Parenting, Birth & Karma

On a soul level, the circumstances of our birth and of those we give birth to are not a coincidence. From conception we are imprinted with powerful, often mysterious energetic forces which shape and define our core beliefs, relationships and life experiences. Many traditions suggest that we make soul-level agreements to enhance our spiritual growth before we incarnate on earth. Regardless of what we believe, taking responsibility for our own behavior and healing the wounds of our past can transform and free us of these often invisible chains that cause our suffering. WARNING: this track uses some strong language that may be deemed triggering/offensive to some of our listeners.

Transcript

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Welcome to Spiritual Psychology.

My name is Renee LaVallee McKenna,

And I bring my 30-plus years as a recovering addict and ex-crazy person turned therapist and shamanic healer to bring you snackable teachings on spirituality,

Psychology,

And all things personal growth.

And today I want to talk about parenting and karma,

And how our birth circumstances and the circumstances of those that we might birth are not a coincidence.

I have come to believe that there are no victims on a soul level,

And viewing our life or our experience from a soul perspective is much different than viewing it from an ego or personality perspective.

Our soul self is directly connected with the larger consciousness system.

It is our own unique expression of divinity,

The spark of the life force,

Our little individuated unit of consciousness from this larger system.

Many people in traditions understand that the soul is the part of our self that doesn't die,

That is connected with the infinite,

That perhaps travels across lifetimes or experiences.

The soul is the aspect of our self that perhaps holds our spiritual or energetic DNA,

The blueprint for the work that we perhaps come here to do,

To participate in this cosmic dance or the evolutionary pull of life.

And our soul self may be completely disconnected from our personality self.

For me,

One of the most important aspects of personal or self-growth work is to connect with myself on a soul level.

And that's why I think any psychology or therapy which does not address our spirituality or our connection with the universal force or God or higher consciousness is incomplete.

And on the other side of that coin,

Any spiritual practice which does not include personal growth work,

Evolution and maturing,

Healing our wounds,

Is incomplete as well.

In fact,

Many turn to spirituality and religion as a way to try to avoid their suffering.

And avoiding things does not make them go away.

In fact,

It drives them underground and can even encourage them to grow into monstrous forms where they will visit us either internally as undeniable dysfunction,

Like addiction,

Depression,

Other psychopathology,

Or they may pop up externally as abuse,

Neglect,

Abandonment,

Tragedy,

Trauma,

Which we feel victimized by because it seems to be external to us.

And in fact,

On the human plane,

It is external to us,

But from the meta perspective,

We are all connected in this larger system.

We are in conversation with life,

Depending on how well we learn to communicate with the life force,

Developing a healthy,

Mature relationship of give and take.

There's what we want from life,

And there's what life wants from us,

And somewhere in the middle is our experience.

Learning to have a healthy relationship with this larger system that we're a part of can really mirror our experience of healthy or unhealthy relationship in our human experience.

And I've come to believe that suffering is not the enemy.

Suffering is perhaps the most important information that we have.

And I put any kind of distress or discomfort under the suffering umbrella,

That the way that life is structured on this plane of duality,

Pleasure and pain,

Joy and suffering,

Offer a very clear compass.

Joy pulls us forward to our own highest good,

Or to be in the flow of the life force,

And how well we align ourself with that flow,

To be able to follow our own joy that comes through our little individuated unit of consciousness that looks like a personality self.

That is the path to joy and happiness,

To fulfillment that most of us seek.

And pain,

Fear,

Suffering,

Disconnection,

Those are information about where we need to grow and heal,

Mature and develop.

Now it's very understandable that most of us would seek pleasure and avoid pain,

But part of becoming a spiritual and human grown-up is being willing to face our pain,

To be changed by it,

To surrender our ego or personality ideas of who we think we should be.

What we think we want or need are perspectives on ourself and our circumstances,

And to open to the great mystery of the benevolent life force that is available to us through all circumstances.

And our willingness to surrender or align ourself with that universal flow as it moves through our particular little creek in this vast forest of consciousness,

That little creek being our own little soul path.

The more we align with that,

Again,

The more peaceful,

The more fulfilled,

The more passionate and engaged we are in this life thing that we're all doing.

And the more we resist that flow,

Ignore it,

Deny it,

Feel terrified by it,

Well,

The more suffering and fear that seems to produce.

And as metaphysical as I am,

I am also intensely practical and was raised with the scientific method.

So I remain unattached to what happens after death,

And I won't know until I get there.

And it seems to me that that memory gets automatically erased,

And there's,

I think,

Good reason for that.

But there seems to be quite a lot of evidence from my work with clients and in my own personal growth path that there is some continuity of the soul lifetime to lifetime.

And I find that actually to be good news,

Because it kind of takes the pressure off.

We don't have to do it perfectly.

It's better if we make progress.

But if we don't,

We're just going to bring whatever is unresolved in this lifetime through to the next one,

And we'll get a chance to do it again.

That has been profoundly motivating for me,

Because there's a few things I would rather not repeat.

Thank you very much.

And from my perspective,

It's also the real downside of suicide,

Is you can hit that reset button if you want,

But you're probably going to come into a similar dynamic to face,

Heal,

And resolve on a soul level.

I used to be a petty thief and shoplifter for a really long time.

If we look at stealing,

There's some powerful information and really dysfunctional core beliefs in it.

The first is that it's possible to get something for nothing.

And although I do believe in shortcuts and efficiency,

The earth plane is a closed system.

Everything's connected.

Every action has a reaction.

That is a law and a principle that is unavoidable.

How we behave,

How we think,

Even how we feel in the world has an energetic form,

And those are causal,

And there's no way around it.

Whether we behave well or poorly,

What comes around goes around on the deeper energetic planes that underlie all things.

And I've had the great fortune to live as a thief,

As a drug addict,

And as a feral cat for a long time,

And as a fully functioning,

Healthy,

And respectable person,

Trying to do service in the world and a lot of iterations in between.

And in my feral cat addict days,

I didn't want the rules to apply to me.

I wanted to be able to get something for nothing.

And I actually never got in trouble for stealing.

I got caught once when I was a teenager,

And the manager of the mall was my best friend's mother.

And although the police brought me home,

No charges were pressed.

I was a great liar.

I told my mother,

That's the first time I ever did that.

Thank God they didn't search me,

Because I had 40 joints rolled in the pocket of my coat to sell at that mall in between stealing shoes at Shoe Town,

Which is where I got bagged.

I always had an innocent face and I used it to great advantage.

But on a deeper level,

My stealing was rooted in a deep unworthiness,

That I didn't feel that I was deserving of love,

Of connection,

Of prosperity directly,

That it wouldn't happen for me on the regular channels.

And so if I wanted something,

I'd have to take it.

And the thing about core beliefs is that they are self-reinforcing.

I was incredibly cynical about love and relationships early in my life,

Because of my birth circumstances and my relationship with my parents as an only child.

Never felt connected to anyone until I was in my 20s.

My whole life has been a slow progression of learning,

Healthy connection,

And heart opening to others,

Continues to this day.

In fact,

I've had a massive heart opening experience over the last four years.

So grateful.

I have more access to my own feelings,

My ability to give and receive love than ever before.

So beautiful.

Growing to understand the power of vulnerability.

I spent a lot of my life being invulnerable because I thought that was a source of strength.

But now I can use my life energy in making deeper connections rather than trying to block people from hurting me or grasping onto them so they don't leave.

But the personality self is often very disconnected from the soul self.

And I felt victimized.

I felt victimized by my mother,

Who was emotionally unavailable and a very wounded person.

I felt victimized by my verbally abusive boyfriend.

I felt victimized by my lover who would go home to his wife and I needed to drop him off down the street so we wouldn't get caught.

I felt victimized by my addictions to alcohol and drugs,

Sex.

I was often a slave to relationships I didn't even want to be in really.

And particularly victimized by my own body that had an insatiable hunger that couldn't be filled by food and got fat without my permission.

And I grew to hate it.

Because I was attached to being invulnerable and very defended,

It was hard for me to own my sense of victimhood because that felt weak to me.

I was more into being a perpetrator than a victim.

And it took me many layers to unwind that under my rage and anger,

My arrogant tough guy persona,

That was all fueled by this sense of fear and victimization.

And so what does all that have to do with birth circumstances,

Karma,

And soul-level consciousness?

Well,

The circumstances of my birth,

As is true for many people,

Set a template for my life.

It's one of the first questions I ask clients is,

What were the circumstances of your birth?

And birth trauma,

The birth configuration is way under-recognized in Western psychology because most therapy and personal growth work exists on the intellectual plane.

There's a belief we can't even access those memories or our relationship to them.

But when we open to inner work,

More body-felt,

Intuitive,

Non-rational ways of knowing,

Like inner journey work,

Guided visualizations,

Hypnotherapy,

That inner knowing,

All that information is right there.

And so for me,

I was born C-section by a woman who was already terribly anxious and had no one to help her.

She was alone in the hospital with a long labor for three days.

And in those days,

Everything was done with complete anesthetic.

And it took her three days to recuperate afterwards.

And I had no contact with her.

They lifted me out of her belly and whisked me off to the newborn unit to be fed by bottle until my mother was strong enough and well enough a few days later to come and peer at me through the glass.

And by then,

Her milk had dried up.

She was never a nurturing person to begin with.

And when she finally came to hold me,

I was furious.

My newborn self had felt completely abandoned.

I believed my mother had died.

And the fact that she was still alive and had not come to be with me,

I'm going to tell you,

I hated that woman the first moment I saw her.

And she looked at me from her own woundedness.

And in healthy parenting,

We look at the baby and we say,

I love you.

I'm so glad you're here.

Mirroring their soul back to them through our love and expression of the great mother.

And we are able to channel the great mother to our children and to ourselves.

I have done tremendous work.

It's been a main taproot for me to connect with the divine feminine as a healing force.

And my mother,

The poor thing,

Looked at me and she said,

Do you love me?

Are you glad I'm here?

And it's no coincidence that I was a colicky baby and screamed in her face.

And we never did make peace in this lifetime.

Although I continue to work with her in the 15 years since her death.

And there's more to go,

But we're doing much better than we ever have before.

And I blamed my mother for much of my life.

And blame is a very low resonance,

Just like victimization.

And as I have come to take responsibility for my own life force,

I've come to understand that the circumstances of my birth were not a coincidence.

That this lifetime is an opportunity for me to grow in vulnerability,

In surrender,

In forgiveness,

And to tap into the sources from the larger system,

For my nourishment,

For my support,

And for my guidance.

Rather than from the wonderful and yet very imperfect humans that we share the path with.

Not that people don't help me and I interchange with them all the time,

But all of the circumstances of my family of origin have actually put me on a path of service in this really windy way.

Through my own deep suffering,

I have come to desire helping others to be healed and transformed as I have.

I did a fabulous multi-part workshop on karma.

And one of the pieces of work was to do an inner journey to consciously understand the purpose or the dynamic between us and our family members.

And there's a really powerful perspective that everyone in our life is a teacher.

And perhaps on a soul level,

They even volunteer for those teachings.

That it's about our growth,

Maturation,

And development or evolution more than our comfort that's important here.

And the dynamic with my mother was really surprising.

It was to teach me about healthy service.

Completely unexpected.

But in that,

She has been my greatest catalyst and teacher for what I have come to understand as my own soul path as a wounded healer.

To be a wounded healer,

You got to have a wound,

Right?

And not all healers are wounded healers.

There's enlightened healers,

There's empathic healers,

There's many aspects of the healer archetype.

I got the wounded one,

And I'm totally down with that now.

Because once we get in the water of our own little stream or creek and get in the flow,

It's a really enjoyable ride.

So I have come to believe that on a karmic level,

I was drawn to the birth circumstances of my parents.

Now,

Some systems might say you actually make very conscious agreements,

Or even plan out the work that you'll do in this lifetime before you incarnate.

I don't know about that.

But I know over and over again,

I have magnetized emotionally unavailable people in my life,

Both men and women.

And when I finally took responsibility and stopped looking to find the right person or change the outside circumstances so my insides would feel better,

I get to see my own emotional unavailability.

I was still looking for something for nothing.

Not unlike my mother,

I wanted you to love me,

Rather than developing my own vulnerable ability to love you.

Then I needed to become what I wanted to attract in my life.

And that too remains a continuing developmental journey on all levels.

We get a long time here if we're lucky.

And if we choose,

We can use every moment of it.

We don't finish developing at 30 or 50.

We can bring it right through to the end.

And I believe the next incarnation is going to be very different than this one.

I did another workshop where we practiced dying from a Buddhist perspective,

Essential work for all of us who really want to grow up,

Facing our own impermanence as an ego self,

And really experiencing that soul spark that continues on.

And in some Buddhist belief structures,

After the body dies and there's a dissolution of the ego self,

The little individuated unit of consciousness goes through what they call the bardo.

And the bardo is that state between death and rebirth.

And from a human time perspective,

It might be understood that we might spend like 40 days going through the bardo and the different levels of it.

And there's some great books on this,

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,

And the Dalai Lama's Meaning of Life talks a little more about these dynamics.

But we were practicing dying and going into the bardo.

And there's all these different kind of emotional states that you move through.

And the first one is anger.

And I got stopped dead right there.

An image of my mother came up.

I was going to incarnate into another lifetime right there.

Really motivated me.

Really motivated me to move into forgiveness.

I don't want to redo this.

Repetition is the key to learning.

And some things I'd like to learn the first try,

Although I don't think this is my first time around.

But we also practiced jumping over the bardo,

Which can be done if one is in full acceptance and surrender to death.

And there are bodhisattvas and saints and angels that can help us.

Hail Mary,

Full of grace.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Leap into the arms of Mary,

Or Avalokiteshvara.

Say that three times fast.

Avalokiteshvara is a bodhisattva of compassion in the Buddhist pantheon,

One of the charioteers across that divide between death and rebirth.

And that work really prepared me for my own children's birth.

Because I had so much blame on my own parents,

I was terrified that my children would blame me in the same way.

And as I have grown and evolved out of blame,

I no longer fear being blamed.

It really is an interactive universe.

If you have fear that you are being judged,

The best way to dissolve that is to look at your own judgment.

I had tremendous fear of abandonment,

And I have a string of people that I have abandoned.

If you are in an unloving or abusive relationship,

Look first at the quality of love and compassion that you offer yourself and others.

So preparing for the birth of my first child,

I spent nine months trying not to have a c-section.

I did yoga three times a week,

Drank all these fancy teas.

I had a birthing tub and a midwife and a doula.

I was going to do this baby the natural way,

No hospital.

And my soul had other plans.

It was a completely unproductive labor.

62 hours I tried to push that baby out,

And I ended up with almost every intervention you can have.

I didn't have forceps,

But pitocin,

A spinal,

And a c-section.

And somewhere before my labor began,

I was counseled to completely surrender the birth process.

My therapist was very intuitive.

In fact,

She thought I was going to die.

She knew something terrible was going to happen.

I could kind of see it on her face.

Luckily,

She didn't tell me I was going to die because I didn't.

But something inside me did die that needed to die.

And surrendering,

Facing,

Moving through this thing that with every fiber of my being I didn't want to have happen was completely transformative.

I faced one of my greatest fears,

And my son's birth was one of the most powerful transformative spiritual experiences that I have had.

I was blasted open by that,

That I could have my greatest fear and have it be a beautiful experience.

I was awake.

They handed me that baby,

And I bonded with him right away.

And I got to heal my own birth experience at the same time and grow in tremendous compassion for my mother.

Incredible.

Not my plan.

I never got to use that birth tub that was sitting in my living room.

And my doula and my midwife were there to make sure they gave me enough anesthetic so I didn't feel it when they cut the baby out.

Because one of them,

They didn't give her enough anesthetic,

And it was a traumatic experience to feel her c-section.

But that's her path.

And it pushed her to become a doula.

Not unlike my wounds have pushed me to become a healer.

So I do a lot of work with birth circumstances.

I have the amazing opportunity to work with a set of adult twins,

And they have very different issues.

One of them has tremendous anxiety,

Difficulty with transitions,

Really struggles with a deep negativity within her.

And there was a complication in the twins' birth,

And one of them got to go home,

And one of them had to stay in the NICU for a week.

Twinship is really interesting,

That there's a deep connection in vitro.

And to be separated from her twin and connected with no one.

But the nurses on the NICU,

That's a powerful configuration.

And she is a healer as well.

And I observe that as she does her own personal work,

She is more effective and more compassionate to those that she serves as a medical person.

And my son's birth by c-section,

And a few years later,

My daughter,

Who practically fell out of me,

Almost didn't make it into the room.

I got the birth I wanted the first time,

The second time,

And the second time I was prepared to have a c-section,

But that wasn't her plan.

We get the birth we need,

Not the birth we want when we birth our own children.

It's been a huge lesson in control and humility,

The different experiences of each of my children.

And I hold that they have their own experience now.

So if you are a mother,

I encourage you to understand that perhaps the circumstances of your child's birth and family configuration is not all your responsibility,

That they have been drawn to or chosen this configuration.

I have a friend who feels terribly guilty,

And her children are almost grown,

About choosing the person that is their father.

He's a really nice guy,

But outrageously dysfunctional.

Struggles with a lot of mental illness,

And is kind of a train wreck in almost every area of his life.

But they produced two gorgeous,

Strong,

And talented children,

And we talk about it frequently.

I believe they chose Peter Bradshaw to be their father,

And that's their own path and their own work to do.

Now certainly we are responsible for how we treat our children,

Just as we are responsible for how we treat ourselves and the other people in our life.

And continuing to grow,

Mature,

Expand,

Develop,

Evolve,

With the guidance of our own soul,

Following our joy,

Listening to and facing our suffering,

That's our work.

We absolutely impact the people in our lives,

But they have their own agenda on a soul level too,

And that has nothing to do with us.

So although no one on a personality level wants to be abused,

Harmed,

Raped,

Abandoned,

To have physical disabilities,

Or terrible medical issues,

To be born into poverty,

Or war,

Or institutional racism,

But facing healing,

Being guided by those dissonant and often excruciatingly painful dynamics,

Is incredible information on our own path.

And on a soul level,

There are no victims from my perspective,

Only volunteers.

Thank you so much for listening.

Blessings on your path until we meet again.

This is Renee LaVallee McKenna for Spiritual Psychology.

Reviews

Wow! Intelligent, articulate, fascinating journey. Thank you for sharing. Going straight to my inspiration playlist so I can revisit multiple times🫂