Brace yourself. This is going to be controversial. It may make you cry, or it may make you angry, or–if you don’t believe in anything you can’t see–you may roll your eyes. In fact, if you’re not an open-minded person, just go ahead and click away from here now because there’s nothing in what I say that you will find helpful for your own wounds or worries. These are things I’ve never written about or talked about before, mainly because talking about a miscarriage at any stage of pregnancy is uncomfortable at best, but I’m being led to discuss these things now, to help someone else.
Hold the bashing. This is not a pro-abortion article or an anti-abortion article. If you think it is, you’ve missed my point because you’re looking to bolster an opinion you’ve already made. This is something altogether different that almost no one talks about.
First, a little of my own history:
I have two beautiful, intelligent, compassionate daughters who are everything I could ever wish for. The older daughter was almost miscarried at 10 weeks, and the younger one sent me thrice to emergency Labor and Delivery over the three months before she was born.
. I’ve gotten pregnant more than once while on birth control pills, which my newest gynecologist believes is because I tend to ovulate unusually early. I have also miscarried several times–two pregnancies I felt ambivalent about and one I really wanted–but something rather unusual happened with the last two that made me rethink everything I used to believe about abortions, miscarriages, and incarnation.
What I believe and why:
Over the decades, I’ve come up with my own beliefs about life, death, autonomy, trauma, and spirituality. That’s the benefit of reaching middle-age–you’ve got enough data to slot and see what shakes out if you care to look. My conclusions don’t fit cleanly into popular belief systems but then, I’m not a fan of just accepting what I’m told is true. I have to experiment and experience life for myself and draw my own conclusions. I fully admit that my brain seems to be wired a little differently and that I see things differently, but then, I’m finding more and more people have similar beliefs but are too afraid to discuss them for fear of being ridiculed or ostracized. I guess I’m used to it.
Most of the anti-abortion debates (or pro-life or whatever-rhetoric-will-best-evoke-the-required-necessary-response) center around when life begins and who has control over that life. My personal belief, based on many things I’ve experienced and observed, is that yes, life begins at conception. However, en-souled life begins sometime after that. I don’t know when. I think it’s different for each child. (Why shouldn’t it be?) From my own full-term pregnancies, I definitely felt that both babies were en-souled–the souls integrated with their bodies, in other words–definitely by seven months. Some people believe that occurs at the point of quickening, which made a lot more sense when we were less technologically advanced and didn’t have the advantages of ultrasound technology to detect a living fetus. I wasn’t able, in my own experience, to sense the soul fully integrated when I first felt my babies move. Who knows–maybe souls wait until the body is physically viable before committing. I can’t say definitively–I had no idea in 1989 and 1992 what to look for. To be honest, I was not as aware of the non-physical aspects of life, especially what’s on the other side of death or birth, when I was pregnant with Shannon and Aislinn. That was before I began to meditate or explore shamanic journeys or look beyond the physical world. I don’t know when exactly that Shannon and Aislinn’s souls integrated into their bodies but I do believe, based on what happened with two miscarriages, that it wasn’t within the first couple of months. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t…around. I’ll explain that later.
In working through these issues emotionally, I shall always be boundlessly grateful to shaman Kristin Madden who shared her own metaphysical experiences during pregnancy in her book Pagan Parenting and to shaman S. Kelley Harrell. I was fortunate enough to have Kelley share her profound insights into what I consider being a portal to allow these souls to enter this world. I was constantly amazed at how aware Kelley was of all the nuances of pregnancy and childbirth as she experienced them herself, and I wished that I could have been that aware during my full-term pregnancies. Maybe it’s because she became a mother later in life than I did, but I tend to think it’s because she’s one of those highly sensitive people who understand the spirit realm in ways that most people never know exists. The unusual things I experienced with my last two miscarriages, after I’d become much more aware myself, seem to be fairly common among other shamans I’ve spoken with, but other than a strange tale my mother always told me, I’ve rarely heard anyone who doesn’t have a specific gift for such things talk about it.
The spooky stuff:
I grew up hearing my mom tell the story of how, before I was born, she saw me in the processing plant where she was working at the conveyor belt. She saw the little girl coming toward her and was upset that a child was in such a dangerous place alone. Except that as the child neared, the little girl disappeared. She wasn’t in the physical realm. That child was me, and I do recall being about that age when I visited my grandmother at the processing plant with my mom.
My dis-incarnate children, at least for the last two miscarriages, did not come to me as children. Not at all. They came as adults. The first time, I was not as developed spiritually and the effects weren’t as pronounced, but holy crap, this last time was…breath-taking!
I have had this happen to me only twice in my life since I became spiritually aware, and both times, I was newly pregnant and didn’t know yet. Both times, until I figured it out, it scared the daylights out of me. This has otherwise not been a normal occurrence for me. I’ve had a lot of strange things happen in my life–things that qualify as “high woo-woo”–even early in my life when I was a devout Christian. The miscarriage experiences have an entirely different texture from anything else I’ve experienced or observed.
The first time, it was a man of about 25. No more. He was tall, wiry, with brown hair to his shoulders and much like mine. Other than that, he looked like his father. I refer to him as “Dagan” because I felt he should have a name. The first time I saw him, he was in the periphery of my vision but not there when I turned. He was close, as though I could reach out and touch him. Here’s where I feel I’m writing science fiction: he was somewhat…transparent. If you’ve seen movies where people fade slowly from reality until you can see through them or if you’ve played with PhotoShop and reduced the color on a background to, say, 20% instead of a nice solid 100%, you have an idea of how he appeared. For a while, he was right in front of me in this way, solemn and wearing long, dark clothes, like a robe. His presence made me anxious and he backed away for a while, keeping his distance, but appearing in my dreams and meditations where I felt I had a little more serenity. He talked to me sometimes in those meditations but mostly, he just watched. At the time, I hadn’t even completed my cycle or taken a pregnancy test. Within another few weeks, I was having tell-tale signs, and Dagan continued to hang around, always close by, even when I didn’t see the thin shade of him there.
Zena, which is what I call the woman who appeared the second time this happened, gave me a much more intense experience, but I was also more able by then to assimilate news of anything that was paranormal in nature. She came out of the blue like a bolt of lightning. I must have been two or three days pregnant at most as I now know I’d had some implantation symptoms just as I’d had with Dagan. Those were the only two pregnancies where I noted implantation symptoms, but then, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention before. I called her Zena because she was very tall and somewhat fierce. She looked much like Aislinn, except taller, very willowy, and with long hair the color of dark chocolate. She was beautiful and appeared to be about 25. The first time I encountered her, she was standing directly in front of me, inches away, and was as transparent as a reflection. I had a weird feeling in my solar plexus chakra that night and had to be held to calm down enough to sleep. I didn’t, for several days, know who the woman was but was starting to suspect I knew. She was right there in the ether in front of me. I knew who and what she was, but I didn’t dare voice what I felt. Her ghostly appearance and the way she was always soooooo close to me was the first of the pregnancy signs. The others showed up a week or so later.
Negotiating the Miscarriage:
I’ve recently been introduced to several shamans (not the ones already mentioned) who talk about the deep trauma of women who chose to terminate their pregnancies for various reasons and live with deep guilt. They help these women find peace with their decisions, but they’ve also discovered what I call the “energetic abortion” or the “negotiated miscarriage.” They urge women who are facing untimely or unwanted pregnancies–not always the same thing–to go into a meditation and talk to the soul who wants to come through as a new baby. By becoming pregnant, they’ve opened a doorway into our world and those souls are standing at the door and waiting for the vehicle we call our physical bodies to be ready to carry them into life. Rather than go through the trauma of a unilateral decision and an abortion clinic, the woman talks to the unborn soul and they work out what’s best for both. The report I got back was that in most of these cases where the woman is able to communicate with the waiting soul, they experience a miscarriage, which is also known as a “spontaneous abortion,”–not to be confused with a medical or surgical abortion. This method of soul-level negotiation, according to one source, allows women to find peace more easily with a untimely pregnancy that ended without outside interference. I know my background in contract negotiation is showing through when I say this, but it was something agreed-to by both parties.
That’s not exactly what happened to me.
Sometimes it’s the unborn soul who re-negotiates. And that’s when it’s terribly hard on a woman who miscarries with no insight into why, especially if she can think of a billion reasons to blame herself. It’s hard enough when you do have insight. I have no idea why I miscarried earlier in my life, except that Shannon wouldn’t be here now, at least not in her current form, if that baby had come to term. It might have been Shannon’s soul in another body but it wouldn’t have been the same because I was pregnant again only four months later, to my surprise. My circumstances had changed somewhat over those four months, and the timing and marriage were suddenly much better.
With Dagan, he showed up at a time when everything in my life was falling apart. My husband and I were fighting all the time and I was contemplating leaving. In fact, I never even told him I thought I was pregnant. I started to, but before I could get the words out, it was assumed to be another argument and I got cut off. I felt too wounded then to say anything and just kept it to myself. Then one night a month later, tensions were high and I was so miserable. I fell asleep and Dagan came to me in a dream. He told me he was going to leave, that the time wasn’t right. I agreed that the time wasn’t right but I didn’t want him to go.
“If I stay,” he told me, “you will never leave him. You will stay here, where you’re unhappy, for me.”
I woke up bleeding.
He did, however, tell me that there would be other opportunities for me to mother him and that he might come through then. I know I did feel his presence a few times after I got into a new relationship that failed, but eventually I let Dagan go. I knew that soul was ready to come through and had waited for the opportunity, but without a relationship in place, the opportunity never solidified. I do think that by now, he is in the world with some other woman as his mother, but it’s not me and never will be. It was his choice, and we re-negotiated that sacred contract between us.
With Zena, it was different. I was worried about how a pregnancy would affect my health at the time, but she was very much wanted and I would have welcomed her into the world, even if that meant raising her alone. I went into a meditation to try to meet with her. She already had a strong physical effect on me, especially in my third chakra. I was under a lot of stress at that point, and my normally low blood pressure shot way up. I told her in that journey to meet her, soul to soul, that I would welcome her regardless of the physical hardship but I was willing to let her go if it was for the best, if something in particular happened that would have a disturbing outcome for her. We were both waiting to see if that would happen. For much of the time, she was not very communicative. She was watchful. The last time I saw her in a meditation, the decision had been made. She was not coming through for me–her sacred contract was with her father. It was more important for her to come through as his child for him than to come through for me. If the pregnancy continued, she would be with me but not with him. This was about what she needed, about what he needed. And I had to give that some room.
After the meditation, she was no longer standing in front of me. She was no longer anywhere around me. The next morning several of my pregnancy symptoms had abated. More the next day. By then, I found out what we’d feared had happened, and she was gone for good. For me, at least. Not for him.
If I knew now….
If I were doing this all over again, say having a baby with some exciting new man in my life, I think I would definitely be more aware than ever before. I’d also meet that waiting soul in meditation and welcome him or her and make sure there were no surprises. I’ve made peace now with my children who never were my children. These last two were negotiated miscarriages where we both had a say, or at least some input, into the decision to go.
Leave a Reply