U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution

Forget the Declaration of Independence, One Nation Under God. We the people of the United States threaten to unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid if nations support language tainting the $70 billion infant formula industry – the latest in our nation’s Declaration of Profits over People.

Themes: 
breastfeeding

Nothing Compares

They say, breast is best. Well, duhhh. But wait, I’m a guy. What do I know? The overarching question is why have a baby? Hormones, of course. No one can win an argument with hormones. There is only one correct answer, to nurture the healthiest, happiest, most awake, aware, sensitive and responsive human being possible. Having a baby is all about the baby. It is the ultimate ‘giving back.’

Themes: 
bonding
breastfeeding
culture

Pleasure is BAD Get Over It

The Time cover Mom Enough, marked the 20th anniversary of The Baby Book by William Sears, MD, labeling attachment parenting practices such as child-led weaning as “extreme.” No surprise, expected really, by echoing a professional party line dating back over 100 years times ten and more.

Please review and share the fabulous re-shoot and Pathways Family Wellness Magazine follow-up on Times most provocative cover story in decades.

To understand why, first realize that a woman’s body was built, among other tings, for pleasure. In a culture where pleasure is BAD pleasure becomes a commodity, something to be possessed, sold and controlled, especially by males whose normal sensory development has been retarded resulting in a cultural hyper-need-response to what is deprived, driving up the value and the compulsive need to possess and control it.

Ashley Montague notes in the Dehumanization of Man (and Woman via children), ‘the central issue of Western thought and civilizations is freedom vs. control.’ In 1932 with the publication of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted an increasing and rapid centralization of power and control, not through oppression and terror, we have that too, but rather through the subtler devices of conditioning, persuasion, new drugs and distraction. What does rapid centralization of power and control have to do with breast feeding and equally intimate circumcision?

Themes: 
birth
bonding
brain
breastfeeding
circumcision
culture
parenting
pleasure
sensory deprivation
violence

DNA Remembers and Expects

dna remembers

“The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice.
The dullness is itself the consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making.”

Gabor Mate, MD, Author,
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction

More on Pleasure, Pain and the Developing Brain

The development of each new human being involves the complete evolutionary process of life on the planet. Native traditions recognize and honor this fact. Western civilization, driven by an anti-feminine passion for male intellect does not, thus the classic mind-body split. One self-world view nurtures the deep ecology that we are, the other attempts to dominate and control nature, including our own.

In each of us is the entire process of creation, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls Evolution’s End. Each stage of development anticipates the past and creates the necessary foundation for the next unknowable leap forward to unfold. The developing fetus in the liquid world of the womb, for example, has no use for lungs and yet creates lungs anticipating an oxygenated environment it ‘knows’ nothing about. The entire spectrum of human development implies this unfolding anticipation and unknowable expectation.

Themes: 
birth
bonding
brain
breastfeeding
culture
environment
play
pleasure
pregnancy

What is Bonding? Has It Changed?

bonding

What is bonding, the very heart of species survival or a nice sentiment? Are the experiences we call bonding or attachment the same today as 100 years ago, before commercial interests made it shameful to breastfeed, fetal monitors and surgical-cesarean births? What is the relationship between nurturing and bonding? Do stronger bonds result in greater nurturing? Is reduced bonding a prescription for generational cycles of neglect and abuse? Critical questions are being raised by visionaries in the field of human development. What are the consequences of interfering with bonding and nature’s expectation for nurturing?

Themes: 
birth
bonding
breastfeeding
pleasure