"The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out … it would twist itself round and look up into her face." Alice in Wonderland 121

The gestalt method is neuroprotective form of evolutionary bodywork, applied whilst breastfeeding

The gestalt method is genuinely holistic and ecological bodywork, a therapeutic intervention when breastfeeding problems arise - and a way to help prevent problems arising.

The gestalt method of fit and hold hands power back to the breastfeeding woman. The gestalt method is a powerful form of evolutionary bodywork for infants, which

• Aligns with the infant Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptedness

• Allows pleasure and joy to be the organizing principles or drivers of the ecosystem of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems

• Uses sucking to organize and downregulate the sympathetic nervous system

• Supports experimentation with mechanical pressures .

• Addresses torticollis by promoting highly repetitive function in the context of a well-aligned cervical and thoracic spine

• Supports posterior pelvic tilt and lumbar flexion

• Promotes cervical extension and chin bury

• Promotes semi-prone positioning which uses gravity for

  • Airway protection

  • Relieving the mother of need for muscular effort because baby's body falls into her body.

We can trust the stunning plasticity and unfolding power of self-correction or healing within an infant's body

The infant's body is pristine tissue.

The nascent human's neuromuscular function (its neural plasticity, little muscles wrapped in and connected body-wide by thin sheets of pristine fascia) finds its best developmental unfolding in the context of the whole mother-baby ecosystem, flesh on flesh.

Your baby's development is driven by the innate and mysterious power of the generative universe coded into his DNA. This innate developmental unfolding is shaped by the sensory nourishment, milk, and loving interactions you provide. Your baby's muscles and organs are woven together in fresh, elastic, undamaged webs of connective tissue and fascia. The great developmental power rising up through your baby is healing and self-corrective, and can be trusted to correct minor asymmetries and irregularities through the repeated enjoyment of healthy function.

A dialed up little body that is repeating medically diagnosed and serious dysfunctional neuromuscular patterns may be setting out on a path to fascial restrictions as the years pass, though nothing is fully pre-determined.

But most likely, your baby's body is unknotted, unwritten primal landscape, pristinely plastic despite some asymmetries and subtle irregularities, and despite breastfeeding problems.

If the birth was traumatic, your little one has profound and innate capacity to heal. We simply need to call this forth in the context of the loving parent's body.

Evolutionary bodywork, applied in breastfeeding as the gestalt method, protects your own musculoskeletal system

The gestalt method is a powerful form of evolutionary bodywork for your own body, too, which

• Uses breath and conscious muscle relaxation

• Supports semi-reclined musculoskeletal comfort with a footstool and firm support under elbows

• Supports comfort in the side-lying position

• Promotes a neutral wrist position which protects from repetitive strain injury or exacerbation of carpal tunnel syndrome, both of which are more common in the perinatal period

• Requires no lateral rotation or lateral flexion of the woman's thoracic and lumbar spine

• Protects arms and shoulders from the effects of gravity because the woman doesn't need to hold her baby's weight.

Evolutionary bodywork invites you to pay attention to your own physical and emotional sensations

Embodiment means attending to your sensations, with awareness of your body's feelings and sensations acting as your guiding compass. Somatic therapy invites attention to the body.

It is easy to disconnect from sensations in the body, especially when we have pain, because we live in a culture which teaches us to dissociate and to disconnect from the body. Our culture tends to value the intellect and willpower, which often override the body's subtle messages.

The gestalt method draws on the principles of embodiment and somatic therapy to promote attunement to your own bodily and breast and nipple sensations and to emotions.

• The gestalt method of fit and hold is a form of somatic therapy, which understands your lactating body as a landscape in which we experience the rise and all of emotions and sensations.

• The Possums programs are strength-based, supporting resilience.

• The Possums programs don't focus on or diagnose anatomic flaws or inadequacies, unless they are truly medically or functionally significant. We focus on

  • Diversity of the anatomically and functionally normal

  • Empowering education for parents, and

  • Experimentation.

• We work patiently, attending sensation by sensation, responding, experimenting, letting your body find her way through.

Setting baby's body up to practice healthy and symmetrical neuromuscular function

Your baby (like all babies, in fact, and all humans) may have subtle muscle tone imbalances and fascial tightnesses. If there are minor functional asymmetries at the same time as the tiny new human organism experiences the innate and powerful drive to feed, the gestalt method sets it up so that baby is profundly physically stable, relaxed, and able to practice repeated healthy reflex driven function with sucking.

Baby's jaw opens in alignment once she's on the breast because of the way you're holding her. The spinal alignment and symmetrical movement patterns of the gestalt method straighten any functional torticollis by virtue of placement, and then give opportunity for the repetitive practice of aligned sucking, due to her innate drive to feed.

Your body interacting with your baby's body is perhaps the most intimate and physically demanding work that you will ever do throughout your lifetime. Breastfeeding your baby is bodywork. The gestalt method heals, by helping two precious bodies join together in a way that nourishes your child, and also protects your own body long-term.

It is your body impacting in a whole-body way on your baby, laying down your little one's neural pathways psychologically and biologically (though the two aren't separate, really.) This is the joy and the healing power of structural and functional alignment during breastfeeding.

Evolutionary bodywork protects your communication with your baby

The gestalt method invites you to tune into your baby's communications or cues and to interpret them (not as medical conditions) but as signs which guide you to experiment further with your responses.

Fit and hold refers to the whole of baby interacting with the whole of the mother, a woman and baby fitting their bodies together, supported by the mother’s arms. Fit is more than the mouth-focussed 'latch’. Hold refers to ongoing interactions which are more than just positioning done to the baby, but which allow for the baby’s autonomy within the mother’s act of holding the baby and supporting him against gravity and in relation to her own body. This is evolutionary bodywork in action.

The way baby comes onto the breast depends on the way you fit your little one into your own breast and body

When your baby fits into your breast and body, there are many different kinds of sensitive human tissues coming together and interacting, shaped by underlying fibrous and fatty and fascial tissues, pulsing organs, cartilages and bones. The fit between anatomies is constantly changing, and the shapes of important anatomic features change in response to mechanical pressures between bodies.

For instance, the shape of the tongue or the shape of the nipple and breast tissue inside your baby's mouth changes according to how much or how little breast tissue there is, and the pressures of the vacuum and gravity and how they interact, as well as according to the elasticity of your unique breast tissue.

The anatomies of a woman's breast and body, of a baby's face, oral cavity and related structures and the little one's body, are incredibly diverse, like humanity itself. Vacuum is created and all parts of the interior of the baby's mouth are bathed in mucin and moistness. The edges of the tongue rise up to nestle around whatever breast tissue has been drawn up into the mouth (nipple and the areolar and the glandular tissue that sits under the areola) in a sensory bath.

This is dynamic interplay, a complex and sensitive interaction between a woman’s body and her baby’s body. The baby’s saliva is an extension of his immune system, rich with microbiome and anti-bacterial enzymes and immune cells. When a baby feeds from her mother’s breast, two immune systems become one complex and dynamic ecosystem (or complex adaptive system). A woman’s body with her milk and skin microbiomes and micronutrients and immune system factors becomes her baby’s body, her living tissue of the milk lines her baby’s gut, primes baby’s blood and organs and bones with immune protection.

Breastfeeding is the baby’s primal sensory motor experience, so that his nervous system is dialed down by the sensory and motor satisfaction of suckling, of relaxed and supported interaction with the maternal body. In breastfeeding he practices movement against gravity, exploring the world of his mother’s body through his senses.

I’m interested in the basic principles which help all women and their babies fit together for pain-free, efficient breastfeeding, in the context of our wondrously variable anatomies! This is holistic bodywork for a single biological mother-baby system which is applied during breastfeeding, a form of evolutionary bodywork called the gestalt method. To be research-based, it has to have a name which distinguishes it from other methods currently in use, so that it can be properly evaluated.

Recommended resources

Resilience, the butterfly effect, and being a biological system as you breastfeed your baby

Why it helps to think of you and your baby as a single biological system when you're facing breastfeeding challenges