Customer Reviews

Remembering Home: Healing Hurts & Receiving Gifts from Conception to Birth

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchase this book ten copies at a time and give them away.
I recently expressed to one of the authors, William Emerson, that if I could, I would get a megaphone and announce it from the rooftops. Remembering Our Home is a most gently written, beautifully illustrated book that invites the reader to reflect on the earliest and most impressionable moments of being human--in the womb. If at first this strikes you as improbable to do, consider the countless life dreams and aspirations you, or people you know have had, and somehow, someway fulfillment seems to be just out of reach. Remembering Our Home can help build bridges across the gaps to fulfillment by revealing potential blocks, that can form in our first experiences of feeling physically and emotionally. Some examples of causes of these blocks discussed in the book are being born early, or late, toxins like niccotine or drugs, and parents in a stressful environment. Throughout the book there are suggested processes and tools for accessing our earliest potentials. I was born with a disability, and working with this, and the ample additional referals in the book is transforming the quality of my daily life. I am learning from it to benefit myself and all the babies and children in my world.

This book is such a hidden gem. It is quite unpretentious, but fulfills a need that many therapists don't even perceive or know how to address. So many of my clients struggle with lack of attuned early parenting. For many, their parents still have difficulty being supportive. This slender volume provides a way to help clients understand that they have "archetypal parents"--ones that don't fail them the way their human ones do. It can be such a support to feel the love of an archetypal parent--and so necessary. Don't let the Christican symbols used in the book turn you away; all spiritual traditions have these same figures--just with different names and stories. Everyone who enters therapy would be well served to read this book--and get their therapists to read it as well. It is also a great book for conscientious parents to read. It is one of the most cohesive approaches to healing parental wounds available in book form that I have ever seen--one that addresses all three levels of existence: personal, cultural, and archetypal. Plus it is so wise about issues concerning pre- and perinatal psychology as well. Even after having read it several times, I am still informed and inspired by this little book.

The four authors have been delivering large public playshops on this for decades mostly "underground" on various church circuits.

The book expands magnificently on the idea of imaging and visualizing a new spiritual father and/or new spiritual mother. The book is a journey to redeem your self from unresolved trauma prior to conception, thru birth, to the weeks after birth. It's also a brief manual of best practices for expecting parents.

Readers familiar with the heavy breathing technique of Rebirthing will see this technique mentioned. Thankfully the emphasis of the authors is NOT on the extremely problematic practice of forceful return to birth trauma thru rapid breathing. Rather it is the "Spiritual Exercises" of Saint Ignatus to relive, in guided visualizations, the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as if you were going thru it as His bodily companion, in great detail.

Then again, the book is not that; rather, 90% of this book is a gentle review of the pre-conception thru birth experience of the soul, pointing out all the ways souls are "tricked" into believing themselves separated form God, in the human birth process. Insights on how we became separated and how to reconnect imaginatively, are not delivered thru dry psychiatric or even Jungian terms but grounded in personal stories by the four authors of their own birth regressions, stories about the results of healing sessions done on their adopted infant son, other client stories, humor and other learnings. One of the authors, William Emerson, is a birth psychology specialist; all the authors lead workshops on this material.

The net effect is a "light" tone enabling readers to go as shallowly or as deeply into unresolved pre-natal and peri-natal experiences as they wish. Exercises, group discussion questions and other helpful things for facilitating growth experiences for others are included.

It's hard to give this book a one-star rating. Although the authors have everything wrong about pregnancy, memory, trauma and therapy from a scientific standpoint, the book is so weirdly silly!

For example, as I recall, Emerson claims to have helped his twin be born by pulling her out behind him. One author, the Catholic priest, claims to have healed himself of his issues with women by imagining, for extended periods of time, being breast fed by the Virgin Mary. And did you know, that at conception, drunken sperm attacking the defenseless ovum can create all sorts of mental health havoc! Utterly amazing lunacy!