“God Is So Merciful” … Let Go, Let God: An Example of Unritualized Primal Spirituality, A Primal Re-Experience after Birth
Part Two of a Primal Re-Experience after Birth: God’s Omnipresent Comforting Surround
In the first part—“Excerpt from Actual Primal Re-Experience after Birth“—the experiencer in this actual primal therapy session reconnected to and released primal pain related to her having her umbilical cord cut too early and then being swaddled tightly making her feel suffocated and unable to move.
She felt this had contributed to lifelong feelings of being held back and unable to assert herself.
In this second part—another excerpt from the same much longer session, which takes up only moments after the first part ends—Mary Lynn Adzema, the experiencer, begins to feel a glowing light of protection enveloping her, which she senses as being, perhaps, a “guardian angel” then simply God, or God’s Love. She experiences the spiritual idea that God gives you only that much pain that you can bear, but no more, which is accompanied by tears of gratitude.
Primal Spirituality
The facilitator is Michael Adzema, the experiencer’s husband and the author of these words. I have forty years experience in deep experiential modalities, including primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, and rebirthing; and I have been trained in these three modalities. I have been facilitating others in these—especially primal therapy—since 1975. I wrote “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” in 1979, which was published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1985. This article was the first to proclaim the occurrence of spiritual experiences occurring to long-term primallers, which take them further along in healing beyond what Arthur Janov contended could occur by just feeling through one’s primal pain.
The article presented a theory of primal pain, healing, and spirituality congruent with Janov’s theories but totally at odds with Janov’s early on proclamation and then continued insistence, based solely on speculation, that all spiritual experiences were derivative of underlying primal pain. That is a notion I believe has at this point been thoroughly disproved by my work, by the experiences of some other long-term primallers, and by the experiences common to Stanislav Grof‘s holotropic breathwork — a modality in which primal pain is accessed as well as a diverse array of transpersonal experiences and phenomena. In addition, they are confirmed by prenatal/perinatal researchers as I have explained elsewhere.
I have no doubt on this matter, personally, since I have had many primal-spiritual experiences through primalling and breathwork over the decades, some of which I was able to corroborate through outside sources. I began having these only after I had been doing deep experiential primal work for several years that did not involve transpersonal/ spiritual experiences. So I feel my primal work opened me up to being able to go beyond the strict designs of primal therapy in a way that would otherwise not have been possible if I had not gone through it.
At any rate, my wife’s primal experiences contain spiritual elements, though they were not sought and, like myself, they did not occur in the early years of her primal experiences. As her facilitator in primal therapy in the most recent years, I did not encourage them either … I simply did not discourage them or encourage her to reinterpret her experience in any other way than of her choosing, as was done in the early years of primal therapy and for those who undergo Janovian-style primal therapy.
In this video—the next part of her primal session—other aspects of her primal-spiritual experience unfold.
Part Three of a Primal Re-Experience After Birth: “Let Go, Let God”
The experiencer, Mary Lynn Adzema, had earlier (video 1) re-experienced the pain of being forcibly removed from the womb before she was ready—she was caesarean born. And she had felt a sudden assault of sensation upon removal from the protection of the womb without any transition time, which caused her to fear sensation and even wanting to feel or be in her body much throughout her life. She had re-experienced the cutting of the umbilical cord, which occurred too soon, and which made her feel, directly upon coming into the world, that the doctor was actually trying to kill her.
Incidentally, from sessions previous to this one, the experiencer had learned that this cesarean removal by surgical knife, the assault of sensations following it, and then the cutting of the umbilical cord too soon had caused her a lifetime of complications. She had made the connection that these events were the roots of a considerable amount of fear she had lived with.
She knows that these were the causes of a frequent recurrent dream of a life-and-death struggle with a man who would try to get into her house, who had a knife, and who she thought was trying to kill her. These dreams were so powerful, and I can attest to this, that she would have violent movements, would shout out loudly in a ferocious voice to “get away” “get out of here,” and so on, and she would clench her fists and pound them into the air. She would do all this while sleeping and without any remembrance afterward. These dreams stopped after she began re-experiencing the events in sessions such as the one shown.
The second video continues with her relating more about the assault of sensations but also depicts how after her cesarean birth she experienced being swaddled tightly making her feel suffocated, which she related to a lifelong feeling of being “held back.” But she also has experiences of being comforted by a light that envelops her and which she equates with God.
She has realizations of the omnipresence of God throughout life’s trials.
The events here in part three follow directly after those of part two. In this video, the experiencer relates her exhausting struggle to keep fear at bay her whole life and how in the therapy she learned that she could let go, that she did not have to struggle, that instead she felt comforted instead of being overwhelmed with fear (Let Go, Let God).
She makes the statement that “God is so merciful.” At the same time she is having feelings of love and gratitude for the blessings of the experience she has undergone, for what she has learned, for the help of the facilitator in coming through this harrowing experience, and for being able to end with such insight and glorious feelings of the beauty of it all behind the pain.
Continue with “You Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free” … What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like
Return to Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like — An Example of Primal Spirituality
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