Hello dear one,

Can I tell you about a morning that taught me something that you might also recognize in yourself or someone you love?

My friend, Hannah, was visiting me, and one morning we were leaving the house together for the first time. I'd done my preparations the night before, which I don’t normally do so thoroughly, so I felt spacious. I was downstairs, watching the cats finish their food so I could put the outside cat back out before we left.

Hannah came downstairs, looked at the clock, and something in her shifted. “We HAVE to go!” she exclaimed. “We're going to be late!” There were twenty minutes to feed the cats. Plenty of time as far as I was concerned. She watched me standing there with the cat and asked, with complete love filled with concern, “Should you put her outside with her plate now? We've got to go!”

I looked at my watch and there were three whole minutes before we needed to leave the house. And honestly, this was Mexico and it didn’t really matter if we were on time. It was going to start when everyone was there. To me, three minutes felt spacious. Plenty of time for real. To her, three minutes was already too late.

The same moment. Lived completely oppositely. What makes our experiences of the same moment so different? This might be a new idea to you. And at the same time, something in you may already recognize it as true.

I love to explore the way we come into the world, and even what happens before we can remember, and how it might be showing up in our everyday lives now. We had been talking about this very idea before she came, so I'd asked her to do two things. 1. Ask her mom about her own birth. 2. And to simply notice, with curiosity, what she finds herself doing as she travels all the way from Holland to Mexico.

She arrived with the story and a heap of observations and questions. But here's the thing. She hadn't told me her birth story yet when we went to leave the house that morning. We weren't analyzing anything. We just watched it play out, live.

It was only afterward that the pieces fit. She'd been born in a rush, a long stretch of nothing and then a sudden mad dash. I was born in two minutes, by emergency c-section. And all these years later, that is still how each of us leaves the house.

That difference in the way we experience transitions has a name. It's called an imprint. The patterns from our very beginning that show up in both the big milestones and the small transitions of an ordinary day. Leaving the house. Getting out of bed. Starting something. Finishing something. Not only the big milestones, like how we go to kindergarten or college, but also the little transitions we barely notice, but can be super frustrating if you don’t understand what’s happening.

We’re told stories about why we do what we do. But what if that isn’t the whole story? What if it isn't a flaw, and it isn't something broken in you. What I see are patterns that made sense once being repeated over and over again that you were never taught to see. And once you can see them, it can change the way you understand yourself. You can come to know yourself in a whole new way, even if you know nothing about your own beginnings and even if there’s no one to ask.

So I'll leave you with a question instead of an answer, because the story lives in your body and you need to be curious about it to begin to see it. Where are the small transitions in your day that tend to come apart? And what might be true if those moments weren't a problem to fix, but a story finally asking to be understood?

My own imprint showed up that morning without my planning it. That's how it works. You don't have to struggle. You just have to pay attention.

If something here touched on something for you, and you'd like to go further with it, I'm opening Back to Birth workshops again this summer. It’s a gentle space to meet these patterns, your own or your child's. Just reply with the word imprints and I'll add you to the wait list. The door is open if you feel called.

Warmly,

Rebecca

P.S. The season finale of the Thriving Humans podcast is out. Meredith and I talk about what it really means to nurture yourself, the real kind, not the checklist kind. It's our last episode before the summer pause, and a quietly special one: the first time you'll hear us say the name Thriving Humans out loud. Have a listen when you'd like a slower moment.