A breast metaphor

I set a challenging boundary with someone recently.

They wanted to process something unrelated to me or our relationship and I’d recently made it clear that I was not available for the topic.

So when they launched into it anyway I stopped them, simply saying, “I’m not available for this.”

They were visibly taken aback.

There was a long silence between us.

I did not apologize. Or make nice.

I didn’t soften the delivery of my boundary.

I didn’t spin out about how they would now feel about my (re)setting this boundary.

I did not abandon myself.

I held my center.

This is an act of self-devotion.

When we are rooted in and give from our center, everyone wins.

It’s not a ‘win’ in the sense that everyone is happy. Or comfortable. Or that it’s easier (for either of us).

Or in the sense that fears are allayed or stories/identities are affirmed.

But in the sense that the Highest Good is served.

And it may bring up some shit. Which may be uncomfortable.

But after you move past the discomfort of staying –
staying committed to the truest thing in you, staying devoted to the Truth as you know it, holding your center
– something else opens up.

If we buy into the stories we love to tell about women who stay rooted in and committed to their center –
she’s a bitch, she’s cold, selfish, unloving, she’s full of herself, she’s narcissistic
– we will see these women as a threat, an affront to what it means to be a ‘good woman’.

And she actually is a threat.

A woman who will not move from her center will challenge you.

She will be inconvenient to your story.

She will not swear allegiance to victimhood – yours or anyone else’s.

Many of us do not know how to play nicely with this kind of woman, let alone support her or be her.

One of the things I saw nearly every day when I worked with new mothers and their hours-old infants was that when most women are learning to breastfeed their baby, they move their breast to the baby.

This means contorting themselves physically, sitting in a way that is both uncomfortable and creates more tension in their bodies.

As the body goes, so goes the mind.

This kind of breastfeeding is both unpleasant and difficult to sustain. And the result is a painful, ineffective latch that causes nipple damage and less-than-optimal milk-transfer.

In other words, you get a still-hungry baby and a more exhausted mother who is in pain.

When we come to anything from the place of self-compromise – moving off our center in order to meet some perceived need or believing “I have to make this work for them” – we invariably lose. All of us.

But…when the mother sits comfortably supported,
aligns the baby with her own body as the reference point,
holds the baby firmly but gently,
and brings the baby onto her breast,
(anatomically and metaphorically located at her heart-center),
only then can the baby get a deep latch and a good feeding.

This is deeply symbolic.

This re-learning that I am my center.

I hold my center.

I am responsible for holding my center.

I offer what I have from this place and no other

because I know

that to do so any other way is ineffective, causes pain, and distorts what wants to come through me into the world.

Learning to breastfeed can be incredibly awkward, on so many levels, and challenging for many reasons, some we may be completely unaware of.

(Did you know that pitocin and epidurals, two of the most commonly-used birth interventions, can alter a newborn’s innate suckling reflexes for up to a month after birth? What we think has no impact can show up as a struggle that most mothers will assume is their failure. But this is a soapbox for another time.)

Many women come to the act of breastfeeding with an already long-established pattern of accommodating, of moving off their center in order to give and be in relationship.

When we must abandon any part of ourselves, any part of the truth as we know it –

this looks like self-censoring,
not knowing we have the right to our boundaries,
being silent because it’s easier,
faking an orgasm so our partner can feel good/be oblivious to the pleasure we are not having

– when we distort or compromise any part of ourselves, what we give is compromised.

We suffer and those who would receive from and be in relationship with us suffer.

We actually give less.

Less of the gorgeousness of who we are.

Less of the power of our truth.

Less of the strength and stability we transmit when rooted in our center.

It only seems like we are making it easier for the other to get what they need, or to be happy, or for all of us to get along.

But we are making a profound compromise of our capacity to give — and of our life-giving capacity to create — when we will not hold our center in relationship to another.

The truth is that what lives within us is mind-blowing. Just as we have yet to identify all the thousands of components of breastmilk, the several hundred that we do know are pretty fucking amazing in all they do and make possible, we, too, contain entire universes.

Most of us contain a potency of Life that we have likely never tapped, let alone acknowledged.

When we stay rooted in our center – out of deep love for ourselves, out of deep devotion to That Which Moves Through Us Without Any Effort of Our Own – when we will not move from anywhere but that place, we all become fuller.