’d wanted to attend to earn my PhD. He was completing his masters degree and then planning to move to the Navajo Reservation not far from where I was living.

I stayed with him for a few days He shared some mushrooms with me. This was the first time I ever tried them. I brewed mushroom tea one morning and stayed at his house and played music and went on an inner journey. I wrote poetry, meditated and went deep inside my awareness.

Satykam approached our lovemaking more as a martial art instead of an act of communion or passion. I just couldn’t feel his heart when he gave to me sexually. He simply tried too hard and was too serious — but now, I can see he was a lot like me.

I hadn’t told him I was pregnant.

After staying with Satykam for a few days,I drove down to Santa Monica to visit my friend Leny. We’d met several years ago at the Krishnamurti talks in Ojai. I’d planned to meet him for lunch and perhaps stay awhile on my way back to Arizona where I lived in Ganado.

We lay down on his futon on the floor that served as his bed.

“It is wonderful to be with you. I would love to have a child together,” Leny offered when I shared with him I was pregnant.

I smiled and sighed at the same time.

“Of course, I mean if you get an abortion and we conceive our own child together.”

I looked at him with a steady gaze, “But Leny, I am already pregnant”.

This didn’t really appeal to me. I looked into teaching or counseling positions in LA County and that looked like a tough way to go. I remembered my conversation with my former husband, Brad while still in Consciousness Village. He shut himself down to considering us getting back together when he found out I was pregnant with someone else’s child.

With these potential partners clouding the clarity of what I deeply desired, I capitulated to see if I could naturally abort with acupuncture needles and special Mexican tea. Several friends said they thought it was early enough for the teas to work. Leny told me an acupuncturist named Victoria was very good, so I went to her.

I lay on her table with the needles in my inner calves. I closed my eyes and lost awareness of my physical body of arms, torso and legs. All I could hear with my physical ears was the beat of my heart and the whir of the halogen lamp in the corner of the room. And then I felt this warmth, an energy like a blanket would form, enfold my being and fill the entire room with its presence. This was the third time I experienced this energetic phenomena in one week.

When Victoria came in, she asked me if I believed in karma.

I said, “No, not really”.

She responded the tea and the needles should have been effective after the past several treatments.

“I suggest you go somewhere and be alone and come to terms with your situation. I think this being really wants to come through and you need to make a decision to allow it or not. I have helped you all I can,” she said.

When Victoria spoke with me in this way, I realized how easily swayed I had been by Leny’s offer: even though I was already pregnant, I’d agreed to the acupuncture as an alternative to returning to the Navajo land alone and pregnant.

Leny was a good lover, but I didn’t want to limit myself. With both Leny and Satykam, I felt like they wanted to control or confine me with sex. I chose to not go there with either one of them again. They focused on techniques without any heart and I didn’t know how to show or teach them another way than by just being my natural self.

I decided to drive on to the bristlecone pine forest where the oldest trees, one over 5.000 years old, in the U.S. grew. I felt intuitively to camp a few nights and be more in communion with nature and find a way to decide if I’d have the baby or not.

I drove up to Bishop, California in my VW bug. The “I give myself the gift of the Present” cassette tape playing with Louise Hay’s voice. The lyrics continue, "I bless the past and leave it behind, Trusting in divine right action, I’m in the right place right on time.” This song helped me let go of any remaining self doubt or judgment about the way things were turning out in my life.

I had first seen these sacred elder pines in a National Geographic when I was staying on a psych floor of a hospital for two weeks. I took the journal to keep as a memento of my stay on St. John’s psychology floor of the hospital. During my recovery and move to Tempe, Arizona, I began a children’s book about them as our elders; a testimony to the beauty and the resilience of life and maturing into old age.

I cried when I first lay eyes on Methusela growing on a rocky crag of bare rock and little soil; most of its growth appearing more as a fossil then a thriving tree. The starkness of its life made me cry at the beauty of its existence. As I approach the higher ground of the North Sierra region of California, the terrain became dryer and the rocks more like granite. The pine trees grew sparse and the air noticeably thinner.

Pull off the main road for a diversion. I feel moved to drive toward this rock formation. A huge red-tailed hawk was circling above and then another and another. They began this spiraling dance of freedom and movement maybe five in all. It felt like an omen for me on this inner journey to make peace with being pregnant the second time.

I said prayed and sang and walked the land. Found a couple of stones for my night ceremony. Just as I was getting back into the car, a huge black raven swooped down and landed practically on my car. I had mixed feelings about seeing him. And he continued to “caw caw” until I pulled away.

As I arrive in Bishop, I feel a sense of anticipation and magic in the air. Found a park ground on the flat lands before the climb up to the mountains. I decided to rest and sleep in my car there, but finally rented a room to get a good night’s sleep. After a full breakfast at dawn, I drive up to these sacred burial Indian grounds. I hadn’t read that anywhere. I just sensed or knew it.

I continue driving up the steep embankment and see a cave like opening in the huge sheer rock cliffs of granite and slate before me. I pull off the road onto the dirt and gravel space next to some large boulders. I kneel to ask for entrance to the higher realms of this region. I’m feeling euphoric on a very subtle level from the rest of the medicinal mushroom tea I drank along the drive up.

As I lay my hands before my head on the ground, I see this huge big creature like the huge plastic cootie bugs in the childhood game. He’s porous yellow and bright brown around the edges with a consciousness like mine. He stops and looks like he’s bowing to me as I lower my head to him and pray he isn’t a huge poisonous scorpion, which he could have been!

I feel blessed by the encounter with the illusory cootie bug. I drive the winding windy road all the way to the top of the mountain where the entrance to the Bristlecone Pine Forest is. The trees and terrain become sparser and dryer as I rise to the higher altitudes. The Bristlecone Pines are part of the Inyo State Park.

These ancient pines have been carbon ring dated as the oldest living organism in this hemisphere. They grow in the least likely place for pines in higher altitude with rock shale like soil. The tree branches vine and a lot of the older trees appear dead except for one extending branch or section of the tree. Because of the extremely dry climate, the pine cones are indeed bristly!

I walk slowly to the back of the grove of trees. As I sit on a boulder near Methusela, the oldest dated tree, tiny flecks of snow fall on my nose and eyelashes in late July! I lift my face to the sky and thought I see a body move along the edge of my vision.

A beautiful, tall, slender blonde woman stood near me. “Do you believe this snow in July?” she asked me. “It’s amazing” I replied. Cristine was from Sweden. She looked like an angel with a native American presence. She told me she lived in Ojai in a tepee. We stayed a while, falling fell silent as the snowflakes flurried with the wind, then dropped and melted as they landed on the rock or my arm and face. Somehow, the milky grains coated the pine needles of the trees like powdered sugar sprinkles.

By mid-afternoon, I begin to look for a place to camp. I find a picnic table and a grassy space to set up my tent and sleeping bag. I lay the wood for a fire and placed the food I bought in town on my table. The fire begins to crackle and sizzle.

I pull out a notebook and a pen. I hold it in my lap while my hand rests with the pen on the pad. I ask, what is the highest and best for me and my child? Then I throw the I-Ching coins several times and get the same configuration of thunder over mountain. Finally, after so many throws, the divination of the Oracle reminds me to stop.

As I relax and quit worrying, I feel this warming in my right arm and my arm begins to move automatically; I write words as they come onto the page.

“It’s a miracle I made it this far. I survived several challenges removed by the medicine man. I want to be born through you.”

I sit for a long time in the moonlight. Crickets chirp in unison, while an evening bird or two fly by within the periphery of my vision. The inky darkness feels like velvet on my skin and breath. As I surrender to the peace filled stillness in nature’s embrace, clarity in my body, heart and mind arises in me. This being wants to be born through me. Even though I feel scared, uncertain of the outcome, I know in my heart I can and will have this baby.

Crone wisdom: I acknowledge you for your courage to follow your inner feminine nature, to trust your innate oneness with nature living through you.

Your baby can help to remind you to put your body first. Continue to listen to your body. This empowers you to surrender to a natural spontaneous flow of Source energy that courses through you and your child.

Trust how silence speaks to you through your body. It becomes easier to allow doubting thoughts or others’ opinions to melt away when you disengage from believing answers lie outside yourself. The aspect of yourself that thinks it must make decisions, always weigh the pros and cons, will fall away more and more as nature’s silent language from Source reveals there’s less and less decisions to be made.