Then we wait - for as long as it takes. It is crucial that the birthing should be initiated and shaped by the birthee; only then will it feel like an authentic event Sometimes there will be a long wait; nothing apparently happens, at least from the outside viewpoint There are a few small movements under the blanket,, once or twice the breathing will deepen and strengthen, only to fade away again.

Inside the 'womb', however, a great deal may be going on. The birthee moves in and out of an altered state of consciousness; many strange and confusing feelings, images and memories flow through them. Eventually, there develops a genuine urge to push, which has a truly involuntary and spontaneous quality, and is generally preceded by a build-up of powerful circular breathing (breathing with no pause between inhale and exhale).

Once the birthee begins to push, it is for the helpers to follow and match the impetus which they experience from the birthee; to judge with their bodies more than with their minds the amount of pressure and resistance which is needed, how 'hard' or 'easy' the birth needs to be, whether a 'midwife' needs to go in and pull the birthee out The experience becomes extraordinarily real and vivid for those taking part and when the 'baby' is finally 'born' between the legs of the helper who has been holding their head, and lies floppy and dazed on someone's lap, perhaps sucking at their hand, it is a moving, heart-opening experience, and it can be hard to keep in mind that this newborn creature is in fact an adult woman or man.

Birthing creates a magic space, an altered state for everyone involved. Only afterwards do people wake up and realise how far they have travelled from everyday reality. Such experiences carry their own conviction, and often have profound effects on the lives of those who pass through them, as they gain a new level of energy and joy in their lives, a more vivid sense of reality, a sense of being truly reborn.

They will also often have learnt specific lessons from the birthing about their basic life patterns. They may now understand in a new way their tendency to push blindly through difficulties, or their constant urge to give up, or the feeling that 'no one's there for me', or the sense that something always goes wrong at the last minute.

All these traits and many others can be illuminated by seeing them as generalisations which we have built up from our experience of being born. There are indeed times, as we have experienced when we have been dealing with a series of birthings in the course of our work, when everything about life seems to reflect our birth! We become acutely sensitive to phrases like 'a tight spot', cutting our ties', 'no way out', 'light at the end of the tunnel'.

There are often quite specific details of the birthing which relate to obstetrical events: the cord round the neck, the breech presentation, the high forceps, the delayed breathing, the caesarean section - all these emergencies can be reproduced in a birthing. Sometimes they match well with the biographical facts - even when the birthee only consciously discovers the details later.

At other times, though, the events of the birthing will be quite different from what actually happened, and when we go through a second, or third, or subsequent birthing, it is often the case that the whole shape of the experience will be quite different from the first time. It seems that each of us is 'programmed' with a whole series of births, from the most beautiful and joyful to the most horrifically life-threatening, and with a need to experience and release all these births at different times.

So what is going on here? No one really knows, but it appears that the crucial experience of being born - perhaps the first great crisis of life (though there are those who emphasise conception and implantation) - remains as a kind of resource for the child and adult, a vocabulary of fundamental feeling-shapes through which we express the later events of life. Each subsequent crisis will summon up for our pattern-maker a particular aspect of birth: magnify it, altering the biographical reality, even develop a largely imaginary birth which will then function in our bodymind as if it had really happened.

This is speculation, but what we do know is that the 'birth-shaped experience' quite often happens spontaneously in therapy, with no need for any setting up on the therapist's part. We have learnt in practice to spot the signs that a client is moving into such an experience: a need to push with their head and neck, statements like 'I feel there's something I have to get through' or 'something big is going on but I don't understand it': most of all a specific atmosphere, equivalent to the so-called epileptic aura, which is hard to describe but highly recognisable - a dreamlike, sleepy premonition which seems to fill the room. In such situations we simply offer our experience and our bodies as resources for the client to shape their own birthing, and save the analysis for afterwards.

And, of course, these birth-shaped experiences happen in life. Most human cultures apart from ours have a formal place for 'rites of passage' to mark crucial transitions - puberty, marriage, death, initiation - and these are modelled on birth. The central figure goes down into a dark enclosed place and comes back up into life; is immersed in water; undergoes an ordeal. Even without this ritual enactment we all experience crisis and transition as a death and rebirth, passing through a strait and narrow place.

Another set of images which come up both in and out of therapy are clustered around the umbilical cord and its cutting: ideas of being connected to someone or something - fed by them or helplessly poisoned with bad stuff, ideas of being cut off, abandoned, irretrievably damaged. 'Cord-shaped experiences' recur in a variety of situations, and seem to set off reactions which are outside our conscious control.

Again, such themes are anchored in our bodies. Massaging around the navel can bring up very powerful feelings, especially of rage and grief, and also fear of falling - our basic sense of grounding seems to be anchored in the umbilical connection, only later being transferred to the legs and the earth. After someone has been birthed and is lying peacefully in a helper's arms, there is often a moment of sudden shock, pain and disorientation which seems to represent the cutting of the cord - often done brutally soon, before it has naturally stopped pulsing as the breath takes over. Almost everyone who goes through the birthing experience emerges as a convert to natural childbirth and as an opponent of high-tech obstetrics.

Another very striking feature of the birth-shaped experience is that, time and again, it spontaneously throws up 'past life memories'. Once more, the quotation marks are to indicate that we are not assuming these indicate a 'real' previous incarnation, simply that after birthing many people emerge with clear and strong images of being someone else in another time and place. These images very often parallel the birthing experience itself - for example, someone may envision a death by strangling during a birthing where breathing is difficult

This sort of experience can be very startling - even annoying to a person who is sceptical about reincarnation! But like birthing itself, past life imagery can be useful in helping people to make sense of and resolve present issues, helping them create a coherent 'story of themselves'. It is also possible to become addicted to past life material as a way of avoiding bodywork, for example, or emotional work on what is going on in the here-and-now.

We have taken up birthing as an example of a much more general reality: the way in which our bodymind holds the memory of every crisis and transition in our lives, and constantly reinterprets each event in terms of every other event, creating dumps or clusters of imagery on the mental level which exist physically as organisations of tension in the muscles of the body. Accompanying these tension patterns are vivid and elaborate body-fantasies, which often emerge in the course of therapy.

For example, someone may experience themselves as being eaten up to the neck by a great snake-worm-monster - which is the body itself threatening to consume the ego-observer. Or they may experience their limbs as paralysed or amputated; they may sense a penis in their throat or rectum; they may feel as though they have a baby inside their womb or their chest, their head might balloon out to a vast size, or their whole body become minute; they may float off the ground or sink through it. Again, there may be vivid 'past life' experiences of torture or violent death. All of these are real examples from our clients or ourselves; all, however bizarre they may seem, are perfectly normal and healthy. This is the 'language' in which our bodymind unconscious 'thinks' and 'speaks'; often it needs to be explored in order to heal our wounds.

We want to close this rather brief survey with a very different form of 'primal pattern'. We have seen how the seed-form of a person's characteristic attitudes can be sought further and further back in their personal history - in birth, conception, and even previous lives (and we have questioned whether 'earlier' in this context means 'more basic'). But there is another form of pre-history which helps to shape our lives: the history of our family, and the characteristic themes and questions handed down and restated from generation to generation.

We cannot be sure of the mechanism by which we inherit our family themes. There is the obvious effect of childhood experiences, but there often seems to be something more fundamental, more mysterious, at work - 'inherited memory' inscribed in the cells themselves? Certainly it is not uncommon for someone to have a recurring issue or image in their life which relates directly to an experience, not of their own, but of a parent. In a very general sense we have inherited the unresolved issues of our parents' lives, issues which they may well have inherited from their parents, and so on back.

Through their upbringing, children will tend either to reproduce their parents' armouring - as when oppressive toilet training in her childhood leads a mother to be equally rigid with her children because she has internalised the need for rules; or else they will tend to react against the parental pattern - as when a father's thrusting character sets up a panicked crisis reaction in his child.

The parents' own patterns are a reproduction of or reaction to their own parents; with each generation a new synthesis is created from the new couple - who, of course, are attracted to each other partly by their corresponding character armour.

Yet couples are also attracted to each other by the intuitively sensed possibility of helping each other towards healing. However horrific the 'family theme', there is always the possibility of resolving it, of bringing it to an end, of bringing out its creative side. The extreme case is the family which abuses its children down through the generations, each child growing up to reproduce blindly its own agony. Even here it is as if the children are sent forth on their parents' behalf to try to do better; as if the parents are silently saying 'You do what we couldn't do; you bring this family process to a close.'

The same is true in the more ordinary and less horrific family situations, where there might be an inherited theme of guilt or of struggling to 'better oneself, or of separation, or of sibling struggle. Every family is a problem looking for a solution; every family member is an element in both the problem and the solution, elected to that role and usually unable to resign from it And until the process is completed the issue will re-seed and reproduce itself - because that is the only way to avoid definitive failure. The very continuation of the family theme is a quest for its resolution, and this is the basis for hope in the family pattern which may otherwise seem utterly helpless, the individual bound hand and foot into a 'family curse'.

The set of patterns within which we as individuals live are rather like a hologram: each part contains within itself the whole, as the pattern-maker constantly re-synthesises our life story out of each new development.

Reichian work chooses to focus on the developmental phases of the first six or eight years knowing that this is not the whole story, that by the time we pass through these stages a great deal has already happened in our personal history and pre-history. We bring a lot of experience with us as we face these developmental thresholds, and this affects how we deal with them. Watching our own baby daughter, for instance, we have seen her manifest the whole sequence of phases within her first eighteen months.

What seems most important is the sequence - that wavelike streaming of energy down from the head to tail which repeats itself many times from conception to death just as it recurs constantly in the therapeutic process. It is relatively easy for a child to pass through a whole sequence in infancy, as our own daughter has, or even within the womb, without significant armouring.

What seems virtually impossible within our culture is for a child to pass the threshold of socialisation and gender, the 'Crisis' stage, without being wounded. The nature of the child's response to this crisis, the style of armouring which she or he develops, will be decided by their whole history so far, by all the crises and challenges they have already faced.

Unless we meet with definite mishap, we may emerge from infancy with only minor scars to face the issues of gender identity and socialisation. It is how we deal with these issues, with the unnatural demands which society imposes on our 'original nature', that sets the seal on our approach to creativity, contact, openness, surrender.

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