Finding A Midwife For Your True Self

None of my children, or grandchildren, were born without the presence of a midwife. The midwife supported, encouraged and guided the birth process. They couldn’t do it for the mum, but they did do it with them. They were present and their presence brought the wisdom of a thousand previous births, along with the deep intuition and understanding of the birth process and the ability to read where the mum was in that process and what she needed next. So it is with our deepest, truest selves. We cannot give birth to ourselves, by ourselves. We need midwives - elders of the process of our becoming.

There are deeper parts of ourselves that are difficult to explain, or accesses, but may have on occasion broken through into our consciousness, like a momentary shard of insight, giving us a glimpse of something richer within us. In moments of honest reflection, I’ve heard friends tentatively begin a conversation with,  

I know this will seem weird, but one night I lay awake feeling a presence of something I can’t explain………   

I’ve never told anyone this before, but I had this unexplainable experience….

There are a million variations of the deeper whispers, intuitions, hunches, experiences, convictions and desires – all are echoes of the deeper parts of ourselves that we often don’t know what to do with.  Western society seems to have little patience, or imagination, for these unexplainable moments. They have lost sight of, or not yet discovered, that there is a dimension of our lives that is trans-rational (the development stage beyond rational). From a young age we learn to silence, shame, hide, dismiss or ignore the things that we cannot easily explain. 

In C S Lewis allegorical novel Til We Have Faces[1], the main character Orual, goes down into a nearby wood one evening. Suddenly, in the half-light, she looks across the lake and sees the most exquisite castle appear, full of transcendent light. She is captivated to the core of her being. In the next instant the mist rolls in and obscures everything. When it eventually clears there is nothing there. Just woods. The remainder of the novel is Orual’s battle with herself. Did she see it? She was convinced she had. Did she make it up? Was it wishful thinking? Was it a dream or hallucination? She tries to dismiss the experience, shame it and over compensate with hyper rationality. However, she had touched something deep within herself and though it had gone, she couldn’t deny it.  She was left with a sense of gnawing loss.  And many of us walk around secretly carrying these kinds of experiences within our own hearts and the loss of what it touched within us, but we could never explain.

Like master builders, we spend the first half of our lives erecting the scaffolding of who we think we want to be.  This strategy for life works just fine, or appears outwardly to work fine, for a few decades, but the echoes and hints of experiences we have had of our deeper, truer selves don’t go away so easily.  When the second half of life comes, it seeks to gently offer (sometimes not so gently), a second chance to gather up, to recover and discover those lost parts of ourselves that were actually fundamental to who we really are. This second half of life stage, calls to us to lean into, rather than away from, those echoes of our truer self. Like fragments of a lost treasure map, or breadcrumbs along an undiscovered path back home, we can begin to claim or reclaim this deeper, more authentic, more spiritual self. It was always waiting for us, waiting until we’d exhausted the scaffold building project of the first half of life.

So how do we make such a journey back to our truest self? Ancient wisdom said you can never make the journey on your own. We need guides (midwives), people who understand the deeper contours of our humanity, wise people who have already made the journey themselves. They were often called elders, or spiritual directors. The word director is a total misnomer, because direct is the last thing they do. They listen and listen deeply, in such a way so that you can begin to hear yourself and see yourself. Starting with the clues of your own unique past experiences, urgings, nudges, intuitions, visions and encounters, they help you to follow the breadcrumbs, or fragments, to a more authentic encounter with yourself. 

Soul-midwives help us see who we are, not just who we were trying to be, or adapting our self to be.  The wisdom and courage of the midwives is vital to unpicking the ego and what it clings to in creating a workable false-self.  They accompany us in relocating ourselves patiently into our truer selves. These are tough waters to navigate and often yield their joys through what feel like little deaths along the way. Poet T S Eliot said,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy[2].

Spiritual directors, spiritual mentors and elders, are midwives of the journey to our truer selves. They provide the cradle that gives birth to authentic people and authentic leaders. Nelson Mandela was very clear that such a cradle was the vital factor of support in him becoming the man he became. Richard Rohr says that we all have access to that deeper, truer part of our selves, but “We don’t always recognise those experiences for what they are. We may be too busy……too “bought in” to the narratives of our consumer culture. A practice of slowing down, of reflection, of asking “big questions” about our desires, our wounds, our values and our relationships helps us to discover and trust the truth and authority that lies within us[3]”.  Midwives do not give birth. They facilitate others in their process of giving birth. Having searched for a few years to find a good midwife, I can honestly say it was the best investment I ever made.

For anyone interested, I offer a holistic spiritual mentorship, to support people in their own unique journey of discovery. Feel free to contact me to discuss how this works. trevor@trevorwaldock.net

[1] Til We Have Face  C S Lewis  HBJ 1957 (1985)

[2] The Four Quartets T S Eliot    Faber   2001

[3] Adapted from Things Hidden Richard Rohr 2008