HELD INTO STILLNESS: OXYTOCIN, ATTACHMENT, AND A BABY WHO HELPED ME SLOW DOWN
A few articles ago, I wrote about “learning to stay.” Staying present long enough not to flee into fixing, organizing, overthinking, or becoming a one-woman emergency response unit with a purse.
This Shavuos marks nine years since what I call “My Stroke of Good Fortune,” the health crisis that forced me to slow down. Since then, slowing down has become one of my primary avodos. Not because it comes naturally, but because it absolutely does not. I have spent decades trying to teach my nervous system that not everything is a fire and not every feeling requires a committee meeting.
I practice breathwork, meditation, prayer, music, mindful awareness, Havening touch, supplements, movement, and the occasional stern lecture from my prefrontal cortex. Sometimes these help beautifully. Sometimes life still barrels through me like a shopping cart with a broken wheel.
And yet, there are moments Hashem places directly into our lives that accomplish in seconds what years of self-improvement are trying to teach. For me, one of those moments is holding a baby.
A few weeks ago, at a Shabbos kiddush, I finally got to hold a baby who had been charming me for months with long, focused eye contact and delighted smiles. He is my rabbi’s great-grandson, and his mother remembered me reading stories and playing guitar when she was little. This was not stranger-danger territory. This was layered communal familiarity — the sacred status of “Tante.” The baby was fussy in another child’s arms, so I happily volunteered myself as an oxytocin opportunist. And because it was Shabbos, I was fully there.
No phone. No multitasking. No divided attention. Just the soft weight of a baby resting against me, breathing near my breath, heart near heart. Almost immediately, he settled. Then he softened. Then he nestled into my shoulder. And something in me became quiet.
Research tells us that babies regulate through relationship. Through gaze, touch, rhythm, tone, and steady presence, a caregiver’s nervous system helps shape the baby’s sense of safety. Attachment theory calls this secure attachment: the child develops a reliable emotional home base from which to explore the world.
The beautiful irony is that regulation flows both ways. I held him, but in some strange way, he held me too. My nervous system lent him steadiness, and his softness lent me stillness.
Tehillim captures this state with astonishing precision: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother” (Psalm 131:2). This is not collapse or passivity. It is the profound inner quiet that comes when one no longer feels compelled to grasp, prove, manage, or outrun life. For a few holy minutes, I stopped performing existence.
Polyvagal theory now gives scientific language to something Torah understood long ago: human beings regulate one another through face, voice, breath, and presence. “As water reflects face to face, so the heart of a person to a person” (Proverbs 27:19).
A baby does not read our résumé. A baby reads our face. Babies are exquisitely sensitive to whether a body is broadcasting danger or safety. Before attachment theory, before neuroscience, before terms like co-regulation and interactional synchrony, Torah already understood that hearts answer hearts.
This is also why Pirkei Avos teaches us to greet others with a pleasant countenance. A warm face is not superficial etiquette. It can be emotional shelter. And perhaps that is one of Shabbos’s deepest gifts. Shabbos interrupts the endless productivity machinery and returns us to presence. “Vayinafash” — we rest and become re-souled.
That afternoon, the baby, the mother, the quiet rhythm of Shabbos, the absence of phones, and the softness of communal life all converged into one small but powerful teaching: Human beings were never meant to regulate alone. A few weeks have passed, and I am still thinking about those twenty minutes. Not because they were dramatic, but because they were so simple. A baby settled. A mother rested.
And a woman who has spent years trying to slow down was slowed, in seconds, by a tiny teacher with soft cheeks and excellent instincts. I have spent years trying to slow down. A few weeks ago, a baby did it in seconds. A baby does not read our résumé. A baby reads our face.
Read a more in-depth SUBSTACK article HERE
With Gratitude,
Rus Devorah
