The Nurture Project

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The Power of Nurture

How can we create a peaceful society? How can we create a world in which humans live harmoniously with nature? How can we live abundant, joyful lives?

The key to these deep and lasting transformations is in weaving web of peaceful and harmonious relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, with the earth. This web of relationships must be made completely anew, created in a mode that is foreign to Western society, whose history has been created through modes of relation defined by domination, oppression, opposition, extraction, competition, and neglect.

These ways of relating that have dominated Western thought, and their instantiations in our colonial and post colonial societies, create psyches, patterns, and cycles of violence. Why? Because relationships built through oppression, extraction, domination and neglect are permeated to their core by lack, tension, animosity, and fear. When we stay in these modes of relation, we continue to perpetuate these psyches and cycles of violence, within ourselves, our families and our societies.

The path to a world of peace and harmony, therefore, is a completely distinct way of inhabiting and relating, a mode that creates that lines of possibility for relationships built on mutual care, benefit and trust.

This mode is NURTURE.

What is NURTURE?

Nurture means, simply, to give to a being what it needs to thrive.

Nurture is intimately related to nutrition, the receiving and processing of the nutrients needed to live and grow and be and do. Nurture means to feed on all levels, the soul, the mind, the heart, the body. Soil, ideas, emotions, tissues… all these need to be nurtured, given what they need to be fully themselves at their best. Nurture is love made practical, turned into an abundant source of all that the beloved needs to grow and thrive.

Nurture makes life possible, from the the continuation of physical existence to the growth of healthy minds, bodies and emotions. Every single life requires constant nurture, far more than we are equipped to realize. Western society has a huge blind spot concerning nurture. Western thought and colonial/postcolonial culture promote the misconception that nurture is unimportant. We focus on achievement, on expectations, on performance, on output. We pay little to no attention to the small and infinite acts of care and provision that set the ground for and ultimately make possible all action, success, enjoyment, and survival. When we do direct our attention toward nurture, for example, the care of children or other people in states of vulnerability, we frame it as “work” and construe it as exhausting and depleting. Nurture (care) work, such as that of young children or elderly persons, tens to be the lowest paid and the least trained of any profession. This work is regarded with disdain or simply overlooked by most members of our society.

It is no coincidence that our society neglects nurture. The modes of relation of the Western/modern/colonial project are built on the exclusion and suppression of nurture. Nurture is the opposite of competition, of trying to measure up, of leaving to your own devices. It is the opposite of dominion, oppression, of violence, of fear, of lack, of neglect. Nurture is the excluded other of Western society. Coloniality cannot tolerate nurture.

To remedy the violence and ills that run as deep and as far back as the beginnings of the Colonial project, we need precisely the mode of relating that Coloniality excludes. We need a society built from the ground up on nurture. In nurture, everyone benefits together. In nurture, we all have what we need. In nurture, we unfold trustingly knowing that our best and the best of the other are a harmonious whole. In nurture, we can all be well. Nurture is a mode in which all can be well in harmony together. When we see this, we enable it. We live it.

Trying to overcome the effects of Colonial modes of relating from within the same modes of relating is a recipe for frustration and failure. Another mode is available to us, and has been there the whole time, waiting for us to inhabit it. It is time to turn our attention away from the colonial modes that have done us so much damage and turn our efforts toward building relationships of nurture.

There is no life without nurture. There is no joy without nurture. There is no true success without nurture. There is no love without nurture. There is no peace without nurture. Nurture enables and feeds life and all things good, on every level, from the smallest to the greatest. Indeed, the POWER OF NURTURE to deeply and permanently transform our ways of being in the world and our ways of relating is limitless.

It is time we shift into this miraculous and life-affirming, life enabling mode. It is time to orient our efforts toward making a world where we honor nurture, make time and space for nurture, enjoy nurture, make nurture primary. While this is a fundamental and world transforming shift, it comes in small and ordinary packages. It is simple, ordinary, and accessible. This is a fundamental part of the shift – to an affirmation of the importance of the small and the ordinary. The vast, immense majority of nurturing acts and practices are simple and accessible. The beautiful thing about nurture is that it is is literally everywhere. Even in a society that overlooks and scorns it, we still need, give, and receive nurture. Once you begin to pay attention to it you see that nurture is everywhere, and opportunities to give and receive nurture are absolutely abundant in all our lives.

Rebuilding our society in the mode of nurture happens in the small spaces of everyday interactions. You can start with yourself, opening to the nurture within you and around you. You can start with your loved ones, with the small and large living beings around you, from the tiniest seed or baby to the largest tree and the oldest person you can find. Acts of nurture are generally small and “ordinary”, which means that they are accessible to all of us. We feel a ray of sun on our faces, breathe a breath of fresh air from the breeze. Notice the trill of a bird or the soaring of a butterfly on its delicate wings. Prepare a meal simply and with love. Give a hug. Listen with our full attention. Close our eyes to rest. Smile. Offer a glass of clean water.

All living things need nurture and all of life is an open invitation to give and receive nurture. As we turn more and more to nurture as a mode of relating, we find that our ability to give and receive nurture increases. We gain practice and skill in nurturing. We find that we begin to relax, to enjoy, to thrive. Those around us also thrive and we live in peace together. This is the reign of nurture, one we can build together one nurturing act and practice at a time.

The Power of Mothers

The world says that mothering, that investing time and energy in the home, is a failure to individualize, a failure to become fully human. A failure to realize one’s unique gifts and talents as a woman and a failure to contribute them to the world.

Mothering is seen as a burden that prevents women from doing what they are really capable of and meant to do.

What does this mean about the object of mothering: raising children? What is the corollary of feminism’s rejection of mothering as a fulfilling human life? Where does that rejection leave children? Where does it leave the future?

More than any other work, mothering is about investing in the future. It are about the transfer of inner human treasure from one more mature human being to another less developed human being. This work is delicate, long, time-sensitive, intimate. It requires attention, patience, dedication and perseverance, particular and personal knowledge, responsiveness, TIME.

It is, more than anything, PRIVATE work. It doesn’t have to be invisible work, but when we make public life the only focus, and home life the neglected back side of public life, parenting becomes invisibilized.

All the time that we are investing in those beings whose future potential is under our influence is time we are out of the public eye, not contributing to the current situation beyond our walls. It is a work deferred in time. The fruits of this work, as perceived by society, come later, years later, decades later. In this sense, it seems reasonable to construe it as a sacrifice because there are so many other, more visible contributions to the world that we cannot do because our time and energy are being poured into a future that does not yet exist. I sometimes feel that in a way, my time as a public human being is over and my children’s is yet to come. It is a liminal time that we inhabit where all my efforts, dreams, and investment just go deep underground, only to reappear in a decade or two or three or four, continuing on long past the moment when I leave this earth.

Only a very immature and shortsighted society could fail to recognize the utter importance that this quiet, long work has. The temporary retreat of our energies is a necessary part of equipping the future generation of humans to thrive, to create better realities, to live in new and more harmonious ways on this earth. If we are unwilling to let women, or even men, take a decade or two of retreat from public life to plant the seeds of the future, what kind of future can we imagine it to be?

In another way, being a mother is about investing your time and energy in the fleeting daily processes that support the health and happiness of your children. What does a child need from their parents RIGHT NOW? Presence, attention. Respect, listening, wisdom. The right words at the right time, the right model for the right kind of living. Love. Abundant, unlimited, unconditional love. These are the atmosphere, the nourishment, the stuff of a good and happy childhood. Children don’t live in the future. They don’t live in the past. They live now. They know whether their good is happening here and now and it matters. The quality of their lives NOW is the best indicator of the quality of their lives LATER because these early life experiences create their set points, their expectations, their norms for what human life should be like and how it should be lived.

This work has material, physical prerequisites: shelter, nourishing food, safety, warmth. These are fundamental but they are only the beginning of the story of mothering. Mothers shelter hearts, nourish minds. Mothers create emotional the emotional safety of knowing we are always loved, always supported, always wanted. Mothers see what we want to learn and find ways to help us get there. Mothers ensure that our needs are attended to, our voices heard, our desires met with good things. Mothers make it possible for us to survive and to thrive. These are the true treasure of humanity….the knowledge that we can be well and what it is we need to be well, how to relate with others in ways that enable us all to be well, how to trust that our needs will be met and look upon our inner realities with love, compassion and affection….these are only the fruit of high quality mothering! They can be obtained no other way. If we don’t get this kind of mothering in our childhood, we have to learn, painfully and slowly, how to become that mother to ourselves. One way or another, we can only learn these things through our relationship with the Mother.

This is why Mothering is actually the most important, actualizing, society-enriching job. It is the foundation upon which all other types of thriving must be built. Until we can recognize the power and value of this work, our society will continue to be a high rise, wobbling on bare ground with no foundation to secure its growth. We will continue to see people who grow into adulthood deeply lacking in inner security and the resources necessary for developing trusting, mutually caring relationships with others. We will continue to foment violence, aggression, depression, despair.

This is a tragedy because the truth is simple and the tools to heal these evils is within our grasp. It is within us, in a return to understanding truth, goodness, and reality as gifts of a loving Mother. This mother consciousness has been lost in Western society as we lost touch with the divine feminine, as we built our society on a rejection of feminine powers and feminine care. When the Mother consciousness is the excluded other of our ways of thought, the result is a society without the capacity to receive nurture, a society so deeply lacking within and expressing that lack through constant anger and violence. The solution is simple. We need Mothers. We need Mothering and Mother care as the forefront and foundation of our lives and work.

When we rotate and open the door back open to the lost Mother Consciousness within, we awaken to the infinite healing power already at work through everyday, ordinary mothering.

Decolonizing Our Homes

One of the most overlooked and undervalued aspect of contemporary society is home and family life. Unless you have a particular religious commitment that motivates you to invest your time and energy in your family and the intimacy of what happens in the world you create in your home space, the reality is that all the pressures of the world go towards spending more and more time and energy on what happens outside the home. More visibility, more investment, more business and social projects, more recognition.

I see this as a natural result of the long train of Western thought that legitimizes a person’s humanity via a their participation in the public sphere. In the days of the Greeks, this public sphere was limited to men of a certain class. Over time we have expanded and opened the public sphere, one by one granting the rights of various groups to inhabit, act, and be recognized within this sphere. These are important gains.

But one corresponding loss is that as the public has gained space in our lives, the private has lost space, until truly what happens in the private sphere is not only private but also unimportant, simply because it cannot be recognized by others from without. This explains why all domains of life have been made public, and the aspects of our lives that we used to often care for in private are now taken from the home and made part of public life. I especially mean the very central task of caring for the next generation of human beings and educating them for life in the world. As a corollary to women entering the public sphere both politically and economically, the world of child care and education has become a public sphere, with public spaces such as day cares, preschools, and primary and secondary schools being the spaces we as a society understand to be responsible for the raising and preparation of our children for life in the world and in society. Pressure on the schools and on businesses and institutions to raise children properly has grown exponentially as the pressure and expectations, as well as the value, placed on home life, have receded.

Of course, parents still parent. And many try to do so to their utmost ability, looking for resources and research to help them train their children in new and different ways from those their own parents used to train them. This is all well and wonderful. But I maintain that the broadest pressure, including on committed parents, is to consistently spend LESS time and energy on parenting and all the invisible labor it involves, including maintaining a welcoming and nurturing home space and investing in solid, supportive relationships with our children. These things take time, lots of time, and lots of private and unpaid time. In a world where we are when and because we are recognized and paid, homemaking and caring for your OWN children in the privacy of your OWN home have become invisible and without importance. This is one reason that blogs and podcasts and Instagram accounts about homemaking and homeschooling have become so popular in recent decades: they make visible the invisible. They create a public space for showing and sharing what it is we do all day, and allows others to witness, recognize, and value the investment of our time and energy in these tasks.

Now, I actually see the pressure to do anything and everything BUT be in the privacy of your home with your family to be a corollary of the colonial mindset that can best control and exploit people when it takes charge of the intimate tasks of family life. Many families who realize the danger this presents and the damage inflicts every day have chosen to decolonize their families by investing their adult time and energy in homemaking, parenting, and homeschooling.

The truth is that the home is an incredibly POWERFUL space. In the space of the home happens so much of what we truly need. Without the power of this intimate space, we cannot and will not effectively inhabit and use our public sphere to create effective and healing actions that benefit us and humanity as a whole. In the home, our most basic and intimate needs can be met, our needs for comfort and nourishment and what used to be called “society”, meaning intimacy between friends. No public space can really offer these things because they are deeply personal. We need private spaces to nurture our bodies and our inmost selves. We need privacy to rest, quiet and peace to take stock of our needs, time to prepare nourishing meals, attention to our particular rhythms and quirks so as to create an atmosphere that is comfortable and welcome to US.

Families and children need home as a safe place to grow, change, go out from and return to. The relationships that form the basis of inner security and peace are relationships of leisurely time, relationships that allow us to see, hear, witness, accept, support, and love one another exactly as we are. These are intimate relationships that require intimate spaces. Spaces of empowerment from within, of growing to know how valuable we are, how loved, how important. These are intimate spaces that create healthy human beings, humans who know how to have their needs met while respecting the humanity and caring for the needs of diverse others.

Birth Without Fear, Birth Without Pain

Dr. Grantly Dick-Read’s Simple Instructions for a Joyful, Pain Free Childbirth

A review of Dr. Grantly Dick-Read’s 1942 book Childbirth Without Fear

When I was pregnant I read so many books on managing labor! There are a lot of helpful approaches out there these days for women interested in having an empowered birth experience. Recently I went back and read this classic book that inspired many of the natural birth educators whose teachings on birth we still rely on today, like Ina May Gaskin, Sheila Kitzinger and Michael Odent. I was surprised, then, when I read Dr. Dick-Read’s instructions for a pain-free birth and learned some things I had never heard before! I wish I had read this book when I first got pregnant, so I thought I would review it to share some of his advice with others who are looking for help with their births.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century, in a time when obstetricians in the U. S. were implementing mandatory use of anesthesia and forceps, Dr. Dick-Read, like most of his obstetrician colleagues, was convinced that labor and birth were agonizing ordeals and anesthesia was a merciful medical necessity to relieve his laboring patients from their suffering. In 1903, however, inspired by a country woman who repeatedly refused his attempts to give her chloroform for pain during the birth of her child, Dr. Dick-Read began to investigate the possibilities and realities of natural childbirth, When he asked this woman afterward why she had refused his treatment, she said, “It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t meant to, was it, doctor?” This simple statement lingered in his mind for years and eventually caused a complete revolution in the way he conceived of the presence and role of pain in childbirth.

Pain, biologically speaking, plays a protective role, warning us of danger and injury. Why, Dr. Dick-Read wondered, would something so necessary to the survival of the species as childbirth be accompanied with pain? After graduating from Cambridge, fighting as a medic in World War 1, and training in Obstetrics in the London Hospital, a young Dr. Dick-Read wrote his first book manuscript in 1919, in which he explained his theory that pain in childbirth is a largely unnatural, culturally-materially produced phenomenon. Relying on cutting edge research into the mind-body interactions that produce pain, he described what he refers to as the fear-tension-pain syndrome: the mind perceives danger, the body tenses and prepares to combat the danger, and the result of this tension is pain as a response of the tense body to certain stimuli. Pain can be avoided if the body is not unnecessarily tense, which it often is in pregnancy and childbirth, as a result of common anxieties and fears as well as modern life, which promotes stressful, tense bodily habits and patterns.[1]

In the early Twentieth Century it was an obstetric dogma that childbirth was a harrowing, anguished, and dangerous ordeal that, in the name of safety and mercy, required significant medical intervention. Dr. Dick-Read was among the first obstetricians to propose and support a trend toward natural childbirth. He writes of thousands of women who, on their own and with his help, birthed their children without pain. Many of his very skeptical colleagues asked him, “Why do so many women experience pain, then, if pain is not a necessary part of labor and birth?” Dr. Dick-Read argued that in a society in which obstetric medicine, popular culture, and women’s storytelling between themselves conditions women to expect pain and suffering during labor and birth, fear of childbirth is the norm. So the near-universal experience of pain during childbirth is not because birth is biologically painful, but because we expect it to be so: our fearful expectations create the painful reality they expect.

Dr. Dick-Read’s theory began from his observations of natural births with no medical intervention in which women gave birth without pain, and on the contrary, often with feelings of elation, joy, and spiritual ecstasy. In 1932 he finally published his manuscript, revised and expanded with case studies from 13 years of clinical experience in obstetrics, as the book Natural Birth, aimed mostly at midwives and physicians. In 1942 he wrote Birth Without Fear to share his educational experiences and methods with a wider audience, and it became an international best-seller. His observation of thousands of births over his 40-year career in obstetrics caused him to believe that elation and joy are the natural emotional state of childbirth – either because of the hormonal process that accompany a relaxed, fearless birth, or because of a beautiful life force at work in bringing new humans into the world, or both. His clinical experiences led him to assert in Childbirth Without Fear that 90-97% of women ought to be able to have a relaxed, fearless, painless birth. [2]

There are several crucial components to breaking the cycle of fear-tension-pain in childbirth, but according to Dr. Dick-Read, the most important one is education. Since the fear-tension-pain syndrome is a product of a deep mind-body harmony, it needs to be addressed at the level of thoughts and emotions, and at the level of the physical body. Dispelling fear and anxiety, both generally and about motherhood and birth itself, are crucial to helping a mother enter the emotional-physical state she needs to be in in order to birth without pain. He believed that the obstetrician’s main task was to educate women to understand that birth could be painless and enjoyable. He also recommended that midwives and obstetricians help women know what to expect during pregnancy and labor so that they can handle the changes and movements of their body in an intelligent and helpful way. He also advocated that pregnant women train in progressive relaxation. This way when labor starts, they are able to reach a state of deep relaxation without much effort by relying on the habits built during pregnancy. In addition, he emphasized the importance of women training women to control how they interpret the strong sensations from the laboring uterus and cervix. During labor, a women will experience a changing series of stresses, effort, expansion and contraction, and stretching in the uterus and cervix. The expectation of pain can cause women to interpret these sensations as painful, which results in a tense body and launches a fear-tension-pain cycle that is difficult to break. Learning how to recognize these sensations as work, rather than pain, is crucial to a relaxed and painless birth.

Childbirth Without Fear is so much more than a manual for natural birth. It is an anthropological gem. Dr. Dick-Read’s book includes not only anecdotes from his many years of clinical experience, his opinions about the role of men in pregnancy and birth, his commentaries on the state of obstetrical medicine, and his responses to his critics, but also his musings on marriage, about the viability of deism or materialism for explaining the universe in a meaningful way, and even recounts some of his experiences in the First World War. Some of his anecdotes comments seem terribly old-fashioned, and others are still perfectly timely and relevant.

But since pregnant women and their care givers may not have the time or interest to wade through the additional material, I have distilled his clinical and educational recommendations to make them more accessible.

Dr. Dick-Read’s Instructions for a healthy, enjoyable birth

What to do during pregnancy:

Spend your pregnancy as happy as possible. This ideally includes emotional and physical support from your partner so that you do not feel alone with your all the feelings and changes that pregnancy and motherhood bring.
Pregnancy is an important time for attending to your fears and anxieties. According to Dr. Dick-Read, women often transfer other anxieties onto their attitudes about pregnancy and birth when they get pregnant. This produces a tense, unhappy pregnancy and can lead to health complications in both mother and baby. In addition, fears about pregnancy and birth are very common in our society. These fears and anxieties are normal, but need to be dealt with and dispelled in an emotionally supportive context that includes loved ones and health care providers. He actually recommends that obstetricians and midwives play this role – of caring for each pregnant woman’s mind so that she can be calm, confident, and happy during both pregnancy and birth.
Practice progressive relaxation during pregnancy. This helps to eliminate muscle tension from the body, which is the cause of pain in childbirth. Without muscle tension, there will not be pain. Dr. Dick-Read’s mantra was ¨Tense woman, tense cervix; relaxed woman, relaxed cervix.”
He recommends not worrying too much about your diet. He says that women from all kinds of cultures and places with widely varying food availability and nutrition give birth to healthy babies. Limit your alcohol intake and eat relatively healthfully and relax and enjoy your food.[1]

What to do when labor begins:

When your uterus/abdomen is tightening rhythmically and repeatedly, perhaps starting every 20 minutes and getting more frequent with time, you are entering the first stage of labor, in which your uterus works to open your cervix to allow your baby to pass through. The best thing you can do during this phase is to disengage your mind and let your uterus contract without your conscious awareness or interference. The more you try to engage mentally with these first phase contractions, the more likely you are to experience tension and pain.

Dr. Dick-Read actually recommends lying in bed in a state of total relaxation. This is why relaxation practice during pregnancy is so important, so that you are easily able to enter that state.

Obstetricians and midwives’ role during this time is to assess the mental state of the laboring woman, and discuss and help her to dispel any fears or anxieties she may have at the onset of labor. They should take significant time at the beginning of labor to help you relax into a patient, calm, and relaxed state.

The ideal emotional states for labor and birth are calm, slow, and gentle. You will be very sensitive to suggestions during this time, so only allow companions who are reassuring, calm, slow, and gentle with you. Patience is the best friend and guardian of a safe and healthy birth. Birth is hard work, and it is important to be surrounded by people who allow you to move gently and gradually through each phase as it unfolds, without anxiety, pressure, or hurry.
Use deep breathing to relax during contractions as they intensify, and maintain a fully relaxed state between contractions.
At certain moments, like during the height of contractions, you may experience a feeling of impending agony. This is only an expectation created by the effort of the uterine muscles as they contract. If you pay careful attention you will see that this feeling dissolves before the pain ever occurs. It is important to know to expect this feeling and to be able to dispel it without leaping ahead into the fear/tension/pain cycle.
The only biologically possible or probable moments of pain might be the last few (6-8) contractions of the first stage, when the cervix stretches fully open to 10 cm. If this is the case, continue to relax and breathe deeply and know that in just a few contractions this will pass. Strong pressure or massage on the sacrum can help relieve this pain.
The mostly likely state to follow full dilation of the cervix is a deep relaxation, a nearly sleepy state. Try to enter this as fully as possible, leaving conscious awareness behind as much as you can.
When you start to feel an urge to push, you are entering the second stage of labor. In this stage, it is important to help the uterus with conscious effort and careful breath control. When you feel a contraction, breathe in deeply and then hold your breath, using your muscles to consciously help the uterus by pushing. Most likely you will make sounds to help relieve the tension as you release air after pushing.[2] Between pushing contractions, take two or three full breaths to clear the carbon dioxide (from the conscious and uterine muscle effort) from your blood and then return to a very deep relaxation between contractions. This is the stage where the contractions are the most work, but the relaxation should also be the deepest between them.
When you start to feel a burning sensation in your perineum, this is normal and means the head is crowning. At this point, in order to keep your perineum intact (to avoid tearing), it is very important to fully relax all the abdominal muscles and let the uterus do all the work. During crowning and the final expulsion of the baby, use short quick breaths (panting) to help relax all your other abdominal muscles so that the uterus is the only muscle pushing the baby out through the birth canal. This allows the perineum to slowly adjust to the baby’s head and stretch, rather than tear, to allow the baby to pass through.
When you catch your baby, gently help it pass its head up and over the pubic bone (rather than pulling it straight out). This also relieves tension on the birth canal and prevents tearing.
Ideally you and baby both will want to nurse right away. Bring your baby to your chest and allow it to nuzzle your nipple and/or suckle. This helps promote the birthing of the placenta in a timely fashion and prevents hemorrhage. It also begins your bonding with your newborn and gives you both time to enjoy the great accomplishment of birthing and being born!

What to look for when you choose a birth care provider:

The Virtues of Birth Care: Dr. Dick-Read’s 3 P’s and 3 C’s

Personal interest
Peacefulness
Patience;
Confidence
Concentrated observation
Cheerfulness

Your birth care provider should know you personally and have a relationship of confidence with you so that you can talk honestly about your fears and anxieties both during pregnancy and during labor. This personal interest should extend to include the time and compassion to understand your personal history and the desire and ability to keep you company as you labor. Your own mental and emotional states are vulnerable to suggestion during pregnancy and especially during birth, so your care provider should help you shape your expectations for pregnancy and birth in a spirit of confidence, cheerfulness, and peacefulness – leading you to expect that things are progressing normally, that you will enjoy birth, that there is nothing to fear, that you and your baby are competent and capable. The majority of births are healthy and normal, and your provider should have an attitude of calm confidence in the health of natural birth, rather than an attitude of searching for and expecting abnormalities. Concentrated attention allows care providers to focus their efforts on recognizing the boundaries of healthy pregnancy and birth without focusing excessively on problem cases or potential risks. Patience is one of the ultimate virtues of a birth care provider, because it “carries health to both baby and child.” Many unnecessary and potentially harmful interventions can be avoided if your care provider is prepared to let your birth unfold in its own natural time, without hurry.

FOOTNOTES

[1] What a difference from today’s micromanaging of pregnant women’s diets! As someone who followed a pretty clearly defined nutritional scheme during pregnancy, I am not really sure what I make of this, but in the spirit of a relaxed pregnancy I thought it was important to include it.

[2] This seems to be a biological need that helps the body release pressure from the chest in a gradual way.

The Unbearable Permeability of Being

This post is about the concept of permeability. A strange word, perhaps an unfamiliar one in discussions about health. But recently I can’t stop thinking about how permeable our bodies are. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the creams and soaps and underarm odor preventers we use – all of these end up influencing what we become and how we change because they permeate our bodies and our cells.

This fact is widely recognized in Western culture and medicine, although in narrowly defined ways. Take issues of weight, for example. It is accepted as fact that what and how much we eat has a direct impact on the shape and size of our bodies. People modify their behavior based on this understanding, attempting to lose weight by changing the chemical composition of their meals and snacks – fewer carbs, fewer fats, fewer calories. We also recognize permeability when it is too obvious to avoid – in cases where we intake substances that quickly make us ill – like severe alcohol poisoning or toxic levels of exposure to metals like lead.

Yet this same principle, the same underlying fact about the permeability of our bodies – that they are open to and susceptible their environments – thoroughly informs our existence at every moment and in every way. All the cells in our body are permeable. It is this openness to the outside that allows our cells and organ systems to function in ways that promote life – allows oxygen and nutrients and proteins and everything else we need to be exchanged and moved and transformed into energy and movement and activity. Our bodies are constantly exchanging substances not only within themselves but also with the world around us through our skin, respiratory and digestive organs, and other tissues. This makes us vulnerable and susceptible in dynamic and powerful ways to our environments. What we eat, drink, and breathe ends up in our blood and our tissues and can have important and long-lasting effects on how our bodies function and change over time.

It seems clear that this thorough going permeability is not fully accounted for in the way mainstream allopathic (Western) medicine thinks about health and disease. Permeability is an underlying factor in both health and illness, because what permeates us influences our bodies in both positive and negative ways. The relationship between permeability and diet, for example, extends in both degree and complexity far beyond questions of body size. The overall functioning of our bodies, including their temperatures, synchronicities, and energies, depends on their abilities to take in a particular, wide range of nutrients and minerals in specific combinations and amounts. Why aren’t we paying more attention to this fact in our research and education about chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, etc.? Might it be the case that people who develop these diseases aren’t getting enough of these vital substances from their food, perhaps because they don’t know how to eat well, or don’t have access to the right kinds of foods, or because, due to unsustainable agricultural practices, their food itself is not absorbing all these substances from the soil? If we look at developmental disease through the lens of permeability, we will be inclined to see that nutritional deficiencies might set the stage for, or trigger, latent (genetic) potentials for these illnesses.

On the negative side of permeability, these illnesses might also be caused by bodies absorbing substances from their environments that cause their normal processes to go awry. The permeation of bodies by various substances that have detrimental effects over time has been suggested as an explanation for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. Excess aluminum in the cells of the brain and body, for example, is thought to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. Aluminum is present in food (through cookware) or drinking water (aluminum sulfate is used for filtering), and then gets absorbed by the tissues and cells of the body (Pitchford 112). Chemical components of certain plastics, like phthalates and vinyl chloride, are also known to be absorbed by the body through the digestive and respiratory systems where they disrupt the endocrine system and cause cancer, particularly in young children whose smaller, less developed systems are less able to rid their bodies of these toxins (Tuana 200-1).

Why aren’t these relationships being more fully researched? According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and is the only leading cause of death that cannot be prevented, cured, or even slowed. Clearly we need a new way to conceive of this disease if, in over 100 years, we have found no medically effective way to intervene to stop, prevent, or alleviate it. The only suggestion given to the public by the NIH concerning “environmental” causes of the disease is that obesity might play a role (as it might in other diseases like heart disease). Why hasn’t more attention been given to environmental influences? This is especially alarming since environmental causes in the form of widely used chemical products have been linked to other degenerative nerve diseases like Parkinson’s (see this article from BBC health). The ability of plastics, pesticides, and other environmental toxins to cause cancer in humans and other mammals and animals is widely recognized, and yet, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her essay “Welcome to Cancerland”, the American Cancer Society spends less than .1 percent of its annual budget to researching environmental and occupational causes of cancer.

This is extremely problematic, not only scientifically, but ethically. People are suffering in unimaginable ways. We must figure out why so many of us are getting cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic illnesses. In order to do so, we urgently need to face the fact that as embodied organisms, we are highly permeable and highly susceptible to the substances in our environment. It is inconvenient that this is the case, since our industrial modes of production are filling our environment with new chemicals and other substances whose long-term, accumulated effects in our bodies are unknown and difficult and expensive to test. But as long as we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that we are individual atomic units that can operate independently from what we put into the air we breathe and the food and water we consume and the products we spread on our skin, the true causes of and solutions to widespread chronic diseases will continue to go undiscovered.

Sources:

Pitchford, Paul. Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition (2002).

Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina”. In Material Feminisms, edited by S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (2008), 188-213.