The Big Hunger

This is a description of an exploration of an old problem. I had started working on, but my friend wanted to press different part of my spine. I felt I didn’t want this as it was disturbing my feelings because she was moving all the time. But one spot she touched was interesting.

I asked F. again to stay on one place so I could see if it were possible to explore the connections.

“I can experience this impulse going right into my brain. But it is also going straight down into the cellular level of my being. It seems to be stimulating different responses that my being is capable of. It is calling them into play artificially. I suppose it is like playing notes and causing a piano or musical instrument to respond in certain ways. So in a way it is like exercising my being. I can feel a part of me coming alive in some way. It makes me wonder what this conscious self of mine is; what part it plays in the body. It is lovely to feel it as part of all that is happening in my body at the moment.”

There is something going on in my body that I am barely aware of yet. Areas of sensitivity are touched that connect with past experience. Therefore the touch connects with those areas, with those feelings, with those memories. It goes on and on because those memories connect with habitual responses and the other levels of myself. F. was pressing on the lower part of my spine where I think there was not much sensation. But it was bringing about the response in which my body wanted to groan and move. There was no pain attached to this it was simply an impulse arising from the pressure on that area of the spine. I allowed the moaning gasping sound to be expressed. I could feel the memory that was being touched and stimulated linking right back into the womb. A distinct sense arose that my body was just being formed – that I was just forming my body. As I was doing this things happened. I could feel my body as an integrated whole. The moaning struggle went on, deepening. I began to make baby like noises. As this happened I experienced complete helplessness with the overriding feeling of not being able to move. Like a tiny baby that did not yet have the capacity to move its own limbs because of the impact of full gravity. I knew in some way that this was how I felt when I was born. I couldn’t move and was completely inert and dependent. Completely without an ability to do anything for myself. There was just a big hunger.

Now the moans continued and my body jerked into being curled up in a ball. I was gasping and groaning with pain. It was pain I could actually feel in my solar plexus. I am a little child locked into that part of my development and its pain. It is the memory that was deep in my bones. I want. I want. I am just a huge want. That’s all I am, just a bloody great want! I want! I want! I want! I want! I really want!

Then I was talking to that part of me as the adult who was experiencing it, saying that I do love you little wanting being. You are a part of me and I am trying to help you. So I am holding you and trying to feel what you want. It’s awful to know that you have been feeling that want for such a long-time.

I realised as I was experiencing this that this tiny part of my being was being cut off from the umbilical cord before the process of growth in me was ready to survive independently. I was too tiny to be able to feed properly in any other way. So the pain in my solar plexus was caused by an immense hunger, a sense of loss, a feeling of being cut off from the flow of life, from the flow of life that gave me existence. And it was painful. All I knew was a longing to be reconnected to the umbilical cord once more. As I understood this I then imagined this tiny part of me being connected to my own flow of blood so it could be nourished. It desperately needed that sense of connections that feeling of nourishment and life flowing into it. And when I did that, when I imagined that connection, I could feel it relax and the pain of hunger and the fear of dying subsided. Quite quickly I could feel it developing. The impulse to suckle was emerging, but still a long way from being established. (The next day while listening to F. I felt twitches in my lips and mouth, and when I allowed them my mouth made the beginnings of a suckling movement. I realised that the tiny part of my being that I contacted was already beginning to develop and its process of growth was going on within me even though I was only barely aware of it.)

Suckling the teat was not enough. After all I did not have the strength or the ability to suckle yet. I needed to be connected. If it was at the breast, then I needed to be connected in the same effortless connection that I had with the umbilical cord. Suckling was not an option. In my actual afterbirth period I had to make enormous efforts to get what I wanted. This has left an indelible mark on the emergence of my personality. I have to make a bloody great effort to get what I wanted, and that has set me up for life. I will not get what I want unless I make a fucking great effort. It felt like a superhuman effort. I was just a tiny bundle of cells not ready for the outside world.

As these experiences were felt and I gained insight into them it was obvious why my sexual orientation had developed in the way it has. I had being cut off prematurely from connection with the umbilical cord and my whole need was to be reconnected. I could feel very distinctly that the level of development I had reached had no ability whatsoever to give of itself. Its whole program was to receive, to be nourished, to draw into itself. And that level of my being was programmed to connect. As the sperm and ovum it had connected to the wall of the uterus. It had developed that connection in a life-giving way. It had maintained that connections via the placenta and the umbilical cord. Its whole existence was about connection and nourishment. Connection and being nourished. As I could see from what I was experiencing, that part of my being had never developed beyond that point. It was only now, through being connected, beginning the process of further development. Yet here was the foundation of my experience of connection with another being. My experience was that I have not grown beyond the point of only being able to receive. So when my body grew and started the connection with another being through sex, the deepest part of me only knew how to connect in the process of receiving. It had not developed the point where it could in any way give. It had not developed anything to give. So my sexual experience was one of being ripped apart, of being vampirised, of being sucked dry of the energy that I needed. As I saw this, as I understood this, I felt that perhaps if that part of me that I have now contacted could grow and develop, there may be a time when connection through sex would lead to a very different experience. I imagined my umbilical cord connected to an artery so blood could flow. This gave a wonderful feeling of being connected to life again.

F. was touching other parts of my spine and I found that when she touched the back of my head there was an enormous reaction. My whole being jerked away from the contact. Yet I was still a tiny baby in what I was experiencing and so it was a terrible effort to try to avoid that pain. I asked France to touched the area very gently. When she did so my body went into very powerful movements and I feel certain I went through being born when my head and neck were crushed and pressed creating this memory of great sensitivity of the back of my head.

Following that, I felt as if I wanted to die. I didn’t want to breathe. I didn’t want to live. This was all too much to bear. So I just lay quietly for a while wanting to disappear back into whatever I have emerged from.

Gradually this changed and I felt a new impulse coming in, the process of being born again. By experiencing those moments of babyhood, of being newborn, with the struggles and torments that existed for me, it seems to offer the possibility of being born again without that torment, without those pains. It reminded me of the saying, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless you become as a little child.

This experience of responding to pressure on different parts of my spine has led me to consider the possibility of what I give the tentative title to of Responsive Massage. It seems to me that if one understood the principles at work here, and used it with that sort of slowness and understanding of being able to respond, this could be a very helpful technique to enable people to find those deeply buried early memories in the womb and out of the womb.

As I came out of the experience of my premature birth I had a great feeling of love and sympathy for other premature babies. I felt as if, because of the work I have done on digging down into myself and meeting the experience of being premature, I was something of a pathfinder for other people who had been born prematurely. I had a spontaneous image of myself as being like a large ship, big enough to enable many smaller boats to connect a line, a lifeline to me. I felt as if I could give support, or I was giving support in a psychic way, to many other premature beings.

After those experiences I felt weak, hungry and thirsty. I needed food and water. I got up and rather shakily managed to get myself some food and something to drink. France had made herself some food and was eating it as I did this.

Nothing of great account followed this, but the influence went on for a long time afterwards. I felt quite weak and needed to lie down all the time. I wanted to simply curl up so I went to bed fairly soon afterwards and existed in continuous waking dream in which all sorts of imagery and feelings flowed along. Very gentle, full of colour and art and ideas. I remember in particular many images to do with British sexuality. The rather proper surface and social front, underneath which still existed the drive for sex. Because it was hidden under the social licences it often expressed as rather a down-to-earth, love in the haystack sort of feeling. A particular image I remember is of seeing what appeared to be a abstract painting, but which was obviously of an English vegetable garden, and in the middle of the cabbages and Brussels sprouts a pair of woman’s legs stuck up in the air obviously in the sexual position.