Hi dear All,
what a thought provoking line of discussion! Thank YOU!

I am here now mostly to listen but there is one thing that kept coming to me while reading all these sharings.

To me, the idea of a linear procession of gateways is confusing, and it is not even true to my feelings of things... I sense things are more like dialectic, and go round and round, if not in circles, but at least in spirals... hence maybe the feeling of falling back, or reaching forward?

I really like Lesley talking about layers peeling off... I would go with that picture and add to it this spiralling ascent idea.

Maybe, when viewing it from this angle, the idea of which gateway almost does not even arise?

And one more:

Once during a birth preparation workshop we came to question how PAINFUL we expect/remember our labour. On a scale of 10, which number would describe best the extent of pain during labour?

At one point one of the ladies just shuffled the numbers on the floor and out of the line of numbers she created a circle of numbers where the numbers 10 and 0 came next to each other. She said that in her experience the biggest pain and and the most blissful pleasure during her labour were side to side, rather than far away from each other.

We came to see 0 really stands for Orgasm :-), so maybe Gateway 0 is actually a fun place to be? - ha-ha ;-)

I think of this story a lot - at all kinds of turns in my life.

But most of all what I (and I'm sure all of you guys here) try to focus on in births (and life) is the wave of energy, the Gush of Life that brings with itself all the 1-s and 5-s, and 0-s and 10-s, all pain and pleasure...

x x x
R