Four Hundred Kilometres of Gold Thread

Take a deep breath in through the nose and exhale through your nose or slightly pursed lips. As you exhale imagine that you are blowing out a golden thread.

Are you familiar with ‘Golden Thread Breathing’?

It’s a hypnobirthing technique that is taught wide and far and it features in my pregnancy yoga classes every week.

Every time I guide a group through it I am reminded of a movie I once saw. It was during the months at the start of this decade where we were told that staying indoors was the thing to do.

During those months Gerald and I consumed a lot of all kinds of curious entertainment and in doing so, despite rebelliously insisting on TWO daily walks rather than the sanctioned one walk per day and although we both had jobs to leave the house for, we finally sat through the fabric of our already threadbare sofa.  

Early on in the movie we hear the voice of documentary filmmaker Alan Eireira as he  passes on his instructions to a yarn maker in London:

‘We are going to need 400 km of gold thread!'

I thought: ‘Yes, we are, for all the women in this world who are giving birth at this moment and for their daughters and their daughters' daughters.’ 

The documentary is called ‘Aluna’ and it is one of the most mesmerising films I ever saw. 

It is a movie about an untouched civilisation, the Kogi people, who live hidden on an isolated pyramid mountain in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Their mountain is almost five miles high and it is the highest coastal mountain on Earth. It is so uniquely situated that it has all of the world’s climates and most species of plants and animals represented on it. The Kogi people quite literally live on a miniature model of planet Earth and they have observed it since the beginning of time. 

Living in this microcosm at the Heart of the World, the Kogi people have declared themselves the guardians of Mother Earth and when Earth asked them to, they summoned back their old friend Alan Eireira almost 30 years after their first encounter and collaboration with him. In Alan's initial documentary about the Kogi people they tried passing on a message to us to stop hurting the Earth. This was in 1990 and we haven’t paid heed to them so they resolved to tell us again and they proceeded to co-produce this documentary film to teach us what we must do to heal the Earth. 

They tell Alan that, in order to help us understand the interconnectedness of everything, they need to span a golden thread connecting one Columbian river estuary to another and so they walk along with their spool of gold thread connecting ancient cite to ancient cite, estuary to estuary and documenting the encounters they have on the way. It is such a privilege to be invited to witness these ancient people in their ways, to learn how they understand the world as an embodiment of the thoughts of Luna, the source of all life. 

The Kogis call those inhabiting the modern world ‘Younger Brother’. They generally keep to themselves and live a simple life in tune with Nature. They respect all Creation and their understanding of the Sun, the Moon and the Stars is astounding. They look to Nature for answers and they have a quaint way of communicating with her by observing Water. 

Younger Brother is not normally welcome on their land and the Kogi don't like leaving it to spend time in the modern world, yet their commitment to bringing us the message they received directly from Earth herself has them get passports, slip on shoes (did you know that you aren’t allowed to board a plane bare footed?) and take a long haul flight to London where they graciously receive their 400 km spool of golden thread, reportedly the longest piece of thread ever produced. 

While in London they visit an observatory and they exchange notes with a renowned scholar of astronomy. They manage to surprise him with their ability to immediately understand a telescopic image of a solar system they can’t possibly have seen before given that it is  invisible to the naked eye. The movie is a real treasure and next time you’ve got 90 minutes to spare, I highly recommend you take this journey with Alan and the Kogi (alternatively hop on my massage table for a 90-minute massage and stretch session).

I most enjoyed how utterly certain these ancient travellers are of what must be done and how much disbelief they show when they realise how little even our most educated experts know about Mother Earth as a breathing, living organism. 

No wonder we’ve been messing her up!

The movie got me thinking about the mysteries of life and my thoughts are never far away from leaping to motherhood, birth, postpartum and the mama-baby dyad. Everything is connected and how you are born matters. Birth is not just women's business, it matters to everyone.

We were all born!

How do our experiences of being born impact us through our lives? 

Does our disconnection to Mother Earth originate in our birth stories?

Are we more inclined to disregard Nature when our own nature as human beings is becoming virtually unknown to us?

I wonder how the Kogi view the ways of industrial birth.

It is evident that we have lost our ways, forgotten that birth is innate. Will those golden threads we breathe out every week be enough to connect us back to trusting our primal blueprint of birth?

The interconnectedness of everything and everyone on Earth that the Kogi people try so hard to convey to us runs through space and time. It spans through generations. We see the impact of the ideas and actions of our ancestors today and future generations will see the impacts of our ideas and actions and so it continues. 

Industrialised societies see this as progress. We learn from the scholars before us and we build on what they learned.

This is science. 

This is evolution.

The Kogi don’t see it this way, they believe that each generation knows less than the generation before and it seems to me that the reason for that is that knowledge is something different to this ancient people than it is to the people of the industrialised world. Perhaps the underlying belief of the Kogi people is that the ability to create reality from pure thought is what constitutes knowledge. 

The Kogi origin story is that ‘Luna’, a being of pure thought without form, ‘started to think that Mother conceived the world in darkness’ and ‘then came Light and the world was real’. 

Do the Kogi believe that this ability to create matter from thought was most pronounced in the first Kogi people to walk the Earth? Might that be why the Kogi believe that wisdom lies in the ways of the past?

Recently I have encountered more and more families who are longing for a simple, no frills birth. They have listened to podcasts or read books about the limitations of routine maternity guidelines and they know what is important to them (did you know that I wrote a book, too, summarising the evidence and bigger picture around routine interventions, scroll down for the link!). They know that for birth to unfold they need to feel safe and many women wish to prioritise privacy over surveillance. This often gets interpreted as selfish by midwives and increasingly I hear from families who find the attitudes of even senior staff wanting if they decline routine observations in labour. 'Why do you want us there if you don't want us to do our job?' This one seems to be a popular one all across Ireland and the United Kingdom and I hear it mostly from families who end up choosing their own path.

Don't professionals see that those women will continue to walk away if they are asked to overwrite their own instincts and have intimate procedures imposed on them against their wishes?

When are we making trauma informed care routine in the conventional model of birth?

I look forward to the guideline that regulates for trusting a woman to be able to take full responsibility for herself and her baby and for the entire spectrum of possible outcomes and to stand by her unconditionally (with woman). 

Meanwhile let's take example from the Kogi people. Let's keep breathing out those golden threads and hope that they will lead us all to the estuaries that connect the rivers of modern medicine to the sea of ancient birth wisdom. The two can (and must) co-exist just like industry and nature, like thought and matter, like body and spirit.

If you are pregnant and want to combine a hands on aromatherapy massage approach to your birth preparation with an educational and mindset approach so that you have all the bases covered, please reach out and send me an email to [email protected]

Resources:

Aluna - The Documentary

Aluna - The Website