Your breasts carry an incredibly robust 310 million year old genetic coding

Elsewhere in Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation I've suggested that you might pause for a moment when you have your bra off in front of a mirror, and notice some things about your breasts, which are working so hard for you right now. Even if breastfeeding isn't going quite right, do you have a moment to celebrate the mystery of your milk-making body?

The science of the last five decades might be able to tell us what's happening during lactation from the point of view of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, but as to why certain creatures on this small blue planet feed their babies from their own bodies, as if they are one body, in a way that mirrors the staggering generosity of life and the Universe itself - that remains a mystery!

Your breasts flow with milk in the same way life pours forth with nurturance and creativity

Your body offers milk to sustain life in the same way that the Universe, on a large scale, pours forth the great building blocks of life in the explosion of stars and supernovas (casting forth, unbelievably, the very same elements which are now recycled through your body and your mammary glands to create your milk).

The astonishing discoveries by the world's most brilliant scientific minds over the past century require us to describe life and indeed the Universe as a biospiritual or cosmological mystery. Quantum physicists, mathematical cosmologists, and astrophysicists tell us that particles of matter foam out of and disappear back into a vast, seethingly fecund and unthinkable emptiness, also referred to as dark energy. I think of it as Mystery.

I have no idea what to make of this, but the very latest deep science fills me with awe and wonder about life, and the human body, and also with a sense of responsibility to this fragile planet which sustains my life and yours, and which is so terrifying threatened by late capitalist, post-industrial culture.

Every second that passes, every vibration or breath of every creature or plant or microbe, every star that explodes, is a vast blossoming forth of the evolutionary creativity of the Universe. I need only listen to how the Universe speaks through my bodily sensations, my intuitions, my allurements, my longings, my joy, so that my own unique creativity, as part of the Universe, flourishes forth.

Reflecting on deep time can help us better enjoy this fleeting present time when we're caring for a baby (even when the going's tough)

Your body's milk, which sustains life, teaches us something fundamentally mythic, really, about life's incomprehensible abundance.

It has taken four million years of female hominim experimentation and creativity (and 310 million years of mammalian experimentation and creativity before that) to be able to do this amazing thing - regardless of whether you can exclusively breastfeed or not! Many women can't exclusively breastfeed, no matter how hard they try, but to my mind, that's not what really matters, in the big picture.

Your milk is a staggeringly complex living tissue, made by your very own body, only because of the biological creativity of your ancestral motherlines, evolving through experimentation from the dawn of time. How mysteriously magnificent your breasts are, every cell alive with primordial history, streaming (or leaking, or dripping) forth a magical elixir of nourishment and protection for your baby!

So one way of thinking about it is that your breasts are millions of years old, and your body has an incredibly resilient genetic coding for the pouring forth milk from your breasts once you've given birth.

The health system culture around us is not very good at calling forth our geneticallly encoded milk-making potential

The power lies is in your breasts - we just need to know as a society how to call your milk forth. As humans, cultural knowledge is required to activate and protect your genetically-encoded potential for milk production.

But this calling forth of your milk is something our health systems aren't very good at doing right now, because of the way the mechanistic or reductionist scientific paradigms have impacted upon cultural approaches to breastfeeding support over the past couple of hundred years.

In creating Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation, I hope to make a contribution to a 21st century paradigm shift in breastfeeding support, informed by new interdisciplinary sciences.

Selected references

Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. The universe story: from the primordial flaring forth to the ecozoic era - a celebration of the unfolding of the cosmos, 1994

Swimme, Brian. Cosmogenesis: an unveiling of the expanding universe, 2023