holistic embryology: van der Wal

"Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. That is the gesture of development. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: 'When we die, we just take off a coat.' Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult and so on. The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born." [Jaap van der Wal, "Embryo in Motion"]