…Contemplating the Core Elements of a Modern Breastfeeding Lifestyle

It has been an interesting journey blogging about breastfeeding this past month. My experience has been quite good.

Although I had been blogging since 2007, I had not really focused on a regular pattern of writing, nor paid much attention to stats. I knew that someone must be reading and hopefully inspired, but did not have a clue about my readership other than most likely they would be mothers or family members of mothers who were breastfeeding.

Coming from over 42 sources or mediums. my blogosphere has expanded exponentially during this period. The power of Facebook and the likebutton became self evident. A full 3/4’s of the visits were from “friends” or “friends of facebook friends”. The three most popular posts were liked and shared there in what would be the third largest country of the world . Social media and word of mouth cannot be underestimated.

They are here, in the order of their popularity, if you missed them on the blog roll:

Breastfeeding Postcard Speaks Volumes

Breastfeeding on Reality TV

Breastfeeding Status Update:  It’s Complicated

I have appreciated all the comments, many of them from my fellow participants in the Ultimate Blog Challenge. Your support keeps me inspired.

This is not an ending, but rather a beginning. With your help…I will continue contemplating the core elements of a modern breastfeeding lifestyle.

I have spent this month wearing my lactivism on my sleeve. Well, if the truth be told, it has been a much longer period of my life that I have been dedicated to protecting and promoting breastfeeding in a bottle feeding formula-centric culture.

In my office clean up I found this relic. (Click on it and enlarge it.) It was edited by an Indianapolis Pediatrician, Mary Jo Stine who presented it at a conference at least two decades ago.

National Breastfeeding Awareness month, World Breastfeeding Week and the Ultimate Blog Challenge were the perfect storm to help find my voice on a regular basis. I’ve been an ambassador for breastfeeding wherever I have gone these past 31 days…from Starbucks to Facebook. At times, I have even surprised myself how I could relate just about any topic to breastfeeding.

I have been as creative and humorous as possible to raise awareness among all who have crossed my path. I will discuss the highlights in my last post of the challenge.

Still waiting for the day that a banner will read…Breastfeeding Foremost and find no one is offended by the sentiment!

What do you think?

Geneen Roth, author of ‘Women, Food and God‘ recently featured on Oprah has a philosophy about food that is very much aligned with Conscious Breastfeeding. She has been teaching here in NYC at Integrative Nutrition and describes why this is a good fit in the video below.

A comment thread to my post: Breastfeeding Relationship Status Update: It’s Complicated made me reflect upon these very points.   Breastmilk technically is a food. The natural delivery system is breastfeeding.  In modern times, the relationship inherent in breastfeeding has taken a backseat to it as a nutritional commodity.  An integrative nutrition view blends these two, the  relationship to mother and spirit with the quintessential food for human babies.

Ms. Roth speaks of  “Looking at food as a way of exploring the health and happiness of our entire lives.”  This is my view of Conscious Breastfeeding.  It is feeding with intention and attention; being fully in the moment and as a consequence developing a very powerful. intimate relationship with your baby that informs every aspect of his/her developing life.

Breastmilk  is the conduit for this energy exchange.  Thus, even when apart from the baby, the expressed milk maintains the connection literally and figuratively.  It is quite understandable that food is often equated with love, especially in breastfeeding circles.

Both integrative nutrition and conscious breastfeeding take a holistic view of  mind, body and spirit in relationship to the experience of eating.  Balancing the sum of these parts can help us to set the tone for health and well-being in our lives.

What do you think?

This New Yorker cartoon was photocopied and sent to me around the time I began my private lactation practice. (Issue unknown)  It still remains very funny after all these years.

Fast forward to today and this highly competitive job market…what if playing the “I was breastfed” card made you stand out in a crowd of applicants?

You could mention how breastfed babies are smarter. In fact, countless studies have shown that breastfeeding not only enhances IQ, but also the health of both the mother and her baby.

In keeping with the growing trend to protect and preserve the environment, being breastfed would mean that adventures in being green began at the start of life.  The carbon footprint would have been minimized by the mothers who breasted exclusively for as long as possible. By extending breastfeeding and judicious use of pumps, those moms would have provided their raw natural resource of breastmilk with minimal environmental impact.

Consuming organic, whole foods early in life, breastfeeding, is aligned with the eco-friendly movements such as sustainable farming and permaculture.

Imagine that…the human resource provided to you by your mother as you were breastfed comes full circle to make you a smart, robust, environmentally conscious candidate for employment!

Conscious Breastfeeding rules!

Your input… thoughts and questions are invited.

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My friend Chip was an eye-catching man when I met him many years ago. He stood out and was literally above the crowd… 6′ 5″ and elegantly dressed in clothes and shoes made for him in Hong Kong. We have not seen each other for many years. Our paths crossing at that time probably was a subtle catalyst pointing me toward Japan. I visited him there on his own turf several times in the intervening years.

Early in our friendship he had shared a comical story with me. He was born in Tokyo and was an avid runner. He told me that even though their were quite a few foreigners or “gaigin” visiting and living in Tokyo many Japanese still assumed they did not understand Japanese. He told me one day he was running along his usual route and overheard a bunch of runners talking to each other about him. To their surprise… this giant, Chip, turned around and spoke to them fluently in perfect Japanese. They were mortified to say the least.

All of us can get caught in this same trap if we are not careful. We are constantly making assumptions on a daily basis…not all of them serve us.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson says…

“The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deceptions”

This is so true with breastfeeding. This week I have encountered several different scenarios which illustrate this very point.

The size of your breasts does not tell you anything about your ability to produce milk. It is a function of genes and fat distribution. It is not how your breasts look, but rather how you use them that will impact your milk supply.

Another assumption is that if only one breast is being used to feed you will have an inadequate amount of milk. It just means that if you have one breast activated for milk production and the other is not that you may have a “visual imbalance” in the size of your breasts.

There are women in Vietnam who only breastfeed on one side for convenience while they work in the rice paddies. Mothers of twins are essentially sustaining each baby on one breast. If you have only one baby, you have an extra breast and a surplus of milk. Using only one breast requires that attention be paid to optimizing the latch and removal of milk at every feeding.

Nearly every mother, and most doctors and nurses believe, that what a mother pumps is what her breasts produce. This is absolutely not true. If you are breastfeeding well… the amounts will be much less than what the baby can get through direct breastfeeding. It always depends on when pumping is done in relation to breastfeeding.

If the breastfeeding is not optimized or your baby has a smaller appetite the amounts pumped may appear to be larger. However this volume will diminish over time as the quality of breastfeeding and your baby’s appetite improve.

Don Miguel Ruiz on Page: 78
of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book), reminds us…
“The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions.”

Much of the Conscious Breastfeeding approach is predicated upon the fact that what we see is not necessarily telling us the whole story. Relying mainly on what we see can lead us down the wrong path and cause us to supplement and may lead to early weaning.

As Conscious Breastfeeding mothers I encourage you to focus upon the quality of your breastfeeding connection with your babies and not allow assumptions to guide your experience of Breastfeeding.