The Art of Wombing

We have a craving for safety right now. Ideally, a baby in the womb is safe. How can an adult access a womb space to regain safety, belonging and holding? One way that works for me to is to get my body in fetal position and wrap myself in a blanket or sheet that tightly contains my shape.

Wombing is also my favorite form of prayer. I position myself inside Mama Mary’s womb, so my entire self is held. I started praying this way as part of my trauma healing when my head could not recite the prayers I knew but my body craved to be held by God. That's a biological fact: we can't talk when we are in pain neither can we recall memories or articulate anything, our frontal lobes are hijacked. But our muscle memories remain, specially the primal ones.

Why would this be important for an adult that has left the womb decades ago and should have found many other safe places and positions? I think because our primal brains store in our muscle cells this fetal position as an internal sacred chamber.  Even God wanted one so He crawled inside Mary.

Wombing can take many forms: as bringing our knees up to our chest, or a full fetal position or our arms and torso holding our upper body, or we can womb inside the ocean or in a pool. The main intention is the holding. To be held as an adult can be a challenging task if one’s burdens feel too heavy to rest on others or too unconscious for our heads to acknowledge or too much for our brains to articulate.

Once you surrender to this tender invitation, what do you do once you are held in Mama Mary’s womb? All feelings are welcome, all tears are collected. I usually cry and when words finally come back they usually are: God have mercy on me. Everything fits in the heart of God. 

To add a cherry on top, womb in Hebrew means Mercy.

Womb

in Hebrew

means Mercy.  

Every single one of us

no matter the wreckage or

how heavy the burden

fits inside God’s infinite dwelling space.