Self Organisation

I reckon my childhood was specially designed to create a strong urge and desire towards self organisation. And my first great experience in how the dark has lessons, those who hurt you teach you far more than the hurt, and how relinquishing control can be so liberating when coming from total control.  

 

In the debutante ball on emerging from my childhood I wore rags.  My confidence had been completely stripped from me, the rug of my entire existence ripped out from underneath me a few times already, fears of everything and loathing for myself had been instilled deeply.  I knew I knew nothing.  And I'd had every minute of my day controlled and scheduled for so long, that just the absence of a routine or schedule felt like a holiday.  

 

Working for other people hurt me.  I couldn't understand the easy way they took out their shit on me, and felt like they could just because they were paying me.  All the facts I'd been taught had bored me into blanking out or going misty eyed when faced with science, maths, or any form of standardised learning.  

 

All the religion I'd had thrust on me had taught me to run a mile at the sniff of it.  All the pain in my family ensured that I kept my secrets at arms length to everyone.  And my family had sternly informed me that the best I could ever hope for was to be a good wife and mother, cause I didn't have much chance at 'making it' any other way.  So of course I steered as far away from that as I could as well.  

So wearing my rags to the debutante ball, I emerged into my real life, and the life of my own directing, with only one realisation to guide me.  The realisation I came to standing at the gate of my life stretched before me, when I left everything that had gone on before behind.  The gate where I realised that nearly everything that had been taught me was a lie or a sadness. And I got that the only ultimate truth was that there was no ultimate truth.  And set sail with abandon into self organisation, even though that wasn't what I would have called it at the time.  

 

Knowing that I knew nothing, and was ugly and a bit stupid to boot, I felt from the start that I had no right to infringe myself or ideas on anyone.  No right to even demur when a fella decided he would fuck me.  I'd had no control or power my whole life to that point, so why try to start getting it now?  

 

I felt I had no life experience to make any kind of educated decisions, and obviously no imagination, or I wouldn't have been aimlessly bumbling from one situation, person, or idea to another as flakily as I was.  No internal fortitude, or I would have finished something, like I was always being told to.  And absolutely no ability to change myself, be better, be disciplined, enforce routine, or create the ability to refuse to give in to my indulgent desires. 

 

Afraid of everything cause I didn't understand it.  Inferior to everyone cause they kept telling me I was.  

In other words, I was primed for gratitude.  It wasn't hard to feel deeply greatfull for any kind word or deed that came my way after the desert of my childhood.  It was also easy to contact great enthusiasm for just about anything positive or enlightening.  And because I was so….well…..nothing, it was easy for me to learn from and appreciate and accept just about anybody.  

 

Some of my favourite people I learnt from, were the people that I'd been warned the most about in my childhood.  Drunks, sex addicts, homeless folk, bikers, drug users and abusers, witches, occultists, goths, punks, the queer community, people of other cultures, new agers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, activists, environmentalists……..just about everyone seemed liberated, and interesting, and intriguing, after a childhood of such banality.  

I was also primed for self organisation.  Almost as soon as I got a bit of control over my own time, on leaving home and school and all those other trials, I just let time ooze all around me, tried my earnest best to not think, and not do, and not feel a need to fill it with stuff, but let time be what it wanted to be. 

 

And learnt very quickly that the things that happened spontaneously, the times that I ended up at the pub dressed in my shabbies having an awesome improvised time, or when a friend let me drift in their wake, while they went on adventures through places and people, or when I just let life and events pick me up like a piece of flotsam on the ocean of possibility……..were some of the most magic moments in my life.

At 18 I backpacked around Europe for a year, with no fixed destinations, no plans, no travel mate, and no fixed goal beyond meeting the rich man of my dreams and spending the rest of my life swanning around on the Riviera.  

 

From the moment I landed in London with my money having experienced a hitch, and deciding to not turn up till a week after I got there, with no friends or family, a hotel room booked for two nights only, and a rising sense of panic…….I started to learn in depth about the miraculous ordered potential of chaos.  

 

Or the beauty of self organisation.  

 

I may not have done it as stylishly as this couple, but I did it on my own.  With only a backpack for a travel buddy, and barely anything in it beyond my sleeping bag and a warm coat, I set off into the seas of self organisation, and began the scientific experiment of my adult life.  

 

My first night in London after getting of the plane, I spent the night in Soho, got my moles read by an Asian restauranteur, had a large black man offer to rid me of my virginity, and picked up a fellow Australian dude who I took back to my shared room with another Aussie chick and her man that she was reuniting with.  

 

And on the second day I got a job.  I soon realised that I may not have travelled with a partner, but they were there nonetheless, even though their face and name changed often.  I always had company when I needed it, always got rescued when I needed it, met the most insane amount of people, including 6 aunts, 5 uncles, and 25 cousins that I didn't even know I had, always had somewhere to sleep, even if it was the church pew on the verandah of a stone cathedral in the snow, cuddled up in my mega sleeping bag.  

 

A travel guide couldn't have led me better, and an agent couldn't have even imagined booking the journey that I had.  A night with gypsies, and a tour by a retired Scottish schoolteacher, and a week on the floor of a French Canadian student flat in Strassbourg, being part of an exhibition in a disused factory that I still tell stories about.  Landing in Berlin to stay with a schoolteacher (and taking her english class of fellow 18 year olds for a day), just a few days before the Berlin Wall came down.....was an incredible experience.  

 

Being there and around at the time, I learnt so much from all the news coming out, and the secrets that were released the minute the wall came down, and was around many conversations about how it would impact West Germans.  

 

Meeting up with an American girl, we got sidetracked by one of her friends into going to Belfast, (which I certainly hadn't planned), and had the most outrageously good time imaginable.  Locals were so stoked that tourists would visit despite the negative media, that we got shouted drinks and meals everywhere we went, visited just about every pub in town and got involved in healthy celebrations in all of them, and got chauffeured up to the Giant's Causeway,  with a stop for a gorgeous cooked lunch by the parents of one of the dudes we were staying with. 

 

When I ran out of money again in Belgium, a kind Chinese professor took me back to his home in Cambridge, where I cleaned and cooked for him and his flatmates till I got another job.  

 

Self organising travelling kicks arse.  

I learnt that if I just jumped, even not knowing what I was jumping into, I always got caught. It was like crowd surfing reality.  I learnt to trust that I'd always land somewhere safe.  Even if it may not have looked safe to an onlooker.  

 

I also learnt that there were worlds and worlds beyond what I'd been taught was real and safe.  

 

Worlds and worlds with cracks of gold to be explored.  

 

Worlds and worlds to be hacked into and journeyed with.  

I started to establish some theories or philosophies to live by.  Some goals that I wanted to work towards.  I wanted to be myself.  Whatever that was.  And I wanted to be honest.  To not lie and be hypocritical like those who'd surrounded my childhood.  

 

I noticed that people projected their shit onto other people, and then yelled at themselves through someone else.  I observed that people only objected to the things in other people that they didn't like in themselves.  

 

And I wanted to learn how to think.  To learn full stop.  I'd also learnt that life had a far better way of teaching, than me trying to chase down courses or gurus.   

Since then I've journeyed through parenthood, and hacked out my own worlds and realisations.  Through birth in particular, I've learnt more than anything the art of surrender.  

 

Our family is in the process of hack schooling our way into self organised harmony and thinking, and I notice more and more as I learn about the fractal nature of self organisation, that this process is actually living and evolving consciousness. 

I'm so greatfull that I was primed by so much control, suppression, isolation and denial, to be especially enamoured with the wonders of playing within self organising ecosystems of people, groups, ideas, and life itself.  I couldn't have been prepared better if I'd tried.  

Self organisation is what happens when a German town takes away all the road rules, except for give way to the left, and drive slowly.  And they drive far safer and have no accidents in a spot where there was controlled chaos resulting in many accidents for years.

Self organisation is what's been happening in Iceland for the last 5 years, and how they're working out fairer ways of governance using the internet as a medium.  

Self organisation is what happens when you move interstate to a place where you know no-one when you're 7 months pregnant, and it all works out perfectly and just in time to birth with the perfect midwife and support people, in the perfect place.

Self organisation is what happened at our market in Macclesfield, and what's happening right now at our market in Nimbin.  

Self organisation is what's happening in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.  This woman didn't actually ride her bike around the exclusion zone, she took a tour like everyone else, but the pictures and stories in this blog are nonetheless true…..and quite incredible.  There's also a documentary about all the wild and endangered species that are thriving in the exclusion zone that's become a wildlife sanctuary. 

 

Not to mention the fact that self organisation, or the miraculous creation of harmony from chaos, is the fractal and evolutionary force of balance that created the radiation eating mushrooms that have grown inside the derelict reactor.  

 

And there's many more examples of self organised rescuers to the disasters we've visited on the planet in this article too.

Self organisation is what happened and was realised by a journalist trying to interview the Occupy movement, who found that there was no-one to really interview.  It wasn't a hierarchy like so many of our organised structures are, but a collection of self formed circular based cells of equals, who just happened to have a lot in common with each other - enough to form a massive group of similar cells that between them all were much greater than the sum of their parts.  

And this very self organisation of activists, is the only path for survival that these scientists can scry through their magical observation of mathematical probabilities.

Self organisation is what's going to happen to our oceans now that we've made them dangerous to us with radiation, and thereby finally safe from our ocean eating never ending hunger for fish. 

Self organisation ripples through our realities like the veins in leaves, the tributaries of rivers, the branches of trees, the veins in a placenta, and will endlessly create order, balance, and harmony from all the raw chaotic substance and mucky blood of existence.  

 

It's what happens on a day when you make no plans, and get whirled up in an adventure that you wouldn't have been able to imagine before it happened.  It's what happens when you practice Idle Parenting, and let events unfold how they will.

It's what happened in this Ethiopian village, where the kids taught themselves english and programming in 4 months.  It's what happens with the computers in holes in the walls in slums in India, where Sugata Mitra showed the learning potentials inherent in every human.  With this teacher in Mexico who uncovered genius.  With the choreographer of Cats in this talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  

Self organisation is what happens when a family with 7 children get chased out of their house in the middle of winter, and through different people and places unexpected, find themselves being held and loved and looked after.  

It's what created all these amazing cultures, rituals, costumes, and lifestyles, so perfectly reflecting their needs and environments.  It's what can happen when we reclaim death into our spheres.  It's what indigenous people all over the world were practicing, and it's the reason why 80% of our worlds diversity exists in the 24% of indigenous lands.  It's how this Ojibway community fixed their town hall roof.  

It's already a part of everything.  It's a major part of our evolution, adaptation, and growth.  It's all the micro balances that keep our biosphere together.  All the intricate relationships between animals and environment.  

 

It's letting natural relationships form around your children, rather than the enforced friendships of playgroups and schools.  

 

It's what happens when you approach a craft with an open mind, finding your own way, and hacking out a new reality, rather than being taught how to do it the same as everyone else.

In Nimbin I feel as if I'm as close to a self organised community as I can get in this society. There's a free pool owned and maintained by the community, the best skate park in the country naturally organised by those that love and sail in her, and every single building in town is owned by a local or committee, galvanised by keeping Nimbin local.  

 

The community services are the most comprehensive, compassionate and resourceful I've ever known, funded and staffed largely by community donations and voluntary self generated time.  

The communities that satellite around Nimbin seem to have largely realised through time that there is always the 'negative' or shadow wherever we go, and rather than try and eradicate them, they need to be dealt with in the micro of the macro and largely left alone and accepted for their difference…..unless violence or cruelty is performed, and then the required parts of the community step in to enforce self organised boundaries.  

 

All the cells of communities form a larger and more extended community that thrives in Nimbin town itself, where respect and sovereignty are experienced more than in any other place I've known.  The town self organises compassionate and loving responses to mental health issues and folk, and looks after the individuals in trauma with love and acceptance.  

 

There are people who volunteer on their own volition to pick up rubbish, and recycle, and paint around potholes so folk can make a decision about them.  All of this cohesion has formed naturally, as the external view of Nimbin being full of rat bag hippies and ferals and drug addicts has nicely turned the backs of beaureacrats and council services - leaving the local community to take responsibility for itself, and heal it's own wounds.  

 

All sorts of micro-balances exist, in the cohesion formed between a whole mob of people who refuse to be told how to be and what to do.  And insist on doing things their own way.

When we self organise as humans, we get to experience what the other animals experience with their self organised consciousness, when they fly in formation, and swim in shoals. Fitting into numerous other shoals and groups and needs and destinies.

In my experience, coming from such strong leanings towards self organisation, and then creating a family with an anarchist already primed for hacking out alternative realities, full of alive and abundantly self created little people, has highlighted the very few requirements needed for chaotically harmonious self organisation to flourish.  

 

Which is an absence of rules and hierarchy, and a supported surge towards people simply being who they truly are, both inside and out.  In order for self organisation to flourish, as the equal and opposite to the absence of rules and hierarchy, we can practice acceptance and appreciation of people for who they actually are, like the grannies in the SOLE Granny Cloud Project.  

 

This is the random soup of potentials that is all that is needed for the conscious and naturally self organising urge of the entire universe to perform it's complicated and simple magic.

And every single individual or institution that tells you that you have to or shouldn't, and need to and mustn't do anything, be it meditation, or abstinence, or discipline, or a healthy lifestyle, or particular mental habits…..is letting you know quite clearly, that they have the path for themselves worked out, but they're misled about their path being the only one.  

 

Because it takes all of us, with our particular selves, and our equal and opposite reactions, and interplay between shadow and light, simply being ourselves…….to let the mighty and miraculous surge behind evolution and self organising systems all over the universe work it's miracles.   

 

We've all got to find our own ways.

All we have to do, to take part in the miraculous harmony created out of chaos………is to truly be ourselves, and to surrender to our personal flow into self organised and organising systems and ecosystems.

Looking forward to seeing you there…... 

Deep Thought

Late last night driving home after a sumptuous feast with new friends, Currawong and I had a dark night moment driving through the narrow headlight beams, and talking up an idea like we sometimes do.  The last couple of days have been an intense revisiting of patterns that we've been spending some sustained time with over the last 4 months in particular, another layer to the onion, a different perspective on the issues, and a chance to reaffirm the directions we take.  But the result of the latest spin cycle was some serious time out in my head on my own.  Looking after sick babies, stuck in uncommunication in order to clear blocks and communicate with new understanding.  So there was a bit of a build up in my internal thoughts waiting to be shared, and it all came out in a lump.  All sorts of highlights stayed lit like fireflies in the front of our Flomobile on the dark way home.  

And bouncing my thought babies off Currawong, both fresh from a shedding of an old skin, he brought the bits to it that I've come to rely on him for.  The Currawong bits that come only from his unique perspective.  The nature that he was born with interacting with the nurturing or lack of it he grew into, and the unique rub caused by that friction.  And he brought in the remembering and comparison to this video we watched on TED, with a kid genius getting passionate about how he thought people should stop learning and start thinking.  That video had been diving around in my subconscious soup ever since we saw it, and when I used those glasses and took a look at my life, it showed a really interesting perspective.  

…………..

My childhood was one miserable routine and learning job after another.  Endlessly boring and repetitive and all about parcelling learning off into different categories, just like my life was cut up into parcels of time, all seemingly separate to one another.  I was surrounded by the dull intellect and suppression of middle class fundamentalist religion and standardised education.  And every minute of my day was scheduled.  From the moment I woke up, from the moment I was born, I was told to follow a routine.  To suppress my desires and needs and wants and fit into categories and time frames and systems.  I had a few more schedules and programs than many other middle class state school kids.  I had a large family I was the youngest of and expected to do the most cleaning for because I was one of the two girls.  The boys did men stuff, walking dogs and mowing lawns and washing cars, and I did girl stuff, which was cleaning bathrooms and doing dishes and cooking and cleaning.  We not only went to church, but we followed its rigorous and busy lifestyle complete with family home evenings, firesides, meetings, socials, camps, inter church visits, seminary, and up to 8 hours of church activities every sunday cause my mum liked to visit the needy and stay around to talk and offer our services to help and do other saintly things on the day.  And she insisted on daily practice and reading as well.  As did my big brothers.  Church was never a short stint on a sunday only in our home.  Then I had piano lessons, with one of my first teachers being a grumpy old woman who liked to rap my fingers with a ruler when I got it wrong…...  I tried whichever extracurricular activity I could that seemed fun - anything for a break from the grind.  Horse riding, volunteering for an animal shelter, babysitting, hockey, orienteering, bushwalking.  Some were short lived, but all were an adventure and thrilling case of  newness.

I also had animals that I doted on and used as an escape from learning and routines, as well as one best friend, who changed face a few times, but was the same spirit of solidarity and security in our close twosome.  And I silently rebelled.  In obscure ways that I'm actually quite proud of now.  I went through my entire schooling career without learning my multiplication tables.  Still don't know them.   And I reckon I must be one of the few born fundies that got through my whole childhood and seminary and everything, without ever reading the bible or any of the other books from cover to cover.  Or even close.  Only ever the bits that I had to cause they were watching me.  And I only ever remembered the bits I was forced to.  I only wrote in running writing for a very short time, decided it was a horrid way of writing, and then stubbornly printed only for the rest of my schooling career and till now.  Somehow I managed to just outstubborn anyone who tried to make me running write till high school, when lots of other people were doing it too.  I was clever enough to scam my way through most of my schooling, getting high marks and staying in the top clases.  Just giving them what they wanted.  And sounding intelligent enough to be believable.  And boring and unnoticeable enough to avoid the limelight.  I got through without reading Wuthering Heights or The 39 Steps, without doing most of the homework, and having friends who would lend me notes, and getting to catch up at home in my own time cause I took  time off school whenever I could.  And I'd lay in bed pretending to be sick or have a headache, and read and read and read books.  Another highly treasured escape from the humdrum.    I was also massively unattractive to boys.  Got called 'ugly dog' more times than I care to remember.  Couldn't even make it with the geeky boys, and the one that did try to be nice freaked me out.  Most of the teachers were as bored as me, and I thought learning was something that was parcelled out in metered amounts, and you learnt grades that went up until you knew everything.  And I felt pretty crap in comparison to what I thought was the pinnacle of learning.  Pretty dumb.  Vastly unsuccessful. And guilty.  Felt like my whole life was a sham from beginning to end, and I was the biggest loser there was.  I took everything very literally, and found it hard to suspend logic, and most comedy went completely over my head cause I took everything so seriously.  

Then wham bam thank you ma'am, I left it all overnight, and moved into a cosmopolitan share college house, in a vast and rural genteel country town where hippies, activists, uni students and farmers rubbed shoulders mostly quite friendly like.  All of a sudden I was surround by young nubile minds, in the throes of exploration, trying on all sorts of gender roles, stereotypes, clothing, styles, thoughts, schools, theories, sexualities, ideas, performances, poetry styles, musical expressions, action groups, and ways to party.  While thinking deep thoughts and having scintillating conversations.  And looking stunning and being brilliantly witty. I felt like a bull in a china shop.  A lollopy dumb puppy dog licking their toes and begging for a pat.  A star struck fan suppressing the urge to ask for autographs.  And fell madly in love with many of them, suspecting that I was totally obvious to the observer, and feeling deeply ashamed at my thickness and inability to present a polished finish or a brilliant mask.  I was totally smitten with how they could create these brilliant thoughts and conversations, pulling in all sorts of parallels and comparisons, and making metaphors up at the drop of a hat.  I didn't know how they did it, and thought I never would.  

It was around here that I realised on a deep level not articulated till now, that I'd been taught to learn, and not to THINK!  Learning was a routine, a 'thing' that I performed by becoming a parrot.  Having endless unimportant facts shoved into my brain and being expected to regurgitate them.  And it was a compartment unconnected to my life and it's experiences.  I decided to try and learn how to think.  And it was a hard slog.  Funnily enough.  Easy enough to fill my head with a multitude of any sort of information I could lay my neurons on, but difficult to try and hold a few of them together at the same time, and draw comparisons between them.  Difficult to stop trying to put each new idea into a separate box.  I wanted to try and work out how to let them blend in all together.  And I practiced.  A lot.  Over and over.  Holding similar ideas together at the same time to see what they had in common.  How they were different and why.  Finding out what happened if you could hold a huge amount of ideas together, swirling them into a big rainbow, and trying to take a big perspective on them all together.  

It started to become apparent that my favourite knowledges, were the ones that bounced off my own life experience.  That compared to my parallel journey.  The ones that were the easiest to recall, were the ones that I could fit into a personal story that related to me and the ones I was explaining it to.  And I had a lot of time on my hands.  I worked my way slowly out of routine using various tactics, went overseas backpacking for a year, nannied for family, got short lived jobs, and then fell pregnant and birthed my first child.  The Sole Parent Pension was a haven for experimenting with thinking, and trying to work out who I actually was, once I peeled off some of the bandaids that had been put on my natural skin by me or others.  I had a routine of baby, but it didn't feel imposed, because of the great bonding and love.  I'd chosen this routine, and could enact it in my own way, and it felt empowering.  And the moments that were left over, when she was off with other people, I indulged in myself and thinking.  I practiced and practiced and practiced thinking.  Swirling round and round problems or thoughts, till I could find a way in or out or through.  When I launched into areas of research where I was strongly drawn, like archaeology, and womens history, and goddess culture, I found my retention of stories and information grew beyond what I'd previously thought possible.  My love and personal ownership of what I was feeding my brain seemed to grow me a hugely larger space and potential to think with.  

And I started to really delight in it.  It stopped feeling like hard work, and started to become fun.  I'd disappear into my mind and play with a favourite thought or possibility.  And used my favourite thoughts to push through out of the boring round of circuitous thoughts spurred on by mundane reality and insecurities, which have their place too, and after going round and round and plaguing me for a while, they often lead to a personal realisation, which is nice.  But that circuit of blame or shame or trying to work out why someone didn't like me often got onerous.  The surface thought cycle.  And to use that energy for good, I'd push off into the sea of deep thought.  I'd become attractive to men and women by then, but only ever had flings, so there was no long term partner to consume my thoughts.  My thoughts were my favourite playground.  

And because I was searching high and low for comparisons, and other peoples thoughts to bounce mine around with, and groups of people who thought like me or differently to me, I bumped into lots of other theories or practices or rule books or groups, and gathered more and more experience to hang on my thoughts.  More and more things to compare with.  I tried guided meditations and channeling and communing with my subconscious through tarot and read books and did personal research on all sorts of topics.  I was always told I should meditate, and I stubbornly never have.  I had to find my own way of meditating.  And when I hit 30 I got a spinning wheel from my mother, and in teaching myself to spin, I also noticed that the action needed to keep a spinning wheel spinning fleece, kept that surface thought so occupied, that I could escape straight into deep thought without needing to pay attention to the mundane first.  It also directly and physically connected me to my feelings.  So thought, sensation, memory, unknotting problem knots, and deep pondering became a daily practice.  And exploded onto another level and ability to hold a huge amount in my head all at once yet again.  

And once I had a practicing model of thinking, and thinking my own way, this model was applicable to just about every field I directed its attention to.  Babies, birth, bonding, sexuality, spinning, crochet, learning - EVERYTHING has worlds of undiscovered thought potentials waiting to be explored.

Till I'm at the point right now, that I reckon if I could go back in time to those early college days,  when I was overwhelmed by the brilliance of the stars I saw around me, and go and visit me as a young woman, I could totally thrill her with my glittery conversation, and let her know that we were gonna do just fine.  I've become one of those brilliant creatures expressing unique individuality and presence of mind, that I never would have dreamed possible in those thought lonely days.  And an artist, which was another pastime I never would have thought myself good enough for.  And in love with a soul mate and father of my children who thinks my thoughts are as sexy as I do.  And all of these places I've found through messing around in Thought Land.  

Over the years I've come to enjoy a profound sense of love and respect for my mind.  For what it can do.  For giving me the rush of pushing through invisible walls into thinking a different way.  For being able to riffle through my divergent thinking tools to find umpteen possible directions when stuck.  For how much a part of all of me it is.  For it's reflection in the great mysteries and deeps of life.  For how many worlds and things I can discover in my mind as reflected by the universe.  

And on my journey, I've noticed the mind gets a really bad rap in lots of religious thought and spirituality.  We're meant to transcend it, disown it, get out of it, disbelieve it, and realise that it's not us. And I can't help but wonder if people are mistaking standardised learning and the superficial chatter for what our minds really are, extensions of our nature and nurture combined, and biological computers that connect with deeper realities, subconscious motivations, and the search towards evolution.  Powered by ourselves, as well as our DNA, collective conscious, and bodily experience.  

I'm not alone you know.  That kid that did the TED talk inspired the hell outta me, and really helped me look at my life through this filter of the difference between learning and thinking.  The Professor Sir Ken Robinson takes it a bit of a different route calling it divergent thinking, and how we're all genius until we get taught how to learn.  And Sugata Mitra, famous for putting computers in holes in the wall in Indian slums, and displaying to the world the incredible and miraculous ability of people to self organise their learning and thinking when motivated by personal interest.  Many other people have taken on this raw concept, and opened up worlds within themselves or in children through encouraging consciousness, or self organisation in application to thinking and learning, like this teacher in Mexico who uncovered a genius through respectful authenticity that encouraged her to think her own way.  The Zapatistas have open air universities where they encourage and support personal interest, and as we speak, the world is being saved by activists, scientists, young inventors, environmentalists, religious and spiritual folk, indigenous peoples and every other label you can imagine…..and they're all coming together in a conscious and self organised way to make a stand for life, and they all got there through thinking deeply and in their own way, and coming to the same conclusions as each other.  

We are the universe, and our minds, and our thoughts, and our experiences, and our sensations, and our shadows, and all the other bits in between.  

Our minds are miraculous vehicles of exploration.  

And thinking for myself, in my own hard won way, is one of the greatest achievements of my life.  

Trust birth? Well mostly..........

A little while ago on Facebook, when I was talking about the search for a home, a midwife, and a doula, a woman asked me why I wasn’t considering freebirthing.  As she pointed out, I’ve got more experience in birthing than a lot of other folks around, and have thought very deeply about it all, so why do I feel the need to have a midwife?  The question really sat with me, and I wondered why myself.  I’ve always had a tremendous respect for women and families that freebirth, and for the last 4 births Currawong and I have tossed around the possibility of freebirthing……..but it never really materialised into a realistic proposition for me.  But I’m really glad the question was asked, as ever since it’s been sitting at the back of my brain pan, tumbling around with all my other thoughts, and it’s been an interesting journey following all the threads that come from it. 

In my toolkit of experiences, I’ve had a few run in’s with homebirthing midwives that were less than empowering, and a few with doctors and hospitals as well.  I’ve read books from the Christian fundamentalist right wing about unassisted birth, and how midwives, doctors and all other birth workers just get in the way of what should naturally be a magical experience shared by the mum and dad alone.  And I really related to what was written.  When the books drew attention to the observation that many women focused their oxytocic love, thanks and bonding on the midwife, rather than their mate, I could really see what they were talking about.  There’s so many birth stories I’ve read, where women talk in loving and glowing terms about their midwives, and all their other family members kinda take a back seat to the show.  And there’s a lot of intervention that some midwives get into that is totally unnecessary and just gets in the way, like giving internals, and cutting cords quickly, and catching the baby and ‘giving’ it to the mamma.  And after having a less than positive experience with homebirthing midwives, I really got into this way of looking at midwife led births for a while…….only to get pregnant again, cleanse a lot of my negative juju about midwives by meeting one who listened to me rant and agreed with me, and then was present at our birth in the most unobtrusive way possible, and gave me the gift of ‘catching’ my own baby.  I then went on to become a bit of a homebirthing and midwife advocate, till Balthazar came a long and introduced me to the blessings of western medicine.  And of course in my most recent and publicised birth of twins, Lisa was an integral, necessary, and much loved part of the process, and I definitely had a lot to say about her in my writings.

And while I know the statistics of caesareans in hospitals is incredibly alarming, and I get the whole interventionist dance that often leads to caesareans, as well as the scare mongering that happens from doctor folks when homebirth or natural birth is suggested…..I’ve had some really empowering, respectful, and peaceful births in hospitals too.  My main beef with hospitals has been their overwhelming attitude that birth is fraught with danger, and that birth belongs in the same corridors as deathly illnesses, physical trauma, great sickness and slow death.  I’ve got a bit of a problem too, with how the trend in hospitals at the moment is to separate mamma’s and babies, and that whole invasive separation they do with cleaning, testing, jabbing needles etc.  Kinda doesn’t really aid in a gentle welcome, compassion for a little being who’s been living in a controlled, peaceful and watery womb, and bonding.  Also, how it’s really hard to feel safe and cave like, and tap into a woman’s mammalian brain, in the sterile and bright environment of a hospital ward.   But then again, if a woman is really afraid of birth and what might happen, maybe for her a hospital is the safe place that she needs to be able to fully relax into the birthing process?  Afterall, even though much ado is made of interventionist practices in hospital, there are still a huge amount of women who birth naturally and without drugs in them.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think either camp has all the answers, or even all the questions, and I think that both homebirthing midwives and their supporters, and hospital birth workers and their supporters are two halves of the same whole.  Very antagonistic and despising of each other halves, but halves nonetheless.  And while they’re stuck in this anti each other and polarising dance for the soul of birth, a lot of women, children, families and individuals on both sides of the track are being overlooked, seriously neglected, and damaged in the process.  On the one side we have the birth trusting, all women have been beautifully designed to birth naturally, and by the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so hospitals and doctors should just get back in their boxes, and take their hands off birth, and leave us all to do it peacefully at home approach, that also makes a fair deal about the scaremongering of doctors and obstetricians, and how a lot of their ‘facts’ are lies.  And then on the other side we have the medical approach that points to the harm that can come to unprepared women and families facing an emergency situation at home, and perhaps a long way from a hospital, as well as some of the dangers that can be faced when there’s an un-regulated body of birth workers attending births at home.  There’s also the body of information they hold about the dangers of birth, and how fraught birth HAS been in our history.  Yes many women pushed out babes on the fields and kept going, but a lot of them experienced babies getting stuck, and dying, and cords around necks stopping them from being born, and a hundred other possibilities that can and do happen even in these days of improved diet and hygiene and birth trusting.  But unfortunately, it’s the mainstream medical model that has the weight of the government and legal practitioners behind them, willing to send the horses of the apocalypse after homebirthers, and resulting in an unfairly balanced war effort on behalf of the hospital birthing scene.    

And the result of this antagonistic polarising dance in my opinion anyway, is causing many a casualty in the self esteem and bonding of families and birthing women across the board.  Unsuprisingly, with the amount of kids bounding around us every time we’re in public, a lot of my conversations with people we come across revolve around birth and kids.  And I’m really saddened that a lot of women respond to my stories with half ashamed accounts of how they weren’t brave enough to try birthing at home, or they tried and just couldn’t cut it, or they used every drug they possibly could because they were so afraid, or they didn’t have any option because their pelvis was too small, or they had health complications, or they had a natural birth and it traumatised them, or they suffered post natal depression, or a million other reasons why they didn’t give birth in either the wholistic, alternative accepted manner, or the hospital, mainstream accepted manner.  And these women all take it onto themselves, as their own fault, as their own body failing them in birth, as their inability to birth ‘properly’ being all their own doing, as an experience that happened to them that was less than they hoped, the result of which, can put some serious bricks in the wall of their lack of self esteem and body confidence, which then leeches from their parenting confidence, and sense of connection with their families, and becomes part of the general body of stories around birth that go unacknowledged from either side of the polarised fence, as it doesn’t fit appropriately into their accepted picture of what birth is.

I see so many women and families in pain around their birthing experiences, that I’ve taken to saying something like this to them….. 

“Ya know what darlin?  There is no ‘perfect’ birth, birth just is what it is.  Every one is different, and every birth is perfect if you let it be, no matter whether it was at home or in the hospital.  And we haven’t been designed perfectly to give birth, cause we CHANGED OUR DESIGN!!  When we decided to grow our frontal lobes and walk upright we changed our design from the less problematic mammalian birth canals that were straight, and we turned them into this twisty birth canal that can really cause problems.    And babies had to be born a year premature, which meant they couldn’t walk like all the other mammal babies, so mother nature had to create a tricksy system of oxytocic rewards if we held them to us and fed them when they were hungry, so they weren’t eaten by dogs or stolen by other tribes.  You just need to be true to yourself and do what feels good for you, cause that’s all that counts really.  Trying to birth or parent in any kind of way because that’s what you’ve been told is ‘right’ is never gonna work, cause it doesn’t carry the weight of your belief and life experience.  Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, and listen to yourself and your new baby whose instincts haven’t been convinced otherwise yet, and all will be fine…”

Or something like that anyway. 

Cause the biggest casualty in the war over birth is birth itself.  And it is a war, and quite a vicious one at times.  Nastiness and personal attacks are hurled by both sides, personalities especially associated with either camp singled out for horrific attention, and it seems that no-one’s getting the law of attraction proven by quantum physics, that you get more of what you focus on!  And my own personal experience that you become what you hate is also coming into this equation.  No one is winning anything, except for long drawn out battle plans being enacted, and a lot of energy being spent on the fight.  And a whole lot of people are losing, their integrity, their passions, their experiences being validated, and their sense of self worth.  Sometimes it seems to me that the fight just takes up too much space.

In an ideal world, both halves of birth would come together and hold hands instead.  Doctors and obstetricians would study their own sciences, especially that of Ethnopaediatrics and the beautiful works of Dr Sarah Buckley, Leboyer, Michel Odent, and all the others who’ve championed gentle and welcoming births, and provide birthing centres all over the world that allowed lesser and greater influences of homebirth and hospital birth depending on the blend required by the families that use them.  And homebirthing midwives who feel drawn to the trade, will work co-operatively with them in partnership and backup, so that all the potentialities of birth can be dealt with effectively and cohesively.  And the women and families entering the mysterious world of birth will have equal access to all the different perspectives and possibilities available, and have free access to whatever option works for them, based on their life experience and deeply held beliefs.  And imagine what we could do with all the energy focused on this war if the war dissolved!!  If the polarity that exists melted into a whole, there would be no ‘taboo’ subjects left anymore, so women walking into birth for the first time could explore the possibilities of natural caesareans for example, and alternative forms of pain relief, and maybe, just maybe, we could also focus our attention on what happens AFTER birth, a largely ignored realm in many birthing circles.  We focus on the conception, the pregnancy, the hormones, the birth and all it’s possibilities, but what happens after?  What about the importance of bonding?  The exhaustion many women feel after entertaining family hours after birthing? How to fold cloth nappies?  How to deal with sibling rivalry?  How to deal with the issues of step parenting?  How to address problems that occurred during the birth and set up patterns that aren’t life enhancing?  How to ‘unlearn’ survival skills that we’ve been taught by our parents that don’t help us survive, and in fact may be really stuffing us up?  I can think of worlds that we could be spending our collective energy on that would be far more rewarding than the argy bargy between hospital and home birthing.

So to get back to the original question, I guess that on deep contemplation, I’d have to say that I trust birth implicitly metaphysically, but not completely physically.  I’m aware of the things that can go wrong, and that HAVE gone sideways for me in my experiences, and when I’m in that intensely vulnerable and ‘elsewhere’ state of engaging in the age old dance of birth, I really like someone around to hold my hand, and who I know will cover my back.  Someone who isn’t Currawong and my family, who are caught up with their own experience, but who is there to just focus on me and the baby inside me coming out safely.  Someone who knows enough about the intricacies of birth to be able to fix any solvable problems at home, and also to get us the hell out of there and to a hospital on time if that’s what is needed.  And I’m so greatful for the folk that spend years in university learning how to help me and others when we really need them in hospitals, as well as the midwives who dig into the past to find old ways of birthing, as well as making alternative information available as well.  I’m greatful for all birthworkers really, and see the value in all their work and ideas.  I just wish it was something that they and others could see mutually and in themselves as well.

But that’s just my perception of birth, and the best way to do it, and when it comes down to it, I’d argue for anyone else’s perceptions till I’m blue in the face, cause that’s what it’s all about to me.  The combination of all our experiences and perceptions are equally valid and enhancing if taken that way, to the whole.  And if we put em all together and respect them all, we have a really healthy blueprint for the evolution of us all and our consciousness so we can USE those frontal lobes we traded easier births for, to help our planet and ourselves move beyond this warring and fighting over who’s right and wrong that happens in every sector, and move into an evolution of love, respect, peace and freedom for every single thing in the universe.  I’ll keep dreaming it up………

After Birth - But that's not all.......

So.

Last post I was talking about how I've learnt about the evolutionary adaptations our bodies have gone through to create the baby/adult experience and relationships we have today, and how in my experience, we live out the patterns we learn in our wombs, birth, and infancy, with the survival imperative that all the other animals follow.  A very scientific, instinctual, evolutionary, and behavioural approach.

But that's not all there is to it, is it?

There's also the soul, fate, destiny, spirit, consciousness, collective soul, and all other things spiritual that come into it, isn't there.  Not to mention all the 'scientific' examples of thought creating reality that Quantum Physics has highlighted, that are surprisingly similar to the wisdom of Lao Tsu and Chief Seattle.  Not to mention the discoveries in genetic science, that tell us that we share the same DNA as every other living thing in our world - about 11,000 libraries worth of information contained within every strand of DNA - and the blueprints for creating every single living thing on the planet.

I've always tried to treat my babies as I would want to be treated if I was in a helpless body, with my consciousness intact.   And I've had a lot of reason to be supported in that belief.  When I was pregnant with mine and Currawong's first son, my 9 year old daughter from a previous life was not too impressed about his choice of birthday.  He was due on the same day as her.  She vowed to hate him forever if he was born on her birthday...so he wasn't.  But that wasn't all, she also had 10 days after her birthday of special events that she didn't want to miss due to birthing, and vowed to hate him equally for all of them. So he wasn't born on any of them.  In fact he waited till the morning of the very next day after her last 'special' day, to gently start his journey to the world.  In the evening when the expansions were 5 minutes apart and I started contemplating leaving the bath at home and travelling to the hospital, I rang my mother to come and be part of the birth.  She was an hour away.  From the moment I got off the phone, my expansions went back to 10 minutes apart, and as soon as she walked through the door they went back to 5 minutes......  I spent a gentle, musical, laughing, and peopled birth journey in the spa bath at the hospital, telling everyone how very considerate this little baby was.

Our second child's birth was no less special in teaching us very different lessons about bonding and it's importance, and the whole experience kinda suited Lilly's nature and personality in a way that made the whole thing make sense in retrospect. Spiral-Moon's birth created a mad dash by us up north to buy a house that we basically birthed in and then left, and was perfect in every way for her in particular.  And with Balthazar, we were going to freebirth in another state, and were living in a isolated house that was to be ravaged by the terrible fires in Victoria.  Just before he was born, we changed round completely, came back home to family support, and were living on a community to have our caesarean baby in the best possible way, and with the best possible support, instead of living through a hellish fire.  And with the recent birth of my twins, not only did they choose to be born on different days, but these boys are completely different.  One's eating hand over fist, and the other is still purely breastfed.  They sleep at different times, and in all ways are two separate babies, with separate needs, happening at the same time.  In fact, funnily enough considering my last post, these two babies have completely rolled all over all my smug judgements about how 'continuum' and 'attachment' babies perform.  They don't sleep....EVER....day or night, and they scream their guts out for no particular reason, even while they're being held, fed, and co-slept with day and night.  In many ways they fit completely within the framework of my last post, and in many other ways they don't at all.

There's been a spiritual, conscious, 'fatefull', and destined element in all of our experiences, and birthing, and children.  Which is contradictory to the perspectives of my recent post about the evolutionary and behavioural elements of birthing right??

Well maybe to some folk yes indeed, but to me.....no, not at all.

I've come to the realisation that there really aren't any 'truths' at all, just an infinite universe of possibilities.  And a whole heap of people with differing experiences, 'truths', perspectives and opinions, that they base on their own experience, and argue with others versions of 'truth', with all the born again zeal of a mammal trying to apply the survival skills they got from their parents. And there's also their spirit, or collective consciousness that is leading them down a merry path that may be not at all what they expect, and may even challenge their 'truths' regularly.

And I've developed this concept of 'composite truths'.  Or a truth, that contains more than one perspective, science or whatever, and maybe even many - some of which can be completely diametrically opposed - that are all equally true.

To explain a bit more......when I look at Ethnopaediatrics, evolution, attachment and continuum parenting, and our survival skills that we learn from our parents, it all makes complete sense to me, and I can see the relevance to it in my life.  And when I look at us mob as a collection of souls, here to learn our own particular trips, and all the delightfully magic little episodes that have occured throughout my life, that bring me to the belief that I'm always in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.......that also makes complete sense and is relevant to my life also.  I tried for ages to decide on ONE approach or the other, and couldn't quite do it.  I swung from one perspective to the other, and there was always something that didn't quite fit completely into the picture.  But put them both together, (and don't sweat the contradictions or paradoxes, cause they're the nature of the universe), and it's PERFECT!!!  Room for both perspectives with a huge potential to expand in any direction.

I reckon there's a lot of areas in our lives that get swamped or avoided or stressed about forever because we try so hard to fit our experience into a pre-packaged box of belief.  Whether that's 'science' or 'religion', or 'evolution' or 'creationism' or 'right' or 'wrong' or 'good' or 'bad'.....  The dualistic arguments go on for ever.  But what if there was no box?  What if you could just mash em all together to get the particular colour of the rainbow that matches the colour of your experience?

The first time I really experienced this was when I was about 17, sitting in the back yard of my sister's friends house, having left home under police escort a year beforehand due to an abusive step-father.  Since I'd left, I couldn't quite settle on what I thought about him.  I hated him for what he'd done to my family, what he'd done to my sister, what he'd done to my life, but I also loved him, for the patience and care he'd shown me, and the protection he gave me from my rough older brothers.  He  noticed my sensitivity and creativity before anyone else.  And I just couldn't decide on how to look at him, how to deal with the situation, and whether I should love or hate him.  And I still remember to this day, and it was like trying to swim through glue, but as I sat out on the lawn in the sun it crystalised in my head.  I could do both.  I could love and hate him all at the same time.  And in finding that middle road I also found peace.

 I've applied this approach of 'composite truths' to many area's and decisions in my life, and it's always resulted in a delicious middle road, peace, and some very interesting theorising and philosophising.

It's an approach I can highly reccomend. 

After Birth.......

In having 7 children, and births, I've learnt stuff from each birth that not that many women experience anymore.... With Jess' birth I learnt about the Goddess and feminism and sexuality, with Griffyn's birth I learnt how easy birth can be - even in a hospital - and how easily I could attempt a homebirth.  Lilly's birth taught me how nicely the journey can be taken at home and how important the post natal period is for bonding and setting up healthy family relationships. Spiral-Moon's birth taught me how incredibly blissful a home, water and lotus birth can be, how incredible it is to catch your own baby, and how a post natal period done well can change the vibration of your entire family. Balthazar's birth taught me about judgement, (mine towards women that had caesareans and western medicine in general), the fully medicalised birth, and also about post natal depression and healing from it. And during the period between Balthazar's birth, and as a result of my twins births, I reckon I've got a real handle on my 'big picture' of birth.

For a start I found out about 'Ethnopaediatrics', which is the marriage of child development research, anthropology, psychology, and pediatrics, and goes a long way towards explaining the science behind a lot of the conclusions reached by Jean Liedloff in 'The Continuum Concept'. I thought I knew a lot about birth, but it only really came together with this new information.

To put it in a nutshell, when we decided as a species to think and walk, we altered the course of our births from the relatively easy journey that we still see today in all the other mammals, to the tricksy process it can be today. Our pelvises could only get so big or we wouldn't be able to keep walking, and our heads grew as we thought more and developed our frontal lobes, and the result was that our babies began being born earlier than was preferable. If we hadn't of made these changes, our babies would be more like other mammal babies, and born when they could walk relatively soon after birth, more like a year old baby than our modern day newborns. And we would have kept the straight birth canal that other mammals enjoy. As it is, our birth canal's have become a twisty journey to the outside world, and we birth babies that are all virtually premature.

Nature had to help us adapt........

And did so beautifully, by setting up an intricate rewards system, that made sure that we'd keep our babies close to us and nurture them, to ensure the survival of our species. And a delicate cocktail of hormones and oxytocins to be released during specific periods of the birthing time, as well as infancy, to keep us following the carrot of baby care that people call now 'attachment parenting'. Sarah J Buckley writes eloquently on these hormonal cocktails, and how they are released and can be interrupted by medical intervention.

It really came home to me about a week after my twins were born. I was experiencing extreme sore nipples and nipple trauma for the first time ever, and finding it all a bit difficult and hard to cope with. Lisa came to visit and found me teary and overwhelmed, and told me I needed to get my clothes off, rest as much as I could, and hold my babies on my skin and close to my chest as much as I could. And as she explained, during the times that followed after we changed our evolutionary path, if I'd left my babies on a bed or ground as far away from me as they were at that moment, they would have been eaten by a predator or stolen by another tribe. If I kept my babies on my bare chest as much as possible, I'd trigger off the happy hormones as the reward for me keeping my babies alive and safe.

I tried it and it worked beautifully. And I realised I still had a lot to learn.

The night my 4th baby was born, my midwife Rosey was on the phone to me being gorgeous, and as my mum was there, she asked me to ask mum how she'd given birth to me - in which position.  I asked, and was surprised when I found that she'd birthed in exactly the same position as I always do.  Rosey told me that a huge percentage of the women she'd birthed with, (and that's a lot in over 30 years as a midwife) birthed in the same positions as their mothers.

But it doesn't stop there.

I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that having twins has been one of the most challenging physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys of my life.  In fact, the birth was NOTHING compared to how these past 5 months have been as a reality.  I tried really hard to imagine what it would be like to have two babies before I birthed them......

And I wasn't even close.

And what comes with pushing yourself and your limits to the very edge?  In my experience anyway, it usually produces realisations and self awareness.  And this experience has been no exception.

I've been saying for a long time, that as we're born, we're turning around and looking at our mothers and saying to ourselves, 'Now THAT'S how to give birth, and when we're being raised we're saying, 'THAT'S how to treat children, and THAT'S what to expect from life'.  I always meant it more metaphorically than anything else, but I'm coming to understand that this learning is literal.

For mammals and animals and us to survive, the very process I've just described has to be imprinted totally and completely, along with an imperative to remember and re-enact all we soak up as babies and children.  That's how great herds of buffalo moved across the grasslands following the water, grass and seasons.  Why Emperor Penguins go to that extreme place in the freezer all those miles from the water and perform the rituals they do, rather than just pull up shop and move closer to the sea.  Why birds flock together and go on their global journeys to eat, nest, and raise their young.  How all sorts of animals remember when and where all sorts of prey are going to be, and how to best eat them.  They learnt the patterns from their parents, how to birth, feed, procreate and survive, and repeated those patterns faithfully.

And guess what.  I'm realising that we're exactly the same.  Except we think that the re-enactment of our parents patterns in our lives is because of all the other reasons under the sun, except for, we do it because that's how we were shown how to survive.  And we've faithfully replicated the patterns.  We may do it in different ways, and with different costumes or descriptions, but in my experience anyway, it's a matter of the same poo (or joy) in a different bucket.....

And it's taken the extremeties of birthing and living with twins to bring me to the realisation that even though I've been merrily tripping down the path of thinking that I was doing things differently to my parents and had transcended my childhood......  I was in denial all along.

It's a long and complicated story, and I don't want to make my eldest daughter feel in the spotlight, but suffice to say, many of the mistakes I thought I wasn't making.....I was.  Many of the things I hated about my childhood.......I did to her.  And most profound to me, how I spent my pregnancy, was a way of being that is a big part of her life now.  In a different way of course, but the essence is still the same.  This shocked the crap out of me when I saw it let me tell you now, and then I started looking at all the other elements in my life, and realised there were a lot of patterns I learnt from my childhood that I'd re-created.  Again, in different clothing, and with different props, but the basic pattern was exactly the same.

To give you an example.  My mum raised 6 children virtually on her own with an alcoholic, disaffected husband, who'd walk in the door after work, drop his hat and bag as he went straight to his room, where he'd read a book, drink a bottle of wine, and mum had to keep us all quiet.  She had no help or assistance.  And Currawong's mum was equally on her own and alone, and had to keep him well behaved so as not to get in the way.  They were both disrespected and unsupported in their lives and choices.

And we live on a community, and are surrounded by friends, and not doing it on our own but with a loving partner (man was I bummed when I realised that getting over my parents patterns, by being madly in love with the father of my children, wasn't all there was to transcend!!) - but - my mum and eldest daughter have had other business, the 6 other adults here haven't helped a jot, and friends help when they can, but the logistics of getting out to see them or vice versa is tricky.  We've also got grumpy neighbours who want us to keep our kids quiet till midday.  In fact, in all the places we've lived since we started having kids, we've done it on our own, had to keep our kids quiet a lot and controlled, and not got any outside help to speak of.  And often end up in home situations where we're disrespected and unsupported in our choices.  All of these paradigms go out the window though when we're travelling and on the road.  We didn't get any patterns to recreate around travelling, so we do it with a clean slate.  And it's divine.

Now I'm not saying this to whinge, or to shame my fellow community dwellers, (and none of you are allowed to be disillusioned about communities because of this story!!).  In fact I'm sure that even if they wanted to help, they wouldn't be able to because my love and I have a learnt imperative that we've implemented for our survival!  And those survival skills we learnt are strong! Learnt at our parents knees!  And it's not even their fault, in fact it's not really anyones....it's just us human mammals acting out our learnt skills to survive.

But the good news is, and I'll have to keep you posted, that when you realise such a pattern for what it is - a misguided survival imperative - then you can change it.  You can unschool it.  You can unlearn it. Instead of justifying, rationalising, psycho-therapising and the rest, you can just say..

"Oh.  That particular survival skill I learnt from infancy doesn't actually help me survive.  In fact it feels really crappy sometimes and I'm only doing it cause my animal brain wants to survive by repeating what it saw my parents do, but now I've been through all these changes and got myself a bigger frontal lobe, I can understand why I was doing it, see where I got that particular dysfunctional survival skill from, and simply change it for one I like better"

Or at least it should........