I have taught thousands of hours of breastfeeding classes in the multicultural, urban environment of New York City. 

We live in a world that revolves around information; knowledge on any given subject appears to be just one google search or click away.  This may explain why an increasing number of students who come to my classes lately seem to be there merely to confirm what they think they already know versus wanting to actually learn something new.  

Adult learners, often find it difficult to be open to the richness of a learning experience when they fear judgement or criticism.  It is often more important to be right than to risk being wrong or feeling like a complete newbie.

I am reminded of my first day in Japanese class. 

The appearance of a diminutive teacher who immediately began speaking in a foreign tongue made me feel at loose ends.  I ultimately mastered enough spoken Japanese that I was able to spend several wondrous holidays travelling throughout Japan.  I immersed myself in the culture and made many new friends.  My language skills have gotten rusty, but rudimentary communication is still  possible for me with little effort. 

A love of learning has impacted my approach to teaching.  There are several learning styles auditory, visual, kinesthetic.  It is not uncommon for some of us to use more than one at any given time to learn and anchor an experience into our memory. 

When your brain is under the misimpression that it already knows something you tend to filter for new data or for things that do not fit your preconceived notions.  Often that filtering process impedes learning because the mind is only attentive to parts of the whole. 

When participants ask me questions using terms and words that I have not uttered and ascribe them to me, it becomes clear that they are at best only selectively listening during class.  When these queries come from their own internal dialogue and are not directly related to content delivered, I thank them and clarify what I had actually said.  Hopefully, this helps them to take in a piece of new information. 

It turns out that cultural differences, apart from language, can also have a bearing on how the students in my classroom may interpret and receive the information.  According to the article published in the Winter edition of Tufts Magazine, ‘The Brain in the World-A Burgeoning Science Explores the Deep Imprint of Culture’, the field of cultural neuroscience is only about two years old. 

Tufts psychology professor Nalini Ambady puts it this way: cultural neuroscience shows that “there is malleability in the neural structure depending on cultural exposure.” The brain, she says, is a “sponge that absorbs cultural information.” What she and other cultural neuroscientists have discovered is that although the brains of people from different cultures do not exhibit large structural differences, certain neural pathways do become more ingrained from immersion in a particular culture. They’ve also learned that those differences in brain function can influence our emotions, our behavior, and our attitudes toward people from cultures other than our own.

It goes on to describe a study done with American and Japanese subjects who were shown groups of photographs and asked to rate them according to the characteristics of dominance, maturity, likeability and trustworthiness.  The researcher, Rule, then broke those down into two sub-groups of power and warmth.  The Americans overwhelmingly favored the powerful faces and the Japanese the warm ones.  When fMRI scans were done it was noted that the Americans were using the analytical parts of their brains and the Japanese the emotional areas.

But what he discovered surprised him: both groups were using the same part of the brain—the amygdala. Sometimes called the “lizard brain,” the amygdala, which has been with us since the early days of our evolutionary journey, helps us detect threats, but it has a more general function as well, signifying increased attention to any object in the outside world. In this case, the amygdala was firing for both the American and the Japanese groups when they saw the picture of the leader they preferred.

It should be noted that the amygdala is also a prime area for the infant’s experience of breastfeeding.  

As a teacher, I am left to wonder how I might better engage these amygdalas, the cultural command central of the brains of these mothers-to-be? The answer may lie in the common thread of child-like wonder that is a constant in every culture while we are young. 

So it not just the words, visuals and the practice of positions, but a cultural sensitivity that may ensure breastfeeding instruction does not get lost in translation.

What do you think? What has worked for you?

I had always wanted to go to ‘the Running of the Bulls’ since I first read James Michener’s novel ‘The Drifters’.  I finally made that dream a reality when I went with two of my brothers and my sister-in-law during The World Cup of 1998.

Today is the first day of the feast of St. Fermin, the patron of the festival which runs annually from 7.7-7.14 in Pamplona, Spain.

Pamplona Memories flood back to me.  I vividly remember cheering for Holland with the legions of orange clad fans that followed their matches in the local pubs.  Now, 12 years later, the Dutch have made it into the finals of the World Cup.  Spain plays Germany in the semi-finals on this auspicious Spanish feast day for the other slot.  This 2010 World Cup will be an all Europe final falling within the week of ‘the Running of the Bulls’.

Leather wine flasks, Botas, were being used by many of the festival goers.  My teaching mind saw an immediate and workable analogy between the human breast and those popular items of the festival of St. Fermin.  It occurred to me that the breast also expands and contracts with the volume of milk within it.  Both a wine sack and the breast are never really empty, but will always have some residual left at the bottom once filled with liquid.  To new moms who might be tempted to think of their breasts in terms of being full or empty this new frame of reference makes much better sense and alleviates much unnecessary anxiety.

As you may have noticed in the video above, the assembled crowds all got the memo and were unified in wearing a garb of white and red.  It was difficult to distinguish ourselves among the sea of people dressed the same way.  People were assembled from all over the world.  We were all part of one big family, more alike than different.  A unity that should also apply to breastfeeding.

The notion of solidarity by costume or color is not new.  Pink is for Breast Cancer awareness.  Purple is worn by those who support research for Alzheimers.  The lactation consulting world has made efforts to make Gold be the color of breastfeeding promotion to represent the liquid gold of human milk as the gold standard of infant feeding.

I watched from the sidelines while my brothers joined the ranks of those actually running with the bulls. I may have been a mere observer for those runs, but the same thing cannot be said about my participation in breastfeeding promotion.  I am steadfast in my efforts to inspire, educate, support and empower mothers to revel in the grandeur of their bodies which are so perfectly designed to nurture their babies for 9 months and beyond through the miracle of breastfeeding.

I envision the day, in the not too distant future, when the same fervor I witnessed for the running of the bulls of Pamplona will be expended on being bullish for breastfeeding.

Won’t you join me?  Be part of the change we want to see…Be Bullish for Breastfeeding!

Frida Kahlo was born on this day, 103 years ago, into the patriarchal society of early 20′th century Mexico.  A revolutionary in so many ways, she created an enduring brand of her image that greeted me today on my Google home page.

A  lifetime of painful experiences, including contracting polio, a near fatal bus accident, a tumultuous marriage and infidelities, multiple miscarriages, served as the inspiration for her paintings.  She continually pushed the envelope of social convention as she struggled to find her identity and come to terms with what it meant to be a Mexican woman.  

One of her more powerful paintings, ‘My Nurse and I’ gives us an idea of how this journey began for Frida.

Frida’s mother fell into a postpartum depression in the months following her birth and handed her over to a nanny.  There are reports that her wet nurse was drinking and offered little nurturing and care to her as an infant.  This lack of bonding is thought to have been the impetus for her perpetual attempts at giving birth to and mothering herself through her art.  

There are many layers to this painting.   The masked nurse hints at a shameful and victimized version of the Mexican mother, La Malinche.   Seemingly abandoned by her own mother, she was left to nurture her own development to adulthood.  On a more positive note, she connects to her Mexican homeland and indigenous culture symbolically through this act of breastfeeding.

As a breastfeeding advocate, I find it disturbing to see this impersonal depiction of what should be a primal bonding experience between a mother and her child or between a loving mother surrogate, wet nurse, and child. 

Frida Kahlo shared with us in this painting what she perceived to be the lack of the milk of human kindness that was offered to her while she was at the breast.  Although this had left a bad taste in her mouth, she still portrayed breastfeeding as the cultural norm for her time.

What feelings does this painting evoke in you?

Confidence, according to dictionary.com is a noun.   

1.full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing.  2. belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance.

There is a familiar catchphrase.  ‘Fake it until you make it’.   Such attempts at  imitating confidence to produce success often fall short for breastfeeding mothers.   

• They worry about how the experience will be for them, and whether or not they will be successful. 
• There is no margin for error when it comes to feeding and nurturing their babies.

Jerry Stocking was interviewed on the subject of confidence.  If you have time, please check out his blog   where you can read and/or listen to his wonderful perspective on this subject.   He believes that confidence is  more of a process than a thing.  I agree with him, especially when discussing it in relation to breastfeeding. 

The kernels of wisdom from his interview are as follows:

• We want it all without the risk.
• We run into problems when we get caught up in the why’s.
• We should not opt for structure over possibility.
• Confidence and Competence should leap frog for best results.

Conscious breastfeeding is not a no-brainer.   It is a skill that is learned by the mother and taught to her baby.  In reality, there is a process that we must go through to learn any skill.  In his blog post, Learning = Change, Rowan Manahan discusses movement through the steps of lthe learning curve (photo) below. 

1. Unconscious Competence:  A mother acknowledges that breastfeeding is a skill to be learned.  She becomes pro-active in the learning process.  To move to the next level, she may need an intervention to assist her in learning the latch.
2. Conscious Incompetence:  The Aha moment comes when she realizes she must make a decision. Her choice is whether to change a sub-optimal latch, grin and bear the pain or abandon breastfeeding altogether.  This stage of learning can be as short as 3 weeks.  The key is not to give up because of  physical discomfort or mental frustration or exhaustion. 
3. Conscious Competence:  Modifications are learned and made which make the latch consistent and pain-free.
4. Unconscious Competence:  Breastfeeding is operating well without conscious thought.  It is ingrained in the body memory.  The skill has been mastered.

Confidence is a way to play with with the unknown, to learn.  It is present in the first steps of the learning curve as we pay more attention.  With the acquisition of skills, confidence becomes grounded in competence.  Ultimately, it becomes second nature, leaving us with a sense of mastery.  

Confidence can open us up to a much larger game.  The secret is to not become afraid of change.  The balance is struck when we maintain an on-going dance between having faith (confidence) and developing the ability to do something (competence). 

Conscious Breastfeeding mothers put their full attention on optimizing their experience. This is the ultimate confidence game for mothers.

I was privileged to attend an amazing personal transformation workshop led by Jerry Stocking, Embracing Being,  Held in early June, this is an on-going course that he brings to New York City several times a year.

A group of us participated in an impromptu sales exercise.  We were sent out on the streets of Manhattan in the Herald Square area.  Each of us was asked to sell one copy of a book from Jerry Stocking’s catalogue of books  to a complete stranger.  Each book was to be sold for $10, which we were told was the price of re-admission to the morning session of the workshop in progress.

The Herald Square neighborhood around Madison Square Garden, Macy’s and Penn Station is usually full of pedestrians, especially on a warm Saturday morning.  People were in motion-many of them were rushing to a  destination or had time constraints needing to catch a bus or train. 

Enter our band of itinerant sales people.

To be successful, we had to break through our personal fears.  We had to confront our fears of approaching strangers, of being rejected, of not being fully conversant with the product we were asked to sell.

There are no accidents.  The book I chose, “How to Win by Quitting” was more fitting than I could have imagined at first glance.  I had chosen it thinking it would apply to giving up substances (smoking, alcohol, etc.) or resonate with folks trying to find their passions in this new global economy.  Actually, it spoke to the fundamentals of this “cold call” sales exercise.

Fear can stop us from attempting anything.  Be it sales or breastfeeding.  As the lotto motto reminds us, “You’ve got to be in it, to win it”.  By quitting my fear, I was fully able to engage in the experience and win big.

The basic secret of successful sales is that you must be able to put your attention on the recipient of the goods or services being offered.  It turned out that the objective of our morning exercise was not to merely sell a book.  It was to observe a process.

The win was not in selling the book as much as it was being fully engaged and attentive.  A personal, authentic human interaction was to be experienced.  Selling the book was just the icing on the cake.

If you are able to align yourself with the dance of communication, you experience life fully in the moment.  You can have fun and both sides reap a reward.

This is as true for breastfeeding advocacy as it is for successful sales.  Passion and playfulness need to to be the order of the day!