My work with people has been a discovery and description of the natural pattern of proportion as it plays out in our own lives. These stages of human development follow the same law of proportion as the galaxy, our planet, a flower or a seashell. For me this discovery came about not only as a professional path but also a personal odyssey. After discovering this basic law of nature, I found it reflected everywhere around me.

After I received my bachelor's degree from University of Illinois in Chicago and became a nurse, I worked with alcoholics. I heard that someone on the West Coast connected with Transactional Analysis (TA) could cure them. When I moved to California I met Eric Berne, subsequently joined the TA movement, and trained with him. His group was studying how people develop "life scripts." I thought we first needed to understand how people develop. 
     In my work with clients, I began to notice connections between their ages and their difficulties. For example, if someone described what was wrong in their life or what their challenges were, I could guess how old they were. Alternatively, if they said how old they were, I could tell them what their challenges were. Twenty-six year olds often had trouble thinking, and were concerned with how they were connecting with other people. Twenty-eight year olds tended to relate oppositionally--testing, challenging, saying "no" and setting boundaries. 
     In Berkeley's during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a lot of people were looking for places to land and work on personal issues. Many of them gravitated to me. Although each person was dealing with developmental issues in their own unique way, I knew that something fundamental--some basic law of nature--was showing itself. I didn't know what it was, but I had the feeling that if I moved to the country I would find out. 
     I sold my house, and a group of us bought Orr Hot Springs, planning to turn it into a healing retreat community. Seeing people against the backdrop of nature clarified the picture for me. I had been seeing the stages of development from a linear perspective. The developmental process is actually cyclical. This was not taught in our universities. Once I understood that development had a feminine face, things began to fall into place. All life arises from the feminine. That is the ground of our life as human beings in the physical body. 
     I discovered that twenty-six year olds were repeating the same stage and dealing with the same developmental challenges as babies from birth to six months. The twenty-eight year olds had the same tasks and challenges as two-year-olds. I published a compilation of material about these stages, tasks and challenges in two books: Becoming the Way We Are and Cycles of Power. 

 
Later, more evidence came together to support this cyclic developmental process--information from chaos theory, fractal geometry and the golden rectangle. I found that the stages, not equal in linear time, followed a particular proportion that described a geometric spiral. My clients were actually demonstrating this law of proportion. 
     I called the first stage the "being" stage. At the fetal level, it is seven days long, but after birth it is six months long. Stage two, the "doing" stage is fourteen days long in the fetal stage, and eighteen months post-birth (from six months to two years old). It is a time for exploring and learning to physically use the body. After six unique stages, the seventh is renewal--the beginning of the next cycle. Just at the ancient Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) tells us that all things are accomplished in six stages, and that the seventh brings return. Even in the DNA molecule, there are six parts that knit together to produce a set of instructions. The seventh says, "repeat yourself similarly." The "repeat yourself similarly" part stimulates a repetition of the six stages. 
     The Fibonacci series (named after a Renaissance mathematician) describes this growth spiral. The sum of the prior number and the current number in this sequence generates the next number: 1, 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, and so on. The proportional constant from one number to the next is 0.618. You can see that this sequence was not my invention. I was recognizing a fundamental law that governs the natural world, from the tiniest molecule to the greatest galaxies. I also came across Jose Arguelles' work in Earth Ascending, which shows the meridians and acupuncture points that go through power spots on the Earth. He highlights seven key locations on the planet that have the same physical proportions to each other as the Fibonacci series. 
     Rather than try to live life as a human invention, the feminine way is to discover and live in harmony with the patterns of life as they are. For instance, chaos theory was discovered by a scientist who had put some cream in his coffee and began to wonder what laws governed its dispersal. It seemed to be chaotic. He realized that things that seemed to have no pattern were simply not being looked at closely enough. The closer he looked, the more he saw a fundamental pattern--the same pattern that we have been discussing--the eternal feminine evolving and giving rise to form. 

 
How we initially go through the stages of fetal life and childhood creates patterns and attachments that contaminate our perception in later stages. For instance, one of my adult clients was born with a severe bilateral cleft palate. He was unable to suck and take in nourishment. After corrective surgery he was still unable to suck, and had to be tube-fed. In his grownup life, he was charming, outgoing and great company. Although people liked him a lot, he was starving in the midst of plenty. He didn't know how to take in what people were giving him, and experienced feelings of emptiness, emotional starvation, depression, hopelessness, and despair. To repattern, he had to go back to the infant layer of his own development and learn to take in from the baby level. 
     One key to such repatterning is feeling protected in a therapeutic setting. People will not go back to a preverbal stage (prior to age two) without experiencing a current in-the-moment relationship in which they feel safe. The person in the theraputic role has to be competent to do the care giving, and have a contract for providing that care. The work involves accessing original pain (the primary survival and emotional layers of the brain, not the thinking and intellectual layers) and the body systems that were developing during the stage in which the problem occurred. In this example, the trauma occurred right after birth, when the sustaining systems of the body were developing--respiratory, digestive, circulatory, eliminative and immunologic. 
      Such primary-process healing work is not merely an exercise or technique. It is about bonding--developing a relationship of trust to enable you to let go and be utterly helpless--except for your ability to cry as a way of communicating needs. When you experience physical discomfort or helplessness, you trust your new caregiver to figure out and take care of what you need, whatever that is: picking you up, holding, rocking, cuddling, nourishing, talking to you, and loving you at the baby level. At the end of the session, you come back into your grown-up self. 
 

 
A lot of societal forces run counter to the baby's and mother's need for bonding, and to grown-up people's need for new developmental experiences at these primal levels. If a mother is drugged during birth, those drugs go through the placenta into the baby, causing the baby to lose connection with the mother during the transition phase of birth. Some babies are removed from their mothers right after birth--whisked away to the nursery to be made "presentable." When traumatized, unbonded children feel despondent, we often medicate them instead of giving them the bonding connection that they need. 
      When a child is put on its mother's belly right after birth, she can breathe her mother's scent while the cord is still attached. That makes the circle complete. The baby knows that the mother she just spent nine months inside is the same mother whose body she is now feeling and smelling on the outside. For nine months, the baby has grown accustomed to the mother's rhythms, scent and biochemistry. Being given bottled formula by a hospital worker--however well-intended--interferes with that mutuality. Even though another caregiver is loving, she has a different body. 
     The mother's colostrum (first milk) is rich with antibodies that help the baby's immune system. As the baby nurses, the mother's uterus contracts. It's a mutual process that supports both of their lives. 
     If a mother has maternity leave, she may spend only six weeks at home before going back to work. We need at least nine months outside the womb ("a womb with a view," as Ashley Montague calls it), just as we needed nine months inside the womb. This provides a solid foundation for bonding, and completes the first post-birth stage of development. At about nine months old, when the baby begins to experience stranger anxiety, the next stage of development is signaled. During the second stage, the baby's energy is geared more toward the development of its sensory-motor apparatus than its sustaining systems; but even this development needs to occur within the bonded relationship. 
      Many primary-process therapies miss the client's need to do developmental tasks. A popular idea in the psychology world is "do it yourself," "connect with your own inner infant" through inner imagery. That is great as far as it goes, but it is not far enough. When a pre- or perinatal trauma occurs without parental support to work  through it, the person spins out a part of their own child to make a "pseudo-parent" in themselves, to fill that missing parental need. As grownups, these people feel that they can't get in touch with themselves, or that something is missing. Saddam Hussein is a good example of how you can split off a part of the inner child to make a pseudo-parent, run a whole country with it and affect the course of history. The "dictator" pseudo-parent indicates how the strength of his need to defend against feelings of annihilation in his psyche-- yet his behavior brings on the very thing he fears. 
      Healing involves giving the responsibility of the pseudo-parent to an actual person--a contract-parent. This healthy parent figure is someone clients can trust--someone who has affection, love and good intentions toward them, is tuned in and can meet their needs. The therapy is conducted in an environment that is set up to support the completion of developmental tasks that were incomplete or missed the first time. The earlier the trauma, the longer it takes to work it through. That's because the length of the stage is inversely proportional to the length of time it takes to heal. Our growth rate is fastest in fetal and infant stages. 
     People do regressive work in sessions, and then go back out into their adult lives in between. We teach the skill of bracketing, which allows the baby to rest in the background as the grownup goes out to the world and takes care of business. Some people don't have enough ego strength to go into and come back out of regressive episodes. In that case, before the regressive work can commence, the first priority is to build ego strength. 
     In this work, therapists cannot hide their own issues or be in a defensive mode. The baby knows. Systems of the therapist's body and psyche are called forth in the same way as occurs when taking care of an infant. The therapist has to do her own work. That is part of the beauty, the challenge and the gift of doing this kind of work. It requires the therapist to evolve. 

 
What comes out of bonding and healing is the recovery of the self that was lost, and gaining the ability to carry out developmental tasks in a healthy way. There is no more hole to defend against or fall into. The hole is filled up with experience, in an affectional, relational bond that is carried throughout life. When the storms of life occur on the grown-up level, the root system is secure. An often unexpected result is that people find out that they are not who they thought they were. They experience themselves as spiritual beings--as psychic, intuitive children of God. Especially in fetal-level work, people not only discover that they have a soul, they directly experience it. They may even recall a past life. This often causes people to reconsider what they thought life was about. What started out as a path of self-discovery turns out to be a spiritual journey--of rebirthing the connection to their own soul. 
    People discover parallels between their dysfunctional relationship with their inner parent and their beliefs about God. People whose traumas put them in a rebellious, "do-it-myself" mode often feel there is no God or higher power. As they start the therapeutic process, they realize they have been denying their need for a spiritual connection in the same way that they denied their need for a parent. It was a defensive posture. Once that defensive posture is taken care of at the regressive level, they experience their own soul and their source--an experience of profound love and reunion. I have seen people weep buckets as a result this discovery.
     Fetal imprints exist at the deepest levels of the psyche. Each person has their own unique healing process that can lead one to work all the way back to fetal stages, conception or pre-conception states. Many people have come to the faulty conclusion that "there is something wrong with me; otherwise I would never have been sent here." If conception and coming into the physical realm are experienced as being sent away from one's original parent--God or spirit-- a person will grieve that loss.  In resolving this grief, people may realize they were sent here out of love, not out of banishment. Then life becomes more than a stage to unconsciously act out compliance or rebellion. If we were not meant to stay in our soul's home but came here to evolve, we can become loving children, willing to cooperate with the greater will of our true original parent/Creator.

 
From the outside you can see varied benefits from this work. One person may become newly successful in a career. Another person removes inhibitions to having abundance, and manifests money and/or affectionate, supportive relationships. Internally, they feel a sense of connectedness and belonging. A healthy feeling of mistrust becomes a true signal from the present not to trust something--not a reflex response based on one's general attitude in one's whole position about life. People are generally happier, more content and more secure; they don't create undue stresses; their relationships are meaningful and affectionate; they replace addictions with serenity and peace, and are more naturally creative and expressive. 
 
 
Such primary-process work instructs us about other parts of life as well. For example, we think of the process of begetting as basically male. The Bible contributes to that idea by reciting the names of the men who "begat" and omitting the mother's lineage. Yet in reality sperm are produced anew every twenty-four hours, and carry only this brief imprint, while the egg actually carries the imprint of lifetimes of female ancestors. The egg from which each of us grew was already in existence when our mother was in her mother's womb and she was just four months along in her gestation. That egg carries the imprint of our mother and grandmother through this long span of time. 
     As women, we carry the imprint of the burning times. Children were asked, "Did your mother give you an herb tea?" "Did your mother put a poultice on your sore?" When the child answered "yes," then that child was marched to her mother, who was told that the child had witnessed her practice of witchcraft. The child, left with the guilt of having turned in her own mother, was then made to watch her mother burn. This was done particularly with female children to break the power of the feminine and to break mother-child bonds. This period, when more women were burned at the stake than Jews were killed in the Holocaust, is still termed the "Renaissance" in the history books. My own deep and profound resistance to letting my light shine in this world had to do with those kinds of memories. Imprints such as these can still affect our lives now. 
     As another example, I used to think that genetics were a strictly physical influence. Now I see genetic makeup and the imprints of the egg and sperm as manifestations of karmas. The soul comes here to work those out and become free. Science is fascinated with altering the genetic code, as if that were the be-all and end-all. But I believe this code reflects the pattern that spans that middle realm between spirit and matter, and that laws of nature apply to it such as the spiral of life that unfolds into the six stages, and the seventh-stage return. 

 
Currently I have eleven books in process. After years of focusing on people's needs for emotional nourishment, I realized the necessity to address physical nourishment as well--using the right kinds of foods and supplements. For example, I discovered that a lot of my back problems came from fetal and birth issues. Although it is true that I became healthier as I did this work, I had developed severe osteoporosis. I have found that when we have certain traumas, we use up certain nutrients much faster than we can access them in food. It often becomes necessary to use concentrated foods to provide us what we need to heal. I began writing about what I discovered in the process of healing my bones. My book Perfect Bones is coming out this fall for professionals, and will be followed by another version for the public. 
     A scientist might say that this subject wasn't studied properly. My position is that we are the experts in our own lives. If we listen to ourselves, our innate knowing and guidance will direct us to what we need. I had osteoporosis before they invented bone-mineral density studies, but I know how my back was, and how my bones were. I now have strong, healthy bones. My stamina has improved, and I am able to hike and to carry weight again. I was so debilitated at one point that it took me forty-five minutes to crawl twelve feet from my bed to the bathroom. After an injury, I didn't have the physical resources for my body to heal. Fortunately, I was led to contact reflex analysis--a systematized way to access the body's nutritional needs using applied kinesiology. Using organic whole foods concentrated to clinical potency, I was able to correct my nutritional imbalances. 
     My own healing process, along with the backup of scientific data, has helped me coalesce information on bone healing. One of the ways to find out whether something is true is to ask, "Does it work for other people?" My work with others led me to conclude, "Yes, it is working for them." Some of my female clients were so nutritionally deficient that they had corpal luteal deficiency--when the corpus luteum is no longer able to manufacture progesterone. Female athletes whose periods have stopped are using so much of their nutritional stores that their body says, "What can I shut down in order to maintain life?" The reproductive system is one of the first things to be depleted: "We have to keep this life going. Never mind investing in a future life." I have been working with two women like that, and in one case tests are showing an increase in her bone density.
     Currently women are being encouraged to fall victim to the idea that their bodies don't work right--to believe that pregnancy and lactation, menstruation and menopause are illnesses, and that they have to rely on the expertise of the medical-industrial complex in order for their bodies to function. In fact, dead chemicals can't do the job that live foods can. My motivation to write this book is helping  women learn ways to improve the health of their bodies.
     Western women have lived with the Western diet, and need to find ways to heal from it. This isn't just a question of eating good, healthy, organic food. With our emotional issues causing our metabolic system to overwork and use up nutrients far beyond what is available in the average diet, we need food that has been concentrated to clinical potency to make up for the deficit. Then the body can heal.

Pam Levin expects to publish a new edition of Cycles of Power next year that includes neurological development, the fetal life and birth process for each stage of the cycle. She has recently formed The Nourishing Company: books, materials, products and services to feed the body, mind and spirit. Her catalog is available at (707) 462-2217.