Momentary Birth: Shift Your Mood Instantly Using Your Senses

By Natascha Bach and Raymond Aaron

Momentary Birth is both a book and a sacred mantra. If you have been noticing negative patterns looping and reemerging in your life, or if you've been feeling irritated by everyone and everything—this book is for you.

Momentary Birth is full of delightfully fresh and simple ways to shift your mood instantly when you feel bothered, upset, frustrated, overwhelmed, or uncertain. Natascha Bach speaks from her personal experience, sharing her own healing journey, and the many ways she was continuously directed back to finding relief within herself using the body's remarkable expertise.

This book will help you recharge your energy as a person, lover, leader, friend, parent, colleague, and collaborator so you can be more effective by resetting your ability to respond versus react in any difficult situation. This book is overflowing with stories and perspectives to help you feel more confident as you set out to honor yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772775334

Book preview

Chapter 1

Momentary Birth

"One word frees us of all the weight

and pain of life: that word is love." —Sophocles

May you remember your birthright:

to be love,

to be loved,

and to allow yourself to be reborn anew in

each divine moment of your life.

With the gift of inspiration, your breath, you are provided this exquisite opportunity should you choose it.

Blessed are you who are awake enough to truly hear and receive these words, you who are ready to leap forward out of the false paradigms of suffering and fear. Being fed a steady diet of fear for innumerable years, you have come to normalize and believe illusions about yourself and the world which have caused you to shrink into owning your faults and wounds as if you surely deserve them. Disappointments and regrets accumulate. Over time you may have come to identify more with your wounds, falling in line with the generations before you who also suffered, and so here you are.

You no longer need to carry these burdens. This is a time of intense healing on our planet. World circumstances have provided time and spaciousness for you to turn isolation into inquiry and deep reflection. You traversed through a multitude of emotions along your journey and many of you, especially my clients, are awakening now to a better way.

Awakening to the realization that you can no longer partake in situations, circumstances, negative stories playing on repeat, negative beliefs, and patterns that have been feeding your wounds. They no longer make sense in your life. You are ready for something new.

This book is your divine opportunity to choose to reset, to be reborn, to reparent yourself, to choose to let the false illusions and negative stories drop away. This is your calling to empower yourself now to create a more loving experience, just as I have done.

You will take back your magnificent power as creator of your own life. There is far more deliciousness to experience when you release the need for comparison and competition, and living in constant fear and anxiety. May you discover in this book how to choose Momentary Birth to create the life you truly want to experience. This is not a superficial bandage to pretend nothing bad ever happens; this is your moment to shift and create a new dedicated commitment to loving yourself so much that your personal happiness is your primary goal each day. Then the overflow begins and you inspire others to do the same. You contribute to a more loving world by truly loving and caring for yourself.

Your commitment to Momentary Birth will be how you not only find relief from upset, move beyond past wounds, overcome obstacles and negative patterns, but it will also be how you consciously choose to create a better life for yourself.

Momentary Birth: the Sacred Mantra

Momentary Birth is allowing yourself the exquisiteness to be born again in each moment of your life. In each and every moment you have the ability to change your reality. You are far more powerful than you may have been led to believe. What if you could expedite the process of resetting your emotional state in order to be the highest and best version of yourself in any given moment?

I have a beautiful painting in my office by my dear friend and artist, Victoria J. Fry, called Momentary Birth. I am continually entranced by the abstract painting. The title of the art reminds me of the power we all have, throughout our day, to:

•Reset

•Restart

•Begin anew

•Be reborn back to our intrinsic self

•Be whole again, no longer separate from love

The title of this painting would become a sacred mantra for me to return to continually on my healing journey.

When I was young I had multiple traumas happen within a short period of time. In those years, we didn’t speak about trauma. Stuff happened and then you just got on with your life and did your best. In my life, I did just that and was fine for many years; many, many years. Until I wasn’t. I navigated life like a pro, or at least that was what I believed at the time. I was resilient and happy, or at least that was the mask I wore when others were looking.

Flashback to when I was fourteen, before seat belts were the law, I was in a car accident and shattered the windshield with my face. In the ER, I winced in pain as the nurse firmly pressed my injured head and neck into the headrest of the slit-lamp while the ophthalmologist checked my eyes for glass. While a bright light was being shone in my eyes, and the nurse was forcing me to lean forward, all I could hear was the sound of my father yelling and cussing at me. I flinched. The nurse pushed my cut-up face even more firmly into the straps and the light grew bigger and brighter like it was spinning toward me.

My father was under a lot of stress that summer, my mother was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and was studying abroad, and it was less than ideal timing. He had every right to be upset. I had taken the car to return a library book because it was too hot outside, and I knew it would be faster than riding my bike. For years I had been the inquisitive child leaning over the front seat to quiz my father, What does that do? And that? on the long car trips to visit relatives. I impressed myself that day that I could drive so well. I had to tell someone, so I stopped by a friend’s house, which turned into an afternoon of driving around town. I had no driver’s license, just my own bold confidence.

I noticed that in an hour my father would be getting home from work. I proceeded to take my friend home when she persuaded me to let her try. I coached her through how to drive, and in the two blocks between where she began driving and my home there was a distraction. I remember looking over my shoulder to the right and when I turned back facing forward—Wham! Everything began to move in slow motion. Every second of flying out of my seat and toward the windshield stretched out until—Wham! I met the windshield with my face and was thrust back into my seat. I felt a warmth dripping into my eyes. I tried to get out, but the door was jammed so I kicked and kicked until it finally opened. I got out and started walking, and toward me ran a huge man who worked at the gas station nearby. He laid me down on the hot summer pavement and placed his rag on my forehead and eyes. He was yelling and calling for help. Because I couldn’t see, all I had in order to understand what was happening were my senses of touch, sound, and smell. I could feel the heat of the pavement and the pressure of the man’s rag on my face. I could smell the gasoline on his clothes and could hear his loud shouting and the voices of the ambulance workers, doctors, and then my father.

My family, not unlike other families, was showing signs of the edges fraying that summer. The family structure was breaking down due to marital issues, communication issues, financial issues, dysfunction, at-risk teen issues, alcoholism, workaholic tendencies, and never-spoken-of unhealed sexual abuse.

Within the next 5 months my family would lose everything in bankruptcy and soon after would relocate. Moving was a devastating blow for me; having to leave the safety and security of all that was familiar felt like the worst thing ever, even worse than my car accident because there was a deep grief leaving so many people I loved. But kids are resilient right? Right. Brush yourself off and get going. Within a year of moving my parents decided to divorce. So I did what brought me the most joy, I immersed myself in every activity I could be in at school.

By the time I graduated high school, I was pregnant. Keep going. Keep going. By the time I graduated college, I was married with two children, worked two part-time jobs and still managed to graduate with honors.

Life was fun and beautiful. I loved being a mom. I took great pride in my work, and I quickly joined the ranks as a workaholic parent, but I had a good reason. Right? A young parent who wants to make a good life for her family so she works extra, this is what I thought. I would work extra so that I could have the additional income to give my children what I didn’t have—everything they wanted.

In truth life was fun and beautiful until it wasn’t. The ugliness of depression eventually overtook each of my children. Each at completely different times and with distinctive circumstances. Suicide plans and attempts shook me. I was so desperate to understand why. What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I see signs? I began to learn about mental health, but still the old saying pull yourself up by your bootstraps was deeply ingrained in me.

There was so much hiding any sort of problem in an effort to save face and maintain the outward appearances of a good family. I believed it was my duty and role as a mother and wife at the time to protect our outward reputation. Or perhaps I didn’t want to admit there were problems. We would get the help needed from counselors and therapists, but I didn’t want to let other people know there was a problem. So, issues were held tight to the chest, unspoken, perpetuating the same destructive patterns shown to us by the generations who came before us. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t let them see your weaknesses and struggles. Do the wait-and-see-if this-works dance with the psychiatrist as she cocktails different meds for my young teenager. Only for my child to become even more suicidal.

Amazing! Absolutely amazing that I didn’t listen to my intuition during those years. I had tremendous inner turmoil about letting professional strangers play with my child’s reality using medications. Well intentioned doctors conducted expensive pharmacological experiments which never really provided any help or relief.

Fast forward to the end of my own twenty-year marriage. I had promised myself I would go to graduate school once the kids had grown, so I could achieve my career goals. My practice husband (this is what I call him) said, That is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. That statement finally helped unveil the ugly truth. This wasn’t a marriage, it never was. It was just a partnership, an unspoken agreement to raise the children. It took me years to recognize the verbal and emotional abuse patterns that emerged when no one else was looking. Harsh criticisms, constant teasing, put-downs, monitoring of my activities and spending, and a complete lack of physical and emotional affections filled our home. No visible marks were made, this kind of abuse leaves only inner wounds and perpetuates extreme self-doubt.

I could no longer stay in an unloving and unsupportive relationship after twenty years. It was only getting worse. I was hopeful and optimistic leaving would be a new start for me! I could be true to myself and follow my heart like in the movies, right? Only good could come from me standing up for what I believed was the best decision, right?

But once I left, I set myself up for the greatest collision of all. I fell in love. In that space of love, where I was finally safe and cared for—I began to fall apart. Everything, every emotion I had ever suppressed in my entire life began to rise to the surface and threaten to destroy my new life, my health, and especially my new relationship with an incredibly supportive, loving, and encouraging man.

My beloved became an immovable force who would only accept loving interactions and a peaceful home environment. He recognized that my defensiveness, reactivity, and emotional rollercoaster were just symptoms of something deeper. He knew who I was at my core and continually challenged me to choose new responses when I would become triggered. It took time to unlearn the patterns, to locate where the imbalances were, it wasn’t a straight line. I didn’t know why the upset was happening, all I knew was what was not working despite my continued effort. Years and years of suppressing and ignoring the unresolved childhood traumas and traumatic experiences during my marriage took time, and so would my journey to heal, forgive, and move on from the negative stories that had been holding me back.

I will continue to seek solutions and relief until I no longer need to. I have found new and better pathways for my brain. I have learned along my journey that healing does not have to be a long and arduous ordeal, and that is what I am here to share with you.

Did my trauma triggers happen because of an actual brain injury caused by the car accident, or too many life-altering circumstances in a short period of time, or because of decades of suppressed emotions that had no outlet? Regardless of the reason, this book contains the gifts I have gathered to help me remain calm, retain happiness, and retrain the fight-flight-or-freeze reactions of my nervous system to come back to presence in the