Resonances

When a tuning fork vibrates, it will cause other tuning forks in the vicinity to vibrate as well, especially if they are related—that is, tuned to the same wavelength. This process, whereby the activity of one vibrating body brings another body into sympathetic resonance with it, is called entrainment. A piano’s A strings will be entrained to vibrate when an A is played on a violin across the room.

Parents and children also constantly influence each other’s resonances. Our lives orbit within each other’s force fields, physically, emotionally, and psychically, and we are continually interacting and influencing each other in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, sometimes known, sometimes wholly unconscious.

Scientists have discovered that our brains also resonate with each other when we are in each other’s presence. Particular cells in the cerebral cortex, known as mirror neurons, fire when they observe another person engaged in a particular movement, especially if emotion is involved. This may be the neurological basis for empathy, our ability to feel with another person. We are literally experiencing the same areas in our brains firing in similar patterns.

Breathing itself is a basic biological rhythm that has each one of us vibrating with life. Tuning to this rhythm presents a wonderful occasion to literally resonate with our baby. I (jkz) used to breathe with our babies as a way of bringing greater mindfulness into the present moment. I would feel the two of us breathing together, swinging in a hammock, as the baby slept in my arms, or when I walked back and forth with a child late at night. Swinging or walking, breathing together, sometimes singing and chanting softly as well, we were resonating with each other.

If we intentionally become aware of the resonances between us, our relationship with a baby can be a continual exchange of energy of all kinds, sometimes harmonious, sometimes not. Either way, it will never be any richer than right in this moment, even as we may have to also cook dinner or do the laundry, or are interrupted on occasion by one thing or another. This is a good reason to step into the dance of breathing in whatever moments we can manage it.

Entrainment happens on a lot of different levels in families. At times it can take us places we may not want to go and without us knowing how we got there. If we are not aware of the energy of the moment, it can easily ensnare us. It can pull us down emotionally, as when we fall into depression, or anger, or anxiety, or any number of other feeling states. In a family, aren’t we all constantly caught up in an ever-changing exchange of energy, putting out vibrations at different frequencies and interacting with each other’s energy in the form of thoughts, feelings, and their expressions, verbal and nonverbal, through our bodies, our actions, and our emotional reactions to events and other people’s actions, even tiny ones? If we know we are resonating with each other in different ways, we can learn to move more skillfully in relationship to such rhythms without losing our balance.

Children can get into very strong energy states that can affect us in a number of different ways. If we can be aware of this, we can stay more in touch with ourselves and respond more consciously to them. If they hit a certain frequency, we do not automatically have to resonate on that same frequency and get caught up in ways that will not be helpful, either to them or to us.

At the same time, there are also many moments of integration and wonder that children experience, and that we can experience with them and resonate with… moments of pure pleasure.

An outdoor restaurant in summer. A young couple with two children: one about three, the other about four months. The mother nurses the baby, snuggled in her lap. For the longest time, the baby’s face is buried in the breast and under parts of her mother’s blouse. But her hand is playing with her mother’s the whole time. Later, her head surfaces, and she lies on her mother’s lap, gazing at her. The mother makes cooing noises and tilts her head slightly. The baby opens her mouth, making a perfect circle, her blue eyes wide open, too, drinking in her mother’s face. Her eyes are so open, her mouth is so open, her face so open, she is an incarnation in this moment of pure presence.

The mother puts her head down and touches it to her baby’s forehead, then moves it back. The baby smiles. There is a complete force field connecting these two. This baby is in the orbit of her mother in this moment, and the two are speaking in a thousand ways, on a thousand wavelengths, across their bodies where they touch, across the air between them.

Later, the father holds the baby in such a way that she can look out over his shoulder. She is settled on his body. Her eyes are wide open, totally receptive. She sees my (jkz) face, and her gaze comes to rest. I smile. Her face registers it in some way I detect instantly but find impossible to describe. It is alert to novelty. She smiles. It is like a benediction from a purer world. Her older sister’s face is open, too. As she sits at the table, I can feel that she, too, is at home in her body and in the force field of her family. It is not even that they interact that much. They don’t. But they form an inseparable whole in which she is completely at home. It shows in her presence, too. As they are leaving, the mother tells us that they had just spent many hours in the car, and the kids needed out.

Just an ordinary meal, but it is clear that these children are experiencing that constant give-and-take with parents that forms the bonds of love and conveys the benevolence and receptivity of the world to young life.