Portal
Contemplating the experience of being pregnant and being a portal, and sharing a bridge (or portal?) to a new storytelling project
This piece of writing is an edited version of a written transcript of a podcast episode with the same name. I decided to share it here in written form as well. If you want to listen to the podcast episode instead, you can simply listen to it in the audio voiceover of this piece of writing. Or follow this link to Dark Void Disco podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/darkvoiddisco/
Pregnant Portal
For the second time in my life I am in the pregnancy portal.
Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I AM the portal. Few portal experiences are so primal and visceral as this. I am a literal, physical, material portal for a new being, a new human, to come through into this life. A soul taking shape in the human form that is now being built inside of me. So I thought I would take this chance to talk about this experience and maybe try to see if I can get to some deeper layers, the suppressed sides that this podcast is about. To meet them.
I also want to connect to the whole idea of experiencing your life and your being as a portal, even if you’re not pregnant.
Humans place a lot of value on their constructions. The marvels of technology, and engineering, and infrastructure. But the engineering of a human being inside the womb is often overlooked in all its magnificence. It's an ordinary experience. After all, we have all gone through it, in order to be here. And many people have gone through the experience of being that engineer - or their body being it.
So, the construction of a human being is very mundane. Perhaps we haven't all visited a skyscraper. But everyone has been born.
The thing that I find strange about being pregnant, and frankly, uncomfortable, is this incredible emphasis that is now placed on my body. It feels like my life is suddenly filled with all kinds of checks and tests. Urine samples. Blood samples. Tests for chromosone variations. Ultrasounds. And midwives prodding and measuring my growing belly. And outside of the medical institution, comments, looks, touching of the belly by strangers. Not that that has happened a lot. But it’s an experience that I don’t particularly enjoy. The attention. If you have a big belly, you can’t hide it.
It makes it feel like my body is not mine anymore. It’s treated much more like an object, with its main purpose being a vehicle carrying this new life, creating this new being.
Sadly, I have felt that my body is not mine even before being pregnant. This was maybe the main reason why I resented becoming a woman, when I was a teenager: because it seemed that something was lost, some ability to inhabit a neutral position as a human being when you experience yourself being objectified. Of course, this happens to others than women too. But I can only speak from my experience in a female body. I suppose it didn't help that I experienced my body being abused, as though my experience within it didn't matter. As though I was nothing. Just a body. And these are things that are echoed back to me in my pregnancy, by the medical institution. And I understand that it’s been built that way, and that there are reasons for it. In the best of worlds it works well and people are taken care of. But it feels like my personhood doesn’t matter as much as the work my body is doing. My identity. Of course, this is not all that surprising as I exist in a culture that rests on materialist foundations, where the physical is in focus, because it can be observed and measured. And it is important what my body is doing. It’s important work.
But it creates a strange, and contradictory experience in being pregnant, because the body usually knows what it is doing, and it feels like I'm just along for the ride. Sure, I can eat my vitamins and try to help it on the way, to help the baby grow and be healthy. But in being pregnant, it doesn't actually feel that I, the “I” of my ego or my persona or what you want to call it, is achieving anything. It’s just my body, doing what it knows to do.
And here another strange contradiction rears it's head. During and after my last pregnancy, I started to realize that I was living very much out of my mind. I was, and am still, to a certain degree, mainly attributing value to things that I have crafted through the use of my mind, while the things that arise out of my body's natural functioning are of less value, because it was not actually I, the I of my ego, that created it. Or , planned it with my mind. And this interesting matter is worth inspecting further, because it also means that creations that seem to naturally flow out, through some kind of a channeling process, are devalued over those that I design and plan for, with my strategic mind.
I always thought myself to be a person who appreciates the free expression of art, when it comes from a more intuitive or spiritual place. But my pregnancy showed me that this was not actually the case. My mind felt appalled by all the focus on my body's natural functioning and started to feel overlooked, like a little child crying for attention. So I desperately tried to hold on to My projects, My intentional creations, with the result that I was not able to fully appreciate the experience of caring for a new human, because I didn’t feel like they were truly Mine. They just happened to come through the portal, the portal of my body.
But what if I could see myself more as a portal overall, than only as this thinking planning thing of my mind? In a way the experience of being a portal for my child also helped me access a new way of treating my other creative work.
In giving birth, you have to surrender and let your body do what it knows to do. And the same is true for a certain type of creations too. I have noticed this particularly in getting back to music. Maybe it’s not a surprise that I found my way back to music after this experience of becoming a mother. Maybe it flowed more naturally because I could let it flow. But also, In creating music, I have noticed tendencies of my ego, or my mind, to want to control the output, the result. To want to direct it, so that I can “show off my sound editing skills”, or something like that. But over this spring and summer, when I became pregnant again, I was often so exhausted and nauseous that I was unable to sit by my computer and work. I couldn’t edit music in the software. What I was able to do, inbetween of the nausea, was to sit a moment by my piano or ukulele and let the music flow through me, and feel it, through my body. The way that it wanted to or the way that my body naturally did.
Again, this process is teaching me to surrender.
And just be the portal.
But let's jump back to the mind-body contradiction again for a bit. I don't want to leave it in this combative place, like “the mind is all bad and the body is all good and natural”. My intention is to find the shared spaces, to enable the dual or paradoxal perspective where both sides of a polarity have their own value, and can be appreciated for that. In writing these words down, there’s a process going on in my mind, where I am taking those disparate experiences and gluing them together, trying to create a coherent expression to share. But I am also trying to let it flow out, in the way that the story wants to. So, I am both affecting the story and channeling it.
I am being both a person and a portal.
The Tension
And that is a great tension in this human life. We are experiencing this life through our selves, our egos, and I think that we should. I don't believe in the killing of the ego. But I believe in the communion between the ego and something vaster. The ego, the self, the wanting, for just me, and my life, gives me a motivation, to allow myself to surrender to the portal, to channeling what comes through. In that interaction, I can be an active participant, bu I can also be surprised and amazed at what comes through. In that, I am experiencing the dance of life, partly as me directing the movement, or at least my actions towards some direction, and partly be surprised by the flow of steps, that I could not have planned for in advance.
And this is also the magic of being the pregnant portal. I am creating the possibility for something entirely new and surprising to come into the world.
The most random thing there is, perhaps: A new being, a new human being.
A new expression of life.
But in doing so, I am also being affected, and being recreated. Earlier, I felt it was horrible and uncomfortable to be this pregnant portal, because I experienced a loss of my sense of self and my ego felt a shock, when the body got all that attention instead of my mind. It felt like a type of death. Like a death of an earlier way of life, that had been resting on the foundations created with my mind.
Overall, I think the connections between life and death are not spoken about enough, particularly how the experience of creating life also brings a kind of death with it. I felt my earlier way of life dying, and it was a tremendous loss, just as much as that new life was a gift. But I wasn't prepared for the sorrow and grieving that entering motherhood also signified, at least for me. I feel like I had only taken part in rose-tinted descriptions of motherhood. So my expectations were that it would be, just, love and beauty, and not also a kind of death and destruction of my earlier way of life. But this is a matter for another episode or, I think I spoke a bit about this in Monster Mother already. Now, let's get back to the theme of being a portal.
Maybe the experience of being a portal has to include both these mirror sides: birth, and death. Because, in all transformational cycles, endings and beginnings both have their role to play. They are both a part of life. And what is a Portal if not an opening for some kind of a shift, a transformation or transmutation of Energy, a change. Whether we view it as a literal portal through space and time, or a more abstract one, into a new mindset or a way of being, there is a change going on.
By now, I realize, that the painful birth/death experience of becoming a mother might just have been a blessing in disguise, paving way for something else, something stranger to grow in me. In experiencing myself as being the portal, in a very literal sense, I can access a way of being that is beyond what my mind could have planned for. Through my body, through that direct experience, I am remembering, how we are all so much more than our minds, or our bodies.
We Are All Portals
Maybe we are all Portals, in our own lives. We are Portals within and in ourselves. We are our own interface to this life where our own way of being affects our experience.
And we are Portals affecting each other by what experiences we create for others in our presence. Simply by the way we interact with each other we are creating different possibility spaces for each other - whether consciously or subconsciously.
We are Portals that affect each other by what we allow to flow through us into the world. Whether it comes in the form of artwork, new beings, or the words you choose to say, we all hold this creative, generative power, and it comes out in a union of body and mind, and a union of ego with something vaster, something beyond us, that we are all a part of.
Call it God, or Love or Soul or Spirit or just Life.
We are Portals of life, Portals for life,
living our lives.
A Bridge/Portal to a New Project
As I was writing this thirteenth episode of Dark Void Disco, it started feeling like something is wrapping up for this podcast, at least for the time being.
Looking back, this has been a year long process of me trying to actively meet with sides that I've been either suppressing or hiding. And I think that in just doing this podcast, something has slowly been shifting for me. In my approach to my life.
Now I do feel like I hold a deeper sense of acceptance for my existence and my way of being. I can hold different sides, both the idea that what I do, and who I am, is not really anything special, it just is, I just am... But also the idea that my life is meaningful and special, and that perhaps there is some value I can share to others through my words and creations. And by looking at those suppressed sides, they have gotten their space, and they are no longer screaming so loudly inside of me.
And my words and creations seem to be shifting a bit. I no longer feel the pressing need to go into these suppressed spaces and the dark shadows in the same way. I feel like I've done that. And they got their time in the spotlight. And maybe I'll come back to it at a later time, when more subconscious depths reveal themselves. Or when I go through some new experiences. Maybe they just want to be in the dark for a bit, as I go on, into this next adventure. Another motherhood.
For now, I feel like something is wrapping up, or changing shape, and my words want to flow into the shape of simply sharing some experiences, some findings from my life, maybe more in a mix of conscious mental processes and deeper, inner work. I feel a call to be pulled out from the Dark Void into a place where light and dark mingle and dance. More of an inbetween space where I can use different approaches: where I can both explore conscious heights and subconscious depths alike.
Mysterious Studies
So I’ve been testing out a new way of expressing, through a video podcast that I decided to call Mysterious Studies, because, yeah, I love to study. But I want to leave space for that to take shape and go into the areas it wants to. So this project, this process, can be a bit mysterious what it turns out. (And I guess that’s also why I call the writings of this substack publication Mysterious Musings: this ambiguous name has enabled me to fill these posts with whatever different types of content that I feel called to create.)
As always, I need to treat this project with a gentle openness, holding my hand open for whatever bird wants to land there and be expressed by me. Or fly out, through the portal that is me.
And for whatever reason, now that bird took the form of a video podcast. Maybe this is just another step in my lifelong process of building self-acceptance and trying to see myself clearly. Maybe it’s a way for me to challenge those voices I grew up with, that told me my facial expressions are weird. To let myself show my face. Weird, or not.
At the time when I’m publishing this episode, I also have published the first Mysterious Studies episode. So, if you are curious to see my facial expressions in addition to taking part in my ramblings through words or voice, then you are welcome to watch the video version of Mysterious Studies. Or just listen to the audio-only version if a video feels unnecessary/distracting to you.
Funnily enough, I almost feel like it feels more vulnerable to try to express myself in a more casual tone that I do in Mysterious Studies. On Dark Void Disco it’s almost like I have been channeling a version of me that is slightly more intense and dramatic than I use in my everyday life. So it’s a bit more like a theatrical role. And in Mysterious Studies, I'm more of... maybe a bit more of, just an everyday me. With all the awkwardness that comes with it. At least that's how it felt when I was recording it. But you can of course judge for yourself. I don’t know how later episodes turn out, my way of expressing seldom stays in one consistent shape for long. It needs different ways, different outlets, so, let’s see how it flows out.
As with most my projects, I also want to keep Mysterious Studies free, so the majority of episodes are just free episodes where I share the core of what I want to say around different themes around these perspective shifts I've experienced, and what I've discovered during my life, my experiences, on this journey of trying to see my life in a deeper way or, kind of look beyond just the purely physical levels.
And then on top of that there will be some bonus episodes that I will share right here, through my Substack, and my Patreon. These bonus episodes will be more elaborations or stories that I feel a need to keep behind the added boundary of a pay wall. And now I can finally use that bonus podcast feed that I created already in February: Deep View Disco!
Allowing Randomness
I find it funny how I was so excited about telling these bonus stories through Deep View Disco, and then, a few weeks after I initiated that, I realized that I was pregnant, and then the whole nausea and exhaustion started, so I wasn’t able to do what I had set out to do. And Deep View Disco just had to take a pause. And that’s just how these things work, sometimes, in being the portal or the channel: You have to accept that the thing that comes through you is a need for rest. Maybe it isn’t that strategically planned, next fantastical project, but maybe that is a half a year of taking it a bit more easy, and resting.
In a similar manner, I am curious to explore a more spontaneous type of expression, where I choose a theme, and discuss it more freely, allowing whatever comes out to be expressed. And just let myself be more of that portal, or let that randomness come out a bit more, the spontaneity. While I also partly did this in Dark Void Disco, and have sometimes written more spontaneous posts on Mysterious Musings, most episodes and posts were well prepared and thoroughly edited in advance before I recorded an episode or published a piece of writing. While editing is important in pieces of writing where you have a particular thing you want to say as poignantly as you can, I think that another reason for editing and preparing so thoroughly was because I was afraid of that randomness. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find the right words. I was afraid of actually letting myself channel what wanted to come out. I was afraid it would be too chaotic.
In order to challenge this fear, I decided that in this next project, or maybe overall in my expression, I want to experiment with having a bit more of that free space for the randomness. And it can be a bit messy. That’s fine.
Or, maybe I will just end up preparing and writing it all beforehand again. Well, then that’s how it will turn out. We'll see.
Discord Community
I’ve had a dream of creating more of a community, a virtual space for connecting, so together with the publication of Mysterious Studies, I’ve decided to create a community on the discord platform, called “Deep View Disco(rd)”.
The idea is that people who read or listen to my ramblings can have a space to share with other readers/listeners. For my Substack readers and podcast listeners I’m sharing the link for free for this first month, as a little thank you for being with me on this journey. So if you’re curious to join, you can do so through this link:
This public link will expire in a month (around 16th of November 2024), and then the community will only be accessed by becoming a member this Substack (so if you’re a subscriber you will still have access to it!) or my Patreon, because I want to keep a bit of a wall between this space and the vaster oceans of the internet. While I appreciate the openness and potential for far-reaching connections that it creates, I’m also still a bit scared about this whole random aspect of the internet, and in becoming more vulnerable and sharing things more openly. As a compromise, this public link will only be available for a short amount of time, so it’s like I’m putting a deadline on the total randomness….
Speaking of randomness, with my current condition, of being this pregnant portal, this new project, Mysterious Studies, and also this whole publication, might flow in a slow way. Or, maybe it’s gonna take a break. I just felt that I needed to get these first episodes out that were pushing in the back of my throat. And then I’ll take it from there and see how the pacing goes after that. So, when I’m on the parental leave with my child, it might be that I’m not doing a lot with these projects. Or, it might be that I have a need for a space to express. Because, on my last parental leave, I was very frustrated, because I thought I had to sacrifice everything. All other channels of expressions. Because all my energy had to go to this new human. Partly that is true. And partly it can’t be that way, because, as it is said, you have to nurture yourself, to nurture another. And this is one of the most difficult balancing acts I have experienced, particularly when nurturing myself includes my creative urges, which are not usually seen as acceptable ways of nurturing yourself. It’s like: “Oh, you have to be well fed, you have to drink water. You have to sleep enough.” It’s not often said: “Oh, you have to take a few hours away to just write, or draw or play music.” But it is...it is true. Sometimes you need to, even if you have a baby. If you are able to. At least, this is something I’ve been forced to realize, through my experience. And last time I wasn’t able to realize that on time and went into deeper depths of despair than what might have been needed. So, this time around, I hope I can experiment with getting this balance better and actually ask for help when I really need to. Or, maybe I won’t have that same need this time around. I don’t know.
I’m quite scared. But I’m also excited.
This is life. It’s the randomness of new experiences. New adventures. And you don’t know how it’s gonna turn out beforehand. You have to experience it, and go through it.
And then you can learn from it and share your findings. That’s my process anyway.
So, now, in ending, I want to take a moment to thank you, and anyone who reads or listens to my work. Whether it’s pieces here or there, or all of it, I’m thankful. Your presence has been felt somehow, and appreciated. Because, I can feel that my words can bring something for someone else. Whether it’s “just” entertainment, or even something motivating or inspirational. And even though my approach to creating needs to come mainly from a deeply subjective need, I do enjoy knowing that there could be some value for others in it too.
So thanks for joining on this journey, and you’re welcome to come with me on the next one.
We’ll see how it goes, and (try to) dance to the tempo that it chooses. That life chooses.
That’s all you can do.
To dance on,
or to be still.
