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A Breastmilk Theory of Love

 

The Milky Way by Rubens

A Breastmilk Theory of Love: Relationships, Love and Mothering

Does our infant feeding experience affect how we relate to relationships? Is there a template for love laid down in early life that creates unconscious patterns that lead to either healthy or dysfunctional connections? Hear what a Wholistic Sexuality educator, former nurse-midwife and intimate arts counselor thinks about the deep connections between the breast and the heart.

If we’d had our needs met, completely and efficiently, with love, security and nourishment all coming together from the abundant breast of a loving mama—would it be easier as adults to form secure and trusting love relationships? To not be possessive and jealous? To trust in the abundance of love and that our beloved(s) will be there when we need them? To be able to receive pleasure? I believe it would.

Auguste Renoir, Maternite dit aussi l'Enfant au seinThe Bountiful Breast

Ah, breastmilk, Mother Nature’s most perfect food, the true nectar of the Goddess. Evolution has developed an exquisite arrangement for nurturing young mammals, perfected through millennia. It is an elegantly simple system, based on supply and demand. A human breast is essentially a milk factory. When a baby sucks on the areola of the breast, it stimulates receptors which tell the breast (via the brain) to respond by producing milk. As the infant grows and its caloric needs increase, the baby gets hungrier and sucks more, producing more milk. Despite myths to the contrary, the breast is never empty. There is an endless supply of milk, always as much as a child needs. As long as the system is not interrupted, and the mother is adequately hydrated and nourished, there will always be an abundance of glorious milk.

Magic Milk

Mammalian milk has evolved to meet the highly specific needs of each particular species. Human milk contains the exact nutrients in the perfect balance to grow the complex brains and bodies of our infants. It contains living immune factors to protect the health of the child. It teaches both our immune system and our metabolism how to function properly for the rest of our lifetimes by mechanisms that are still poorly understood. Children who are breastfed for a year (or ideally two or more) suffer from less of every known disease, not just as infants but throughout their entire lifetime.

Durer - Life of the Virgin -small cropRelationship 101

Sweet and plentiful breastmilk is the perfect food, always ready, warm and delicious. And it comes in an attractive and time-tested package, that of the woman’s breast, firmly attached to the warm, soft, breathing, pulsating body of the mother. This perfect food is delivered from within the context of the first love relationship that the baby knows. This is how evolution set up the system. When the baby human feels one of its basic needs, that of hunger, the need is met, not with an external object, but by their own personal Beloved. Fed from her warm yielding body, cradled in her strong arms, enveloped in her scent, her loving touch, steadied by her heartbeat and breathing, gazed at by bliss-filled eyes. Ideally, the human need for food is answered in the context of a relationship, by a person, with love.

Sad Stand-in

For those who truly cannot breastfeed, it’s good that we have a substitute that’s at least adequate to prevent significant infant mortality. And, of course, a bottle can be given while the baby is held lovingly in arms. But nothing from a factory can come close to replicating a system that evolution has perfected.

Unfortunately, many modern industrial culture women believe that they can’t nurse, don’t have enough milk and that their body has failed. The truth is that it is our system that has failed them. In nature, it would be extremely rare for a woman (or any other mammal) to not be able to adequately nourish her child unless she’s starving. In our bottle-feeding culture many women have unsuccessful nursing experiences because the natural process, which certainly begins before and during labor as well as after, has been repeatedly disrupted in multiple ways. The result is that the elegant system is too disturbed to function properly and nursing doesn’t work despite many women’s heroic efforts to fix it. This is more then a shame, this is a tragic epidemic as the dysfunction of this system has so many sad consequences.

The Barren Bottle

Compare the perfect sweetness and ideal nourishment of breastmilk to the synthetic formula given to most of us as children and to many babies even now. Artificial infant formula tastes nasty, like wallpaper paste. It’s often given in a transparent bottle, clearly in a finite amount. When the bottle is empty, that’s it. It’s all gone. There is no more. The need for food is met, not in the context of a warm and loving relationship, from a soft and sensuous mother’s body, but with a ‘thing’, a hard and separate object. This is so removed from the context of relationship that it need not even be given while the child is held. A bottle can be propped up or self-held by an older baby.

Terrible Templafinger-1404202_1920te

This forms the template for love and attachment that many of us struggle with for the rest of our lives. Is it any wonder that so many people in our culture, as adults, look to consumer goods, to external objects, to satisfy their oh-so-human needs? But more stuff is never enough to really fill those needs. So we go out and buy more stuff, newer stuff, bigger stuff, better, faster, sexier stuff. More, more, more. But it’s really no good. No matter how much we accumulate, objects will never satisfy our needs for love, security and acceptance. Only relationships can do that.

Sick Substitute

Moreover, artificial infant feeding formulas are unhealthy and barely adequate substitutes that can’t come close to Mama Nature’s perfect food. Indeed, they cause innumerable infant health problems, including gastrointestinal distress, allergies, irritability and malaise. Food, nourishment and the associated feeling of love can become deeply connected with feelings of sickness and pain.

Life Lessons

In our first few years we learn some of our most basic life lessons. Is the world a good or bad place? Am I loved? Can I trust that my needs will be met? Is my body a good place to be in?

Sunga period, 1st century BCEShould we be surprised that so many people have mixed up feelings of love and desire with pain and dysfunction? After all, for most of us our first model of relationship taught us that food and comfort come from an object that is separate from another body. That satisfying our hunger is likely to make us feel uncomfortable and even ill. We learned that nourishment is finite in amount and unpleasant tasting to boot. It’s no wonder that we feel that love is a limited commodity with only so much to go around. It’s not surprising that we can’t get comfortable and form trusting relationships with others. Is that why it’s so hard for some people to receive pleasure? Scarcity consciousness and bottle-fed limits are deeply ingrained templates. Bottle-contained artificial infant formula, unsatisfying, toxic, and unpalatable has confused us about the nature of love.

If we’d had our needs met, completely and efficiently, with love, security and nourishment all coming together from the abundant breast of a loving mama—would it be easier as adults to form secure and trusting love relationships? To not be possessive and jealous? To trust in the abundance of love and that our beloved(s) will be there when we need them? To be able to receive pleasure? I believe this is true.

Reframing Scarcity and Embracing Abundance

For myself, I’m trying to re-frame my beliefs about love and attachment, about scarcity and abundance, from a breastmilk perspective. It’s remedial education, to be sure. It’s a process that requires practice and repetition to succeed at changing (or at least influencing) such old core beliefs. I’m rethinking love, in the breast-milk model. I’m granting myself my ditaly-695032_1280enied birthright, reminding myself, over and over, and over again that there is an abundance of love, there’s always as much as you need and plenty to go around. And that if you need more, just suck and more will come. The breast is never empty, just like the heart. There is always enough. And my hunger can only truly be satisfied by human relationships, never by things. True milk, like true love is plentiful and nourishing, never finite or toxic. And it tastes really, really good.

No wonder the breasts are right over the heart. It is where love comes from. Endlessly, without limits, because the breast is never empty and the heart can always give more love. Read more

Keeping Relationships Hot! Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)

Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot!

Guerin, Pierre-Narcisse - Venus et AdonisShine the Love-Light (Part 3)

Opening the Windows

In part one, we covered kissing and in part two, touching like you did when you first fell in love can sustain the heat and turn-on your turn-up even in long-term relationships. Here, I offer one more area to explore: shining your love-light onto and into each other.

Seeing Into the Other

Eye-gazing is a powerful way to connect. Cliché though it is, the eyes really are like portals that allow us to see into the heart (and possibly the soul) of another. They show our true feelings, vulnerabilities and desires.

It’s not always easy to eye-gaze, though. Looking deeply into another’s eyes can be dauntingly intimate. You need courage to show up fully and stay present, to see and be seen.

When we’re first enamored of another, we tend to gaze deeply into their eyes, beholding the wonder of our beloved. Wanting to eye-gaze comes naturally, but it tends to be limited to those times when our love hormones are in overdrive. As the years go by, most couples spend less and less time looking into each other with wondrous love. Or, if we do look, it’s not with the open-hearted delight and passion that earlier overflowed through our eyes and face and heart. The result is less intimacy and connection.

New lovers don’t need to set aside special time to use their eyes to pour their love into their mates, but if we’ve been together for a while, we’ve probably fallen out of this habit. Help yourselves fall back in love, by remembering to look at your partner, with love, throughout your regular interactions. Make giving a loving look a regular and frequent occurrence.

In addition to making love-looks an ongoing habit, you can also set aside time for eye-gazing practices as another way to increase the flow of heart-energy between you.

Eye-Gazing Galore

Here are a few suggestions for some simple eye-gazing practices.

  • Get into a comfortable aligned position where you can easily look into each other’s eyes. Lay side-by-side or sit facing each other in chairs or have one partner straddle the other’s lap.
  • Decide which eye will be the focus of your gazes. One particularly useful trick is to look into each other’s non-dominant eye, which is theoretically more connected to emotional state. Look into each other’s eyes. Allow your gaze to be soft and relaxed. Let your gaze softly focus, resting on one eye. Try to avoid switching from one eye to the other or glancing at their mouth.
  • Simply look into each other’s eyes, breathe and be. Relax into the experience.
  • To make sure your gaze is filled with love, it can be helpful to silently say loving things like “I love you” as you look. Try doing that and notice how your heart expands as you repeat loving words and how more love-light shines out.
  • The more love you feel, the more you give, the more loved your partner feels, the more they give, creating a positive love loop between you.

Oh, Babypicasso-maternite-1905

Another practice is to see your partner as if they were a shining newborn baby. Imagine seeing your sweetie with the love, delight and open-hearted joy that greets a new and beloved child.

You Are Divine

One more option is to consciously imagine that you’re seeing the Divine in them.
To expand this practice, try to coordinate your breathing, so that you’re both in the same rhythm. As you sync up your breathing pattern, it often becomes easier to stay in a tranced out, heart-centered love space.

Let There Be Love

Incorporating the actions of new lovers into the habits of long-term ones is crucial to keeping our love luscious. The actions are simple: looks of love, sweet deep kisses and tender touches. Remembering to do these simple actions isn’t so simple. The new love biochemicals aren’t there to drive our impulses toward intimacy. To create sustained ardor, we must call on our conscious choice and our intention. When we add these sorts of fuel to our fires, they can burn on, and falling in love can be transformed into a sustainable life of living in love.

Want more long-term love lessons? You got it! Here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Two: How Touching

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Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! (Part 2)

Touch Like You’re Madly In Love

julien haler-Body PicHow Touching

In part one, I discussed how the period of time when we’re madly in-love tends to come to an end for most couples. However, we can use the unconscious behaviors and actions that came naturally at the beginning of our relationship to keep the blaze burning over the years.

One key is to consciously choose to engage in the same type of intimate early-in-love behaviors. In my last post, I suggested that you fire it up with some liquid lip love, with luscious wet kisses.

Next on the list: the fine art of touch.

Tender Touching

Touch was your first sense, beginning while you still floated in your mama’s womb feeling held, surrounded and safe. You were already touching your own body before you even emerged.

Touch is so fundamental that without it, babies will wither and die. As grown-ups, we won’t die from touch deprivation, but we won’t be as happy and healthy as we would be if our minimum daily touch needs were met. Yet most of us are starved for this essential tactile nourishment.

For people without intimate partners, it can be challenging to get all the touching you want and need. Even people with partners may be touch deprived if we’ve allowed the frequency and the spectrum of touch to diminish.

Rodin - Eternal Spring resizeArticulate Touch

Touch is a basic form of communication—we all speak this universal tongue. It’s also one of our first languages of love, beginning with mother and infant.

At a subtle level, touch transmits intention, emotion, energy, relaxation or tension, and the rhythms of the body. If someone is touching you in a loving way with the intention of giving you pleasure, it feels very different than if they’re touching you solely for their own enjoyment. Comfort, anxiety, caring, attention and distractedness are all transmitted through physical contact.

While touch is a language everyone shares, many people are tremendously confused about the purpose and value of touch, how to share it appropriately, and how to do it masterfully. Touch is complicated, delicate territory. It’s easy to miscommunicate about it. And it’s not always easy to touch with great skill and finesse.

Whether or not a particular type of touch is pleasurable is completely subjective. For instance, the sensation of being tickled may be something you find dreadful or delightful. Personal preferences notwithstanding, when we fully activate our kinesthetic intelligence, we’re most likely to touch our partner in a way they enjoy.

Remember, though, that no one is born knowing how someone else wants to be touched. Which is why we can’t rely on touch alone. To give exquisite touch, even if we’re totally attuned, it helps to add other modes of communication like sound (“Umm!” “Aah!”), words (“More pressure, please”) and body language.

Play A Touching and Feeling Game!

Play this game in total darkness or use blindfolds. This will remove all the visual stimuli and help you focus solely on the sensations of touch.

Touch each other with full attention and awareness. Use your breath to get centered and stay present. Use sounds of pleasure to amplify the sensations and give feedback..

Alternate your attention: Shift your awareness to the part being touched, then toggle back to the part doing the touching. Imagine that you’re stroking velvet as you slide your fingertips along your partner’s skin. Focus on how lovely it feels on your palm, then toggle your attention back to your partner’s skin. Run your fingers through their hair, alternating your awareness of its texture against your fingers with attention to your partner’s pleasure in having their hair stroked. Try to balance your focus so that you’re really feeling as you touch.

After you’re done, have a chat about what happened, what worked or didn’t and what you learned.

Ask me no more....for at a touch I yield, 1886_Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrenc
The Four Languages of Touch

There are four languages of positive touch—nurturing, healing, sensual and sexual. To keep a relationship vital and satisfying, I believe we need to share all four types of touch.

Here’s a brief introduction to the spectrum of touch.

Nurturing touch transmits caring and acceptance. It’s the kind of tender touch a loving parent gives their beloved child. It helps us feel loved, valued and worthy of being loved.

The second language of touch is therapeutic touch—any form of contact that heals, eases stress, promotes well-being, repairs bodily damage, restores health or palliates pain.Eros-Psyche Bouguereau

The third language of touch is sensual touch—any form of contact designed to heighten the senses, amplify body awareness and magnify perception. Sensual touch is not explicitly erotic. While it might be a warm-up on the path to arousal and is often an excellent prelude to sexual touch, it’s not designed to be a turn-on in and of itself. Think of it as turning on the senses, not the genitals.

Last but definitely not least, there is sexual touch—any contact that arouses and stimulates. Sexual touch entices your erotic energy to come out and play. It teases, titillates, ignites and (hopefully) satisfies erotic desires.

Remember, new lovers caress, hold, rock, stroke and creatively explore all kinds of different ways to discover and delight with contact. An important strategy to sustain your relationship’s passion is to consciously incorporate all four touch vocabularies into your connections.


Want to know how to fall in love over and over again? Did you miss the first part of this series of posts? No worries — here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light.


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Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot! Luscious Kissing (Part 1)

How to Fall In Love … Over and Over Again

Dicksee Romeo & JulietLook around at couples in any busy restaurant and you can probably tell which ones are madly and newly in love. It’s easy to recognize the telltale signs—they gaze into each others’ eyes, can’t keep their hands off each other, seem fascinated by everything their partner has to say and find opportunities to kiss.

Like other animals, our biological mating template is in full force when we connect to a special and especially delicious partner. These behaviors are the result of a biological cascade—we’re awash in a falling-in-love chemical soup. It’s a delicious, intoxicating, delirious cocktail … and it doesn’t last. For the vast majority of people, the in-loveness compounds run out within the first four years of a relationship. We can continue to experience all sorts of other forms of a love connection like caring commitment, deep attachment and special friendship. But the sparks of ardent desire usually evaporate and our burning passion cools.

What can we do to sustain or rekindle the fires of desire?

One technique is to act like you did when you first fell madly in love. Think of the in-love period as your relationship training wheels. Now, after so many years, the biological support system is gone and you’re on your own to feed the fire and keep the connection sizzling.

Act Like You’re Madly In Love

Here’s one suggestion for using the falling-in-love template to keep those hot and heady feelings alive or to revive them if they’re slumbering.

Hot Kiss

Photo See-ming Lee. CC Lic.

Kiss Like You Mean It

Remember how when you first were in love you wanted to smooch, lap up, sniff and nuzzle your lover? Can you recall the pleasures of sweet soft lips pressing together? Remember the sensations of that delicious yielding mouth slowly opening, followed by hungry exploring and some serious deep wet kissing.

Have you forgotten? Has your kiss fountain dried up and become a scarce desert of dry little pecks? When is the last time you had a hot make-out session with your long-term sweetie?

If it’s been awhile, then it’s time to put wet kissing back on your menu.

Kissing creates a sexual circuit between lovers, an intoxicating reciprocal scent and taste response loop. Arousal heightens your senses, increasing your pleasure in the flavor and aroma of your partner’s body. As you get more turned on, your arousal causes your mouth to become tastier while heightening your senses—you taste better to your lover and they to you. The more you do it, the more turned on you get, and the more delicious the kissing becomes. You’re creating a positive kissing feedback loop.

Not only is your sense of taste intermixed with your ability to smell (and get turned on by scent), but your mouth, lips and tongue are some of the most richly innervated areas of your body. That’s why licking, kissing, sucking and nibbling are such significant erotic activities. You get the delicious combination of taste, aroma and tactile delight all rolled into one delicious ball.

Gulácsy_Lajos-Ecstasy_ca_1908Biochemical Bliss

In addition, kissing mingles hormones and biochemicals in a way that not only shares but literally increases the body’s love and lust substances. You can literally taste and smell your playmate’s arousal. Arousal tastes divine!

One of the simplest ways to get some juice flowing is to take up the art of ardent kissing. Have a minimum of three ‘wet kiss dates’ a day. They can be sweet and soft gentle explorations or hungry feasts of ravenous desire. Your kiss trysts doesn’t have to be long—even a minute of serious succulent smooching will start to shift the energy from ‘ho-hum housemates’ to luscious lovers.

Put a ban on the parched pecks! Shift from dry lip skims to liquid lip love when you wake up, leave for work, come home or go to bed. Or take ‘kiss breaks’ and do a few minutes of lusty lip locking a few times a day.

There are so many ways to kiss. You can use your lips, mouth and tongue (and occasionally even your teeth) to give and receive, to be soft or fierce. Your oral equipment provides a huge variety of perfect ways to play with your lover.

Serious smooching is an easy yet powerful relationship fire-starter. It’s an intimate and inspiring way to lubricate your relationship and re-ignite your partner passion. Make time for making out!


Want more ways to keep long-term relationship hot? You can have it. Here’s Part Two: How Touching and Part Three: Shine the Love-Light


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