 With that, without any further delay, I would like to thank Karen Hesse. Karen is a mother and grandmother. Older she is grandmother, don't be. She's been a decade and a midwife for four decades. I can't believe that either. She's had the pleasure of working all models in this business here. Her own family, rising in Caldera and Hesse. Together with her experience and private practice, she has provided the stimulus to explore the field of people's development and mother-feated interactive. And so today Karen is going to take us through her current understanding of that people's development and the role of the environment in the long-term health and well-being of the development individual. Karen, how long can you keep the midwifery at the University of Southern Cross on the Gold Coast, not today yet? Thank you very much, Karen, and over to you. Thanks, Sarah. And welcome, everybody. And it is a cool picture. It isn't very much. It is a cool picture. Peter Simoth, who's a medical student in a biochemist token, he had that background and I thought it was just fantastic. And sometimes the pieces can feel like it's closing in fluid and understanding the consciousness of the developing being. So the topic's entangled mind and entangled body, and I'll be travelling through the understanding that we can glean from quantum physics about people's development and mother-baby attachments and father-baby attachments or partner-baby attachments. So the aim of this session is really to talk about why sitting and talking and being with the women in their apartments and their families and doing those things that we've always do so well about getting to know the women, exploring how they feel, going through, travelling through all that information about their own experience of being mothered, what their mothers are like, their fathers are like, what they think about this person that's coming into their life. Because we know from all those diverse things of science now that how important that is to have that opportunity to sit down to feel relaxed and comfortable. And the last couple of presentations have been very interesting talking about the way this has been corporatised, really. And I think that whole political action around doing a relationship that into the busy practice is really, really important. And obviously that's more so in the Western world than in some developing countries. But that whole relationship-based care is critical for the mother's physiology to work in the best way and then for the pre-nate to actually take what it needs and grow throughout the pregnancy. This is a couple that I had the pleasure of being with at their birth at home. I actually might be jobless at photography because they were so well prepared that they knew exactly what they were doing. We know that the kind of care we do when we can sit and talk and explore ideas and give information and share learning and share emotional stories. It really helps mothers and their partners connect. And this whole thing about engaging dads that I know that it's talking later this evening or later in the morning for others on the other side of the world from me. But we know that that connection with their babies is a life-giving thought. We know that from Carlo Munkin's experiments way back but we also know from the Romanian orphanages that the children who were there that didn't get any physical touch, no loving kindness, they died. And that whole thing about loving tender attention is needed right from the beginning. I just want to briefly run to the Italian physics idea which was, you know, both Newtonian and quantum physics are important because they explain different realities about our physical and energetic universe and world. So I got Newton, you know, the whole apple falls in the tree thing which gave the physics idea and that matters its solid bodies in its space. The quantum physics tell us we're not solid, but we're energy particles and the whole world is made up of energy particles and these particles root together to make material objects such as people, bones, water. But the two different between living things and inanimate objects is consciousness. Like I said, isn't it? You know, where is it? Where is consciousness? And they're looking forward in all sorts of places. They're examining the brain and they're gunning down into the microtubules, trying to see where consciousness resides. The consciousness has been called many things. It's spirit, awareness, life force, mindfulness. One of the things we also know is that there's a big issue of consciousness. Where is it? Where is it located? Where do we find it? It's something bigger, bigger than the material world. And then there's the idea of entanglement in small localities and entangled being laden has been doing a lot of work about entanglement. And they know that when particles, and we're all particles, are in connection with each other, they become entangled. And they remain that way no matter how far apart they are. So one affects one, affects the other. This is called non-locality. I find actually this thought to that capacity as through the action of the distance. So talking about radon and all the work and other people see that radon's probably done the most. When they put, there's a thing called a ferrodecage which is totally isolated from any kind of outside influence. And they put a neuron in one and a neuron in the other. And what they did to one neuron affects the other neuron in the other ferrodecage even though there's no possible way that they could communicate it. And they've done that to single cells. They've done it to lots of cells. They've done it to a human being. They had one human being in a ferrodecage in one place and another in another ferrodecage. And when they've done something to one or got them to do a particular activity their physiology has reacted as if it would happen to them. So these are people who knew each other and cousins and wives, partners, children and parents. So we are very, very interconnected. So quantum physics tells us that living things in the weak radiation, the MRIs move in this, and nanotechnology is coming to the fore with quantum physics and is doing an enormous amount of research in the health field. And what we know is that communication and information exchange occurs constantly. So we really know that... I keep getting distracted by the chat box. I'm looking for these little questions. That communication information exchange, we know that at the point of conviction there are people who like it at the primordial battle of the mother's system is welcoming the budding blastocyst. So that's the first hurdle. But the previous hurdle is just in terms of the production of the egg in the stern and then how those two cells actually negotiate the state to come together. So really, neuron, this is emitting weak radiation constantly. It's a great graphic, that one. And then it comes to the idea of epigenetics, which many of you will have heard about already. Evolution with biology has come to understand that our genes and our cells really respond to signals outside the cells and that there's hormonal and energetic messages that reflect the emotional, mental and spiritual experiences. And the science has to work with epigenetics, which means above the genes, so it's that environmental signals control the expression of and the activity of genes. And the regulated protein, they're kind of reading the environment and then tweaking the genetic code to up to 2,000 variations, and I've heard more. When they were mapping the human genome, they really thought they'd find, you know, 100,000 or more genes. And they were quite sober to discover that they only found about 26,000 and we've only got 2% difference from a banana and 2% difference from a chimpanzee and other creatures too. And what they realized is that what we used to call junk DNA and, you know, I think it's basically chuckle because nature don't do junk. I think we have to understand that the microRNA, the so-called junk DNA, has been dismissed forever and somewhere they go, oh, hey, man, hang on a minute. This stuff seems to be important and what we know is that these regulated proteins are actually creating how those genes are going to be expressed and this has huge implications for preconceptual care and I think we literally really need to look at taking on preconceptual care in a big way because we know that parents are actually genetic architects of their children that what they're doing for the, something to say six months, something to say a year, before the actual gametes will be expressed. Actually influences which genes are going to be expressed in the sperm and in the eggs. So what, instead of genes, they used to say that genes were actually, you know, the source of life and the important bed and everything came from that but they're actually just storage boxes. They're just like any blueprint. They're like a blueprint for a house, for example, an architect can make a blueprint but the builder takes that and the builder interprets that blueprint and I'd like you to think about a play, for example, Shakespeare and I think that Romeo and Juliet, for example, which had two films of Romeo and Juliet and how different are they? How many of you get the traditional Shakespearean actors during the traditional Shakespearean play? It's a very different thing from, I think, the Leonardo DiCaprio was not really with Romeo. How different is it? And that's exactly what's happening with that gene even now, but particularly in the genesis of the gamete, both sperm and the egg. And then again, as the individual, the individual, the beginning of human being, the little ball of cells, is actually expressing itself. So we know that information is transmitted generationally through DNA and environmentally to changes. So Bruce Lichten is a really good person to read. He's booked The Biology of Belief is wonderful and he's actually done a couple of TED talks. You can find him on YouTube. He is absolutely wonderful. He's booked The Biology of Belief. Really explains it quite simply about parents who have each archetype. So these physical memories are actually encoded in the genetic structure and cave through. That's fascinating. I can see people are saying this is really interesting. Yeah, that's what's fascinating and fun. So we know that this material has come down and expresses itself because you know that as the ovum and the egg and the sperm are developing, they're split. And then the chromosomes, you know, they've got 20, 60-inch cells and they've got, on each of the chromosomes they've got what they call alele. So they've got the characteristic. Each characteristic has got like two teeth. So which one gets expressed? And if it gets expressed at all, depends on these beliefs and habits and behaviors and social influences that this... You can see how intelligent nature is because what nature is doing, it is helping create the person that can live in the environment that it's been born into. So this happens right throughout this developmental process. So here's a few rounds of sperm hanging around. There's the alele. And here they've had that female attractor of the ovum that's been released and they're off to do their business. These photos are from Leonard Wilson's book. Leonard Wilson did that fiber optic photography in the universe which was extraordinary as they're developing, bringing extraordinary work and also ferns and eggs. And the classic line has been that the egg is like this passive waiting cell, waiting for these ferns to surround it and release their, I love the words, highly wanted that secretion the sperm has placed down the vitally membrane around the egg. The reality is the egg is actually meeting with the cilia, the cilia and the waves and that whole end of the flow, I can see the cimbria, there's a whole lot of waves moving going on. So the egg is moving and there seems to be, yes they need all those ferns, yes they need that highly volatilised to break down that vitally membrane but the egg is actually being accepted to the sperm at once. It actually creates a sort of sinkhole where the sperm can go into and cut out any other that actually chooses the sperm. So by the end of the first month we've jumped off a part of it here. There's so much in there so it's wonderful and I recommend to you if you're really interested, I have found this book, I think it's called, So we know that by the end of this month all these stuff can be in place and that that primitive vascular system is starting to thread it's way through and the heart beats, the tube, the actual tube is starting to beat reasonably. It's just phenomenal, isn't there anything about it? And at 44 days, at 99% of the embryos muscles completely nerves and vascular supply are present. It's all there in that primordial setup. So here's the five weeks up and you can see that the spinal cord is starting to phase a few, the little triples are there, the little spines are there and then people were looking at the embryo and they were trying to look out why doesn't it move? But what we know is that form follows function so that the whole experience of growth and development is experience-dependent, so it depends on experience but it's also experience-exceptant so that it expects certain movements, food and nutrition. Nutrition is so crucial and that's another big area for midwives to really get a good gladiator in. I know that recently wives are really learning a lot about nutrition now. They're doing subjects. I know our students have a whole unit on food and nutrition because we see that it's so vitally important in their lives to know how to support women and their partners to produce optimal physiology and optimal cell production and then obviously to really provide that nutrition substance that helps that individual growth in the best way it can. So we have seven, a lot more definitions. So what they discovered was that the arms and legs need to be able to move so that they can go. So that expects the... the leg blueprint expects the movement and it depends upon the movement to be able to expect the next level of development. Let's put this slide up for the critical period because this is really important to think about and one of the biggest bugs I think we have in our modern maternity unit is that often women won't see a midwife until she goes between weeks. Well, if it makes any sense, the horse is already bolted. I don't know if it's some culture that doesn't make sense. But what I'm saying is that if you've got a horse and you have the gate open, once the horse is out, there's no point setting the gate. And let's do that with this whole prenatal growth and development that seeing people at Trinity Weeks, there's a lot that's going on. The foundations are there. The whole process is more and truly got a template happening. We need to be involved pre-conceptually and really early in pregnancy to be with women and their partners and really help them negotiate these times. And you can see the weeks, third week for the brain, the heart, around four weeks. We know that neurons start getting born out of that neural tube, 28 days post-conception, four weeks post-conception. So all these neurons are filling out, well, shooting out actually, but it looks like a 5-cracker I reckon because they're going it. I don't know if you can tell them, but they say there's 250,000 per minute being born and traveling to the different places in that little developing embryo spotting. So there's the cerebral brain, there's the heart brain, and there's the gut brain, and then there's all those nodes that are ganglion in Western medicine. So you're looking at the lower limbs, where their form, the ears, the eyes, the palate, the teeth, the external genitalia. So there's major abnormalities in this pink region, and then the functional and minor abnormalities in that more orange section. So the keratocins, what are keratocins? Well, the keratocins are mixed as long as your arm is keratocins, but I'd really like you to consider the two major ones, from my point of view, and I think 45, I'm only in this, is the maternal state of happiness about the pregnancy and nutritional load as two. I can't help but feel, and this is a total hallucination and I'm making it up, that those two things are protective for all the other things that go on. We really need to think about what's going to protect us. We've got people in war-torn areas, and it's time that we know that maternal stress and how that really is very, very dangerous to babies. I know for myself, my own experience, and I've written about it in a book, The Territory and the Rifted Guardian, people do a cell chapter there about emotional and spiritual territory of the growing individual, but I think it's really important and we need to explore this a lot more. There's also the question going on there, which is fantastic. I just wanted you to look at the unicell mass, the vision for you, the exterm and the exterm and the exterm, and the path before that destination is probably one of the critical points when the cells are rearranging themselves, and I'm like, oh, what an intelligent process. And I want you to look at ectoderm and you'll see that the skin and the nervous system come from that area. So the skin is actually a nervous system. It's as much a nervous system as a cerebral brain because of all the receptors in that area. So it's a big sensory brain, and I just think that really points to why the skin experience at birth is so critical for the mother and for the newborn because what it's doing is it's really reaching up the baby in terms of love and connectedness and physiology, absolutely setting in the right pattern so that's where they get their sense of safety from. Their sense of love, their sense of trust by how they're treated at birth. The particular lack of a nervous system is set at this time at birth. So the man called James Prescott, he's done a lot of work with, he's quite that age in musical hymn. He's about the origin of love and violence, and he says that the best out of love is being held, being rocked, and being touched and the smells that go with the experience women land on the outside of their mothers. And if you land on her skin and we're held and the warmth, all those sensory experiences are actually setting that particular lack of a nervous system into a place of feeling safe in the world. When they go on to the research volume and have all sorts of things done to them then they're actually not a place of the world's unsafe. Now we know that putting a baby and a mother in the bath and doing a skinless skin in the bath even if they've had to go to the nature or all those other things, reboots the baby. So it needs a computer turn. It actually helps that whole process get going and the need to assist their physiological birth and birth setting absolutely. That thing, talking about physical contact is a prime activity for reception of love, absolutely. And forgiving it because that original relationship is what sets the stage for the future relationship. And briefly, of course, that when a baby's got a skinless skin experience and access to the breast it will get there. And so letting a newborn find its own way is so important. I think it's really interesting the way the linear negra and the nipple change colour to impregnancy which tends to be the markers of the baby. So I think it's really interesting that when a baby's got a skinless skin it's going to change colour to impregnancy which tends to be the markers of the baby. So I think it's really interesting the markers of the baby to actually find its way. So in neurogenesis we talk a little bit about that. There's apparently about 100 billion neurons. Depending on what book you read I can't find any definitive thing but this book by Harming and Bocking which it makes me tackle actually because every second paragraph we think now we don't quite know how this happens. There's still so much we don't know about the development. There's so much we don't know about the way our cells work. There's so much we don't know about how people are protected in difficult times but I think that's what we really need to look at. How do we protect this system so that it can grow and develop in the best way? So there's 100 million neurons in the system in about 100 million neurons in the cardiac nervous system. Now this is important because there's a friendly brain cell. Hello. I think it's gorgeous. I want you to look at these three images of the brain. Now this one's a two-month embryo, eight weeks. And here's got the spinal cord, the cerebellum developing and the diaphragm kept on. This is where all the emotional brain is and then the telling kept on grows open and becomes part of that cortex and then the prefrontal cortex while we lay it on. But this is the emotional brain. This is all the structures that manage the heart rate, the breathing movement, all those physiological processes and the emotional brain. So what's happening in pregnancy is that the growing fetus is growing its capacity to deal with life and stress and everything that's going on by working with the environment. So it's being built to come out into the environment it's living in. So when there's really high stress, a lot of agro, then the hindbrain gets really developed and it's at the expense of the telling kept on and the prefrontal cortex that is smaller in baby to grow in a hostile environment. This emotional brain, we know that part of all the structures here is what's called the heart rate element for purely adrenal access or the stress response. And when there's a lot of stress then these are upregulated. They're triggered much faster, there's less cortisol around and the child has got a flat apex a lot of the time or becomes hyper-distressed very quickly. That can be changed over time but it's much harder to do it once the infant's born and growing than it is to actually intervene in pregnancy and help that woman learn self-medicine techniques or get out of the brain's situation or whatever's going on for her that's creating this constant set. We know that following 9-11 and also the previous war in Lebanon whenever there was a bombing experience and wondering what's going on in Syria now apart from all those absolutes. The other side of the story, you know that the latest in this case spontaneous abortion was decided dramatically as does Silva. And to think about that from an evolutionary biology point of view the mother has to be nature's preference to keep because you can always have another baby but you can't always have another mother. So it's really important that we understand it so that we can work with women in whatever their context is to help them. Now I found it's quite interesting when you work with women who are in just their circumstances that they really get this. Whether it's drug-tasting or the stressful situation they really understand and they find this fascinating and they will do everything in their power to change their circumstances. These two brains here are from dead babies and the one on the is it on your left is the normal brain and the one on your right is a fetal alcohol syndrome gross fetal intestine baby. And it's a gross example of what can happen to brain development when there's this terrible terror sitting around. But we don't really see a lot of the other ones that happen through overheating and poor nutrition. The optimal transformation I think we're going to get to people programming in a minute. This is one guy. It's very interesting world. So the spiritual, the chemical and the essential and they're the ones that we're working with. So there's two bio-behavioral domains but I think I might have missed that out on this slide but I just want to mention the whole thing about people programming and the Dutch hunger winter which really gave us the tip and Dr. Barker is a epidemiologist in Bristol in the Newtay and he had access to an enormous amount of data for people's long-term health and wellness and what he recognized with vast numbers was that people who were born small had small percentage wonderful military records. They actually had higher rates of cardiac disease high blood pressure, diabetes in late life. So he had a hypothesis that the children, the developing embryos, developing fetuses actually are affected by the environment and that they're programmed for their long-term health and wellness. So there's the the genetic imprinting happens early and what happens is that for example with the kidneys when they're going fetus if they're not much food or there's a lot of stress or there's a combination of all those things or there's, you know, various things missing that will have head sparing and we all know that head sparing grows with fiction but the kidneys are the things that they all the fetus won't bother developing because the excretion is taken care of by the court so that the kidneys aren't needed in pregnancy. So they have huge implications so people we know are an indigenous government who have a huge issue with kidney disease, lots and lots of people on dialysis. So this whole idea of early nutrition early stress reduction is so important for understanding the genetic imprinting and the fetal programming. That's the Dachangawita. What they discovered was because they had fabulous records from Holland was that depending there was a period where there was great deprivation people were literally starving. Now if they were starving in early pregnancy those children turned on a gene they called the 50 genes which actually really conserved the food and made it available in a very a very time limited way with really, really very conservative but the minute those children got adequate food they became obese and they were much more likely to be obese in lower age than they were older. When they had that deprivation in later pregnancy they were much leaner in themselves like they were saying they didn't have the same thing but they may have trouble also with high blood pressure and diabetes later in life so depending on the darker hypothesis that's why I start a theory now because the ones now agree that it's more of a hypothesis is actually true and the plethora of studies that have been done on this is extraordinary. So look up these Dachangawita and you'll see the way that people have interpreted the data and then they'll understand that it's really powerful when that deprivation happens when those emotional times happen so we know that chronic stress a little bit of stress is good because it helps that hypotension and peculiarity of adrenal axis grow and develop in a flexible robust way so it gets tested but chronic long-term stress no good and really profound acute stress like this bombing or something that is affecting also the very damaging. So the dead by the hazel domain mediated by that autonomic nervous system the love pathway, the parasympathetic and advice to the vagal nerve so it goes from the gut to the heart and into the emotional brain and the fear one, the sympathetic is up with spinal cord and the various hormones so we know that the hormones with parasympathetic there's dosamine, oxytocin, relaxin, endorphins and serotonin and one of the things we know is that most of the serotonin and most of the new system is actually created in the gut the gut brain takes care of that and the fear is called the doors the doors to happiness the OREF are the initials of the hormones in the parasympathetic nervous system and normally in the parasympathetic that's when we tend and we bring them we're crazy and happy and babies grow well the fear. Fear is only supposed to be around the nerve some kind of beast about to eat you or some real threat to life and men but now we're stress driving on the freeway so we're all up-regulated with our fear cascade happening the sympathetic being simulated so people talking about traumatic birth which is basically anxiety absolutely Rihanna is talking about that re-birthing and also those phyto-dynamic processes going back in everything is recorded in the cells of the growing individual that's called implicit memory people used to think that newborns couldn't feel pain do they remember things and so on but that's not true at all there and the people that Michelle O'Donnell used to work which is absolutely wonderful the link to autism there's also a link with the use of ectogenous oxytocin to autistic spectrum disorder and that's something I think we've really got to look at so these four major, I don't have to hurry up I could talk all day that would suffice to say that four major systems of agaction self-regulation and communication they use chemical methods that's Candace Kerr's work she discovered the receptor sites were endorphins and I would really encourage you to read her book which is called Molecules and Emotions it's absolutely wonderful so these systems are these four systems and these chemicals can actually change places a cytokine can become a hormone and a hormone can become a neurotransmitter and then they can turn around in neuropecides so they can shapeshift intelligent little beings they are and so their neurotransmitters are used by the osmotic nervous system as the nerve synapses so this whole thing about optimal performance activities you need a little bit of it to get going and do, you know, when you're going to do something important and get a little surge of that sympathetic system and then creativity, relaxation and healing and growing of pre-nates so hormones are the endocrine systems so it regulates all those basic processes and it's also involved in emotions memory learning and behavior and I want you to think about these things in the nations that are developing pre-nates and what it means for each individual cytokines in your system and one of the master hormones is CRH Choyotonic Deletion Hormone that is, that seems to be the hormone that's involved in everything including implantation and resectivity of the mother's cells to the developing blastocyte So it's also, you know, it does all this as well as it's involved in psychological mood and motivation so you can see how if people are down then their immune system is down and neuropeptide so they modulate that central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system and all these neural communication in these various states has been Luffy is the person to read for that he's done some wonderful work on all these neural communications and genetic expressions Well it looks like you have just done a lot of studying and tell me you've got five minutes until the absolute close of your classes We better hurry up there, haven't we? So that's it, there's fetal programming we're talking, we talk about that and these three mechanisms for fetal integration of this environmental information and that excessive maternal stress can have organisational effects on the fetus long term consequences So one of the things we notice in the research is that these fetal hormones, cortisol is much lower when we have a perception of control and they're much higher when they feel like they're being done to or they're out of control which has organisational effects on the fetus and the mother and her processes so that is why information sharing discussing, talking, being with and leading the women's drive, the best if you like really help those fetal hormones stay in a reasonable level So the prenatal environment Joe Johnson is talking about how people want to read studies on these things, all of them the literature So prenatal environment there's everything to do with the mother and her environment so the whole social, economic, cultural factors the quality of the relationships, the data like the activities, what's used in drinks and so on and this is a great poster from Antioch which is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisation that's working towards a better deal for indigenous people and that's exactly right Our physiology is constantly leaving the environment and when it's off it responds way below our conscious awareness So here's a scan of the 17 weeks fetus mining so the fetus is having the most experience but can do all these things way before birth and needs to do it and we know that babies do have the example of Tati or some of your sisters don't pick up because they don't have that pressure and they don't swallow in usual so they don't learn how to swallow one of my friends had a child with a top but it was quite interesting apart from how horrible it was to see how that child had to learn to swallow 16 weeks and this is how we want babies to be but then other than the body when I first really started getting into all of this I really thought that it would keep parents together but when you had all this bonding experience it would keep parents together well that didn't happen actually but what did happen was that our fathers would stay connected with their infants which we all know is profoundly important and that's the caregiver the primary caregiver and that infant the brain is growing and developing and it's important to the quality of the relationships that develop prenatally and during birth and postnatally and so the end of the story is that every woman the way we work with women and their partners but every woman should feel better that themselves than they leave us than when they come into us that's it I think it's Tati at the right time there oh by the synagogy challenge I have to say I find this presentation a little scary to be honest when I think about my kids we're now beautiful young adults of 23, 24, 25 and how oblivious I was when I was pregnant and even before I was pregnant the impact of things I did in age and my life on the growth of my children it's scary really I guess that science will continue to inform us about these things look we have got like half a second for a quick one very, very quick question if anyone wants to just one quick question either in the text box can I just say to this someone's asked about Ola asked about Alexander Tsiparis he is A-I-R-I-S he's actually done a TED talk he's a fantastic Ola so have a look at his TED talk it's really good he does a lot of simulation and graphics he's a master at that that's what his role is and to least ask about my reference please don't tell me if I can email that if you can put it up all right well I think we'll call it a day thank you very, very much and certainly I think this is what your presentation is something that is I haven't really put a lot of thought to other than using this stuff you think about it as a midwife so really appreciate you opening up our minds to things to go on and like with so many the other companies for me it rains more questions than answers so it's good to leave the company to continue to investigate so thank you Carolyn and especially helped with that literally at the last minute so thank you so and thank you everybody for attending and your wonderful comments as we've gone along I'm actually going to say goodnight to you now I'm then often having my Sunday tea and and I will be joining the presentation joining again tomorrow morning and well I'm going to be leaving you in the hands of I think it's quite depredated the implementation of the next session so we've got 10 minutes now where we'll be