Why I listen to behaviour before I try to make it stop
By Joanne Yanke, BodyTalk Birthkeeper -Part 3 -October 2, 2026
There is a baby that almost every exhausted parent has fantasized about having.
The baby you can put down long enough to go pee. The baby who happily lies on the mat while you make lunch. The baby who transfers effortlessly from your chest to the bassinet and somehow does not seem to notice that you have left the room.
Because that baby makes adult life easier, it is very easy for us to quietly turn ease into a developmental ideal.
We call them a “good baby.” Independent. Content. Easy to put down, easy to sleep, easy to hand to somebody else.
Then there is the baby who wants your body. They wake the moment you move, cry when somebody else holds them and seem to know the exact moment your butt touches the mattress after you have spent twenty minutes trying to transfer them without waking them.
We jokingly call these babies “Velcro babies.”
I understand the joke, especially when you are exhausted and would really like the use of both arms for fifteen minutes, but I think we need to be very careful about what problem we think we are solving.
Because babies are supposed to need us.
Dependence is not developmental failure
Human babies are born profoundly dependent. They need nourishment, warmth, protection, touch and responsive caregiving, and their nervous systems develop within relationships.
The expectation of proximity is not a character defect.
A baby wanting your arms is not manipulating you, and a nine-month-old who protests when you disappear is not running a sophisticated behavioural strategy designed to control your life.
Security does not develop because we successfully teach babies not to need us. It develops through enough experiences of connection, responsiveness, repair and safety that eventually the child becomes increasingly confident moving away from us.
This matters enormously in my infant sleep work because our culture so often begins with the adult goal. We want longer stretches of sleep, less feeding, less holding, less signalling and more time alone, and then we ask how to teach the baby to comply.
I prefer to begin somewhere else.
I want to know what the behaviour is communicating, what is developmentally normal for this age and what this particular baby seems to need.
Then I want to ask one more question:
Is there anything about this response that feels bigger than the situation in front of us?
Because there is a difference between preference and panic.
There is a difference between a baby communicating, “I want you,” and a baby whose entire body appears to be saying, “Something terrible is going to happen if you leave.”
A baby protesting when you put them down may simply be behaving like a baby. That deserves to be normalized rather than treated.
But I have also worked with babies whose responses feel qualitatively different.
There is the baby who would rather be held, and then there is the baby whose whole body seems to go into emergency when their caregiver moves a few feet away.
There is the baby who dislikes being strapped into a car seat, and then there is the baby I described in Part Two, who could sit calmly in the seat until the seat entered the car.
There is the child who approaches water cautiously, and then there is the baby whose response looks like genuine terror despite having no known frightening experience with water.
Those distinctions do not tell me why the response is happening.
They tell me that there may be more worth listening to.
That is why I resist both extremes. I do not want to pathologize normal dependency, and I also do not want to dismiss every intense reaction as “just a phase” when the baby’s body seems to be communicating something much stronger.
Behaviour is communication
Before babies can tell us stories, they tell us things through their bodies.
They turn toward us and away from us. They stiffen, arch, freeze, startle and reach. They refuse, cling, settle in one person’s arms and become distressed in another’s. They respond differently depending on the environment, the position they are in, who is holding them and what happened immediately before.
None of those behaviours gives us a perfect translation.
I am very wary of the kind of thinking that says, “Your baby did X, therefore it means Y.” Human beings do not work like symbolic dictionaries, and babies certainly do not.
But behaviour gives us information.
One of the most useful shifts we can make is to become curious before we become corrective.
Instead of beginning with, “How do I get them to stop?”, I want to know what changed right before the response happened.
Is it the restraint, or is it the car?
Is it water itself, or is it the temperature, sound, position or sensation of being lowered away from Mum’s body?
Is this behaviour new?
Could there be pain?
Does it happen with everybody?
Was there something similar during pregnancy or birth?
What happens if we increase connection rather than decrease it?
And, when it is appropriate to the family and the situation, I may also ask whether a BodyTalk session identifies another layer that none of us had considered.
That, to me, is listening. Pasted markdown
This is where active memory comes back into the picture
In Part One, I described active memory as an experience or pattern that may be finished chronologically but remains active in the way the body-mind responds.
In an adult who can tell me what they are experiencing, that might look like a disproportionately powerful emotional or physical response to something happening in the present.
With a baby, we have fewer clues.
Perhaps there was something during pregnancy or birth. Perhaps an association developed after birth. Perhaps the family is living under enormous stress, or there has been a separation, sensory challenge, developmental factor or physical discomfort. There may be a feeding issue. There may be something medical.
Within my BodyTalk framework, there may also be inherited, karmic or past-life material.
What matters is that I do not begin the session having already decided which explanation is correct.
That would completely defeat the purpose.
The system leads.
What I actually mean when I say a past life comes up in BodyTalk
I want to clarify this because the phrase “past life” can make it sound as though I sit beside a client and begin inventing an elaborate historical story.
That is not what I do.
BodyTalk uses a structured protocol and neuromuscular feedback to identify priorities and relationships within the body-mind. A session might move through anatomy, physiology, emotion, belief systems, environmental factors, relationships, family patterns and many other areas.
Sometimes the material that emerges does not appear to correspond with anything we know in the person’s current life or family history, and the system identifies it within the BodyTalk framework as karmic or past-life material.
Sometimes what comes forward is remarkably specific.
Other times, it is barely a story at all. It may simply be a theme: loss, drowning, orphaning, separation, war, starvation, danger, being trapped or being rejected.
The purpose is not historical entertainment.
I am not trying to discover whether you lived in France in 1742 because that would make an interesting conversation over coffee.
What matters to me clinically is whether the information appears to be active now, whether it relates to the present pattern, and whether anything changes when we work with it.
That is the part I care about as a practitioner. Pasted markdown
Why do we tap?
People also ask me why BodyTalk uses tapping.
The image I use is really simple.
Imagine completely still water. Now touch the surface with your fingertips and tap. Ripples move outward. You have introduced movement into something that was still.
People sometimes play with the word emotion as “energy in motion.” I am not offering that as a physics definition of emotion, but it is a useful metaphor for the way I conceptualize emotional information that has become fixed or repetitive within the system.
BodyTalk traditionally uses tapping over the head and heart as part of the balancing process. The way I understand that is that we are giving the system an input while we are bringing attention to the information identified in the session. We are introducing movement into a pattern that has become organized and repetitive.
There is separate research around Emotional Freedom Techniques and other tapping-based approaches, and I do not use that research to claim that EFT proves how BodyTalk works. They are different systems.
I simply find the overlap interesting because both involve the relationship between attention, triggering information, bodily state and patterned response.
For me, the puddle and the ripple remain the simplest visual.
Something is active. We bring awareness to it, introduce an input, and give the system an opportunity to reorganize. Pasted markdown
My model of consciousness is an ocean, not a row of little past selves
This is also where I need to explain how I personally think about past lives, because I do not imagine consciousness as Joanne being Joanne six hundred times in a row.
This particular Joanne has never existed before.
This exact combination of body, personality, history, relationships, children, work, circumstances and choices is unique, and it will never exist in precisely this form again.
The image that makes more sense to me is an ocean.
An individual life is like a wave. A wave has a recognizable shape and location. It has a beginning, movement and identity. You can point toward it and say, “There is that wave.”
But the wave was never actually separate from the ocean.
It arose from the ocean, it is made of the ocean, and eventually its particular form dissolves back into it.
Another wave arises.
It is not the same wave, but it is not completely separate either.
That is where my understanding of BodyTalk, my spiritual worldview, the consciousness literature I have read and the work I have done with clients have gradually started to meet.
Physics tells us that energy is conserved. That fact by itself does not prove that memory, personality or consciousness survives death, and I want to be explicit about that because spiritual conversations often collapse those statements together as if one proves the other.
It does not.
Whether consciousness or informational patterns can continue beyond the physical organism remains a philosophical, metaphysical and scientific question.
My own answer has increasingly become yes.
But I know that answer comes from more than one way of knowing. Pasted markdown
Dolores Cannon changed the question for me
One of the major catalysts for that shift was Dolores Cannon.
Reading The Convoluted Universe fundamentally expanded the range of questions I was willing to ask about consciousness.
Cannon’s work emerged from decades of hypnosis sessions in which people reported past lives, between-life states and realities that extend well beyond conventional understandings of a single human lifetime.
Hypnotic regression does not provide the same kind of evidence as prospective research into children spontaneously reporting previous-life memories.
That distinction matters to me.
But her work changed what I was willing to consider possible.
Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe pushed those questions further. Then I began looking more deeply at prenatal consciousness, near-death research, children reporting past lives and the kinds of material that repeatedly surfaced in BodyTalk sessions.
And, importantly, I kept working with babies.
Over time, the boundaries around “this life begins here and ends there” stopped feeling quite as solid to me.
That is my worldview.
I do not require every client to share it, but I am also not going to pretend I do not hold it simply because it would be easier to market a practitioner who stays comfortably inside familiar categories.
Science and soul do not have to be enemies. What they require from us is intellectual honesty about which one we are speaking from. Pasted markdown
What changes when we see a baby as conscious?
For me, almost everything changes.
If I see a baby primarily as a collection of reflexes whose behaviour needs to be shaped, my question becomes, “How do I make this baby behave differently?”
If I see the baby as a developing human being participating in relationship from the beginning, I start asking, “What is this baby experiencing?”
If I allow for the possibility of consciousness before birth, the questions open further.
What was pregnancy like for this baby?
What did birth communicate?
What kind of relational environment did this baby arrive into?
And if I am willing to hold consciousness before conception as a possibility rather than a proven fact, I may eventually wonder whether this baby arrived carrying something of their own.
None of that gives me permission to ignore physiology.
Quite the opposite.
I still want to know whether the baby is hungry, in pain, overstimulated, ill, cold, hot, tired or moving through a developmental transition. I want to understand feeding, sleep, sensory processing, attachment, motor development and what is happening in the family.
Consciousness is not an excuse to abandon the body.
My work is called BodyTalk for a reason.
I want the whole picture: mind, body, relationship and baby. Pasted markdown
The goal is not to make babies more convenient
This brings me right back to the Velcro baby.
If a baby needs closeness, my goal is not to “clear” their attachment to a parent so that they become easier to put down.
That would fundamentally misunderstand what I am doing.
There is nothing pathological about needing your caregiver.
Sometimes the most important intervention is helping an exhausted parent understand that their baby is not manipulating them, their dependence is not a failure, holding them is not ruining them and responding to them is not preventing future independence.
Sometimes, though, the amount of alarm tells us there may be another layer.
Maybe the baby’s nervous system is still responding to something frightening about birth.
Maybe there was a separation.
Maybe there is a feeding problem causing discomfort.
Maybe the parent is carrying enormous anxiety that the baby is responding to within the relationship.
Maybe a family history of loss has made separation especially charged across generations.
Maybe BodyTalk takes us into an active memory.
Maybe it takes us somewhere none of us would have predicted.
The goal is not to prove my favourite theory.
The goal is to help this particular baby and this particular family experience more safety, connection and ease. Pasted markdown
Curiosity is not the same thing as blame
This is especially important when we talk about prenatal experience, intergenerational patterns or parent-child regulation because parents can very quickly hear accusation.
My stress harmed my baby.
My birth caused this.
My trauma did this.
My attachment created the problem.
That is not what I want women to hear from my work.
Parents are part of systems too.
A pregnant woman does not choose every stressor around her. She may be grieving, unsupported, living through medical trauma or working under impossible conditions. She may be carrying patterns that were handed to her by her own parents while simply trying to survive the circumstances she is in.
Awareness is useful only if it creates more options.
It should not create another layer of shame.
If a pattern was learned, perhaps it can change.
If connection was interrupted, it can be rebuilt.
If something never had the opportunity to be processed, perhaps we can return to it now.
If an old story is still active, perhaps it does not have to remain active forever.
That is the hopeful part of all of this. Pasted markdown
And this matters before conception too.
A woman preparing to welcome a baby may already be thinking about the kind of emotional environment she wants to create, the family patterns she wants to end and what she wants to leave behind before becoming a mother.
I do not want Katie to hear that as one more demand to become completely healed before she is allowed to conceive.
There is no finish line where you finally become perfect enough for motherhood.
The invitation is to become more connected to yourself, more aware of what you are carrying and more able to notice when an old pattern is driving the present.
That is a very different thing from perfection.
I don’t need to know exactly where consciousness comes from to listen better today
There are enormous questions underneath everything I have written in this series.
Does consciousness emerge entirely from the brain, or can it exist independently?
Do people remember previous lives?
Can unresolved information move through generations?
What happens to consciousness at death?
I find those questions fascinating, and I suspect I will keep studying them for the rest of my life.
But I do not need to solve the nature of consciousness before I can become a better listener today.
I can stop assuming that behaviour is meaningless and become interested in what it is communicating.
I can resist the impulse to extinguish every difficult signal before I understand what is underneath it.
I can remember that the present moment may not contain the entire explanation for the response I am seeing.
Sometimes the story began five minutes ago.
Sometimes it began during birth.
Sometimes the family has been carrying it for three generations.
And sometimes, in my work, the story seems older than that.
That is why the phrase I keep coming back to is so simple:
Your BodyTalks. Your baby does too. My work is helping you listen. Pasted markdown