View from the First Floor

By Paula Houseman

“I’m going to be the talking womb,” she says. She tells me that’s her opening line. Sounds like an actor speaking about a role, doesn’t it? But Marie Burrows is no actor. In fact, she’s about as real as you get. Sure, she role-plays. But don’t we all? She’s just passionate about the womb. Fair enough, if you’re a childbirth educator.

Marie’s womb-preoccupation is her lifeblood. It started “on the floor,” from where, she says, she “got real.” And she uses her opening line in prenatal classes to help expectant parents get real.

As Director of Birthing Rites Australia and a counsellor, Marie says, “I spend most of my life on the floor. I’m not really good at sitting in a chair.”

Her long, reddish-brown hair—save for a wispy fringe—is clipped back off her face, and she’s sporting a black t-shirt and leggings, a coffee-colour bomber jacket, and sneakers. Fitting attire, I’d say, if you spend so much time on the floor.

When she’s down there with expectant parents, she’ll tell them, “Curl up in the foetal position. You need to understand what happens to your baby in the womb.”

But really, how can anyone understand? How can anyone remember?

Quite simply. At 63, Marie does. She’s “been back.”

She was a 27-year-old schoolteacher with a brief, abusive marriage behind her when she started therapy. She talked about her feelings for months, but it barely made a dent. So her psychiatrist tried a different tack: he guided her back to her core pain and encouraged her to fully express it. Marie unexpectedly regressed to the womb and re-lived her own birth.

Her blue eyes become animated as she describes it. She’d been instructed to lie on the floor. “I think all he said was, ‘just breathe and let your feelings come.’ I was just engulfed by feelings and my body started to spontaneously move with it across the floor with my feet first—‘cause I was of course breech—and they ended up the wall! And I remember I had my lovely black stockings on, pearls, and a nice skirt and silk top, and they all ended up round my neck. So my shame had to go out the window, fast!” She hoots with laughter—a big, contagious laugh that occasionally punctuates her poised, measured responses.

Just then, the impatient honking of a car horn filters through the open window. Marie’s offices are on a busy street corner above a tyre and auto service centre. We’re in her counselling room. Not surprisingly, we’re sitting on the floor, on a Persian rug. Her surrounds are earthy—nothing flash: a mahogany dresser and coffee table, a maroon, velvet lounge suite and yellow scatter cushions. Four lamps softly light the room, lending a homey feel.

Marie continues talking about that first regression. It had opened the floodgates. In later episodes, she re-lived the terror of both mother and child almost dying at birth. She re-experienced the oxygen deprivation, and would gasp for air. “You feel it very physically,” she tells me. “It was a horrendous birth.”

So you might ask, ‘why would you keep going back?’

Marie says the baby absorbs the mother’s feelings in the womb and at birth. “The mother’s stress is experienced (by the baby) through the cord.” Painful primal feelings remain frozen as a “cellular memory, and lay down long-term life patterns of behaviour and negative feelings, (keeping) us stuck in particular places in life.

“My two marriages were riddled with ‘I’m not good enough’,” she reveals. In re-living her birth, Marie felt a sense of her mother’s disappointment at having a girl: “Because you’re the wrong sex you have an innate feeling of wrongness, (of) ‘I’m not worthy’.”

The body remembers. It needs to “speak,” she says. You then “live more and more authentically.”

Marie wanted to help others live more authentically. Training as a therapist, then taking others to the floor, she says, “It was very obvious people’s pain came from womb-life, birth and the first three years. That’s what I kept seeing.”

And she’s still seeing it. But why does “going to the floor” stir up such intense feelings, and why not every time?

“I think people, when they lay down on the floor, are more vulnerable,” she says. “They’re more real (and) present to what’s happening.” When they’re ready “to own and respect their pain, brave enough to be open … (they) go through it.”

A single mother, Marie opens up about the younger of her two daughters, Lianda, 22. Then she hesitates: “Will I talk about this?” I urge her on.

The effect of womb-life was driven home to Marie when Lianda had a breakdown at age 12.

When Marie was ten weeks pregnant with Lianda, her second husband left her. “I was in such grief,” she recalls. She went to the floor most days, but balanced the feelings with an intense meditative practice she’d learnt from time spent in a commune during her 20s. Still, she says, “I agonised over the effect (on the baby).

“But what you’re doing is teaching your baby, already, it’s OK to have feelings,” explains Marie. “I always worried with Lianda. I kept thinking, ‘when will it come to her?’” When it did, “she was a natural,” spontaneously falling “into the foetal position on the floor,” says Marie.

At this point, a mechanic from down below booms out instructions to someone. Marie doesn’t flinch.

Why would she? Shouting and screaming are commonplace within her rooms. Regressive therapy is noisy business.

“Ah, ah, ah. I can’t breathe. I can’t get any air. Get me out of here!” she screams, simulating what she hears in her prenatal classes. On the floor, some expectant parents return to their womb-experience. And this “takes it to a very real level for them. They (become) much more aware of what’s going on with themselves, and how to feel … what it will be like for their babies in the womb,” she says. They’re “at a very ripe time in their lives, very open. Every couple wants the best for their baby.”

Marie also wanted the best for her children. But her life hasn’t been an easy one. Of her womb-regressions, she says: “You’ve got to get real. (When) you’ve felt your pain, you’ve got distance from it. You’re no longer driven by it. You then have choices.”

Marie’s choice to keep “going to the floor” and to make it a large part of her life’s work, ensures that many other children have a chance at a better life.



Paula Houseman is a freelance writer currently undertaking a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of New South Wales. Her majors are linguistics and sociology. She has been on a strong healing path for the last fifteen years.