Preach It!

No one can tell a woman what is best for her and her baby ... waterbirth, homebirth, hospital birth, doctor, midwife, Unassisted Childbirth (UC) or cesarean surgery ... it is for her and her baby to know. The best we can do is support her to access, trust, and know her own inner wisdom and communicate with the Being within her - the One whose birth it is through her womb and the man. - Janel Mirendah, Attachment/Birth trauma therapist, Filmmaker of The Other Side of the Glass.

Watch It! (The Trailer)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Breastfeeding -- the key to a healthy relationship

The news in Los Angeles today is interesting. Breastfeeding woman is harassed by female employees at Cost Plus World Market in Orange County.
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Mother-Harassed-for-Breastfeeding-in-Public-101427799.html

Meanwhile, another headline is "Man Arrested Near Paris Hilton's Home" over a picture of her with her huge, fake breasts jutted upward. (Blogger has changed and I can't find how to upload pics!)

Posters on the news about the breastfeeding woman vary from the breastfeeding supporters to those who believe we are not a third-world country, she should go the car or bathroom, breastfeeding in public, maybe anywhere is being not classy, and examples of seeing it in public with men staring at the woman's breasts ... all reasons against it. Oh, several posters said it's like defecating ... you don't do that in public, do you?

My response to this article's posters and to the world:

Being breastfed is a human right. It is a BABY's right to be breastfed whenever hungry & mother's responsibility to do so. If we would stop seeing it as a woman's right only and see it as the right and ...need of human baby (hers when she was a baby, yours when you were a baby), maybe those of you with issues about seeing it could begin to get over it.

Breastfeeding is same as defecating ONLY if we are talking about a baby who is doing either or both. Do you expect a mother with a pooping baby to leave? No.You laugh as if a normal process is funny. Do YOU eat in bathroom, closet, hot car or with blanket on your head? So why do you expect a baby to be treated that way? Most likely your mother walked around a store with chemical formula in a bottle feeding you. You got fed in public.

We've had generations of misinformation and downright lies, all based on, yeah, you guessed, money, about formula as better, and therefore, a majority of humans did not get what they needed -- HUMAN MILK, from their MOTHER, and on demand. Now you spend money trying to "create abundance" in your life when your early brain tells you there ain't none. When the breast and mother is available to the newborn when she or he needs it ... for food, for comfort, for connection ... THAT person will KNOW abundance, and that everything they need is there for them. THAT, my friends, is the real "Secret." It was your right and your child's right to be breastfeed and since you didn't, you see it as nasty, and worse, you see a mother-baby breastfeeding and you see it as sexual. You see love and connectedness only as sexual.

Breastfeeding is NORMAL. Not being breastfed is one of the most devastating, fundamental causes of many physical and emotional issues in our culture. Anyone here against it for whatever reason, if you go and look at truth of the science and what has ALWAYS been true about breastfeeding, and MOTHER-BABY attachment, and you deal with fact that you weren't and you didn't give it to your child (BECAUSE the system, experts LIED to you or your mother), you can get over "shock" of seeing what is normal and natural and absolutely necessary.

Now, will you please go after women walking through that store with all but her nipples hanging out, butt cheeks, tattoos, & belly ring showing that is supposedly "normal"? And, those man-boobs, please do call security. And, can you go after industries that sexualize even little girls, capturing them as little consumers before they can even read their ABC's? Can you go after Miley and Brittney to keep their teenage breasts covered so our little girls are not pressed to follow these role models in slutdom? So that a when she's a woman breastfeeding her baby her breasts are not seen as sexual, merely for men's pleasure, and she is not ostracized for doing most natural, necessary thing in the world.

Thanks Mom for breastfeeding me for a year ... in 1956 .. the height of the industrialization complex and when sheeple thought you were "behind" the times, so I could do it too in 1975 (and 1977, 1983, and 1994) when I was weird and uncool for breastfeeding. Thanks for helping me to see that "mothering" was the most important job I could so. Of all the things I've been through with my children, I see that breastfeeding was the magic bullet that helped us recover from birthing in the medical machine designed to separate mother and baby.

One of the sad truths is that men do sexualize the breasts and wombyns. I was on youtube on an exercise segment and I was shocked at the comments, presumably by men about how annoyed they were that the picture of nice butt lured them in and it wasn't that good to masturbate to. SO MANY! Men masturbate to work out videos, I knew this, but dang, the things people say when they think they are anonymous, like on Youtube in general.

So, yeah, men are also supposedly masturbating to breastfeeding images these days. Scandals have broken about Facebook creeps trying to get access to breastfeeding pictures. Men luring at wombyns and baby breastfeeding IS a big issue. And, yeah, it's god-awful, but dang, it IS INFORMATION folks. Like the father in my film says, referring to circumcision, overpowering wombyns at birth, and men's experience, "We have to stop the harming and heal those who were harmed."

Male babies are so profoundly harmed at birth. We can not stop disrupting the mother-baby at birth fast enough for me. Inside me, every fiber of me wants to go HULK on those who continue to separate and harm babies, acting out THEIR own traumas and getting paid so well to do so. It's outrageous to watch male and female babies and how they are treated at birth. We can not begin fast enough to insist that medical caregivers support the self-attachment and support women in doing this. I am amazed at the women who say they want to do this profound, natural, simply done, physiologically programmed event -- supporting baby to crawl to her breast and self-attach himself or herself, and then they don't. This is a symptom of a wombyns own wounding, her own fear of attachment and connectedness. We humans are so confusing. Come here, go away. She offers her sexuality, her breasts and then doesn't deliver. She can't; she's not mama. "I have to have her" and then he cheats on her, or beats her, or ridicules her. And then he hates himself and then he compensates. Oh, how well, we all know of this cycle. Trying to connect with the Mama. Instead we collectively destroy her, the Mama Earth, and we harm wombyn. It begins with denying her body, mind, and soul the power and dignity birthing as a female body, and as a young girl programming her with false images of what a wombyn is and it culminates in the drugging, controlling, and manipulating of her during childbirth ... when she brings forth another life, a little boy or girl baby. The cycles repeat.

We can not fast enough STOP the genital mutilation of our precious little boys. I can not even begin to know, to touch how profoundly most men in this country have been harmed as a newborn, and how it is to live life through this PREVERBAL rape and violation. Allowing my oldest son, even though I was young and uninformed, to experience this to have allowed it is the hardest thing for me to forgive. I was holding him and I do believe this has allowed me the information I needed to really see what happened and the need to address it. They no longer allow a parent to be there. For good reason ... they don't want you to see it. They make a lot of money from that foreskin. If you see it, you talk about it.

Circumcision is a sexual violation. They often manually make the boy's penis erect to do it. Strange women TOOK him from his mother in his first moments of life when every cell of his is programmed to reconnect with her. These women "bonded" with him by being the first to look into his eyes, talk to him, touch him, FEEDING him with a rubber nipple (women also robbed of this with their own babies do it to other women) ... all in violating way .. after robbing him of his cord blood by separating him from his transitional Life Force/God/Creator/Allah in the womb with him. Then WOMEN tied him down so that his penis is sexually mutilated. The nerve densest piece of skin on his body made to give him pleasure by communicating with his brain is now missing, and the brutal pain of cutting it off puts him in shock. He was BORN a whole being, ready for love and connection. We all are. We are welcomed with strangers inflicting pain, fear, and self-serving separation that, as they wish it to be, is blamed on our mother's. Mothers take it on as their guilt, rather than seeing they too are violated and prevented from giving their well-loved and gestated babies what they know in every cell to be what he or she needs. Mothers and babies live with the impact of separation and hospital systems continue to crank out wounded, wounded, wounded human beings.

These men we speak of angrily, the violence in society we seek to end, wars, harming women and children, pornography, masturbating to breast-feeding pics or exercise videos, to molesting children .... ALL of them have experienced some combination of being conceived and gestated unwanted, born with doctor-nurse inflicted trauma, not allowed to feel her touch first, gaze into her eyes first, to crawl with her gentle support to her breast to self attach, but instead were separated from their mothers, force fed formula by strangers (force fed because a baby's stomach is only the size of a hazelnut, enough to hold a super-duper shot of colostrum), and then he was circumcised.

These men never had the comfort of the mother's breast no matter how they tried. Babies DO try over and over to get to the breast of the mother. Formula feeding mothers know this if they allow it to come through to them ... how their babies try to get to their breasts. Well, they never stop trying, folks - baby boys or baby girls. So, of course, they sexualize the breasts and breastfeeding. Of course men go masturbate to these images, or a young male after seeing a breastfeeding baby at the breast. I am sorry my sister's whose path it is to push this boundary for us all -- public breastfeeding -- may or may not know this. It's not their problem. It's yours if you have an issue with seeing a breastfeeding baby. An adult male is simply, yet profoundly, trying to connect all that was lost, oh, so much that was so lost. So, of course young girls and women are profoundly impacted by their images related to their breasts too - how they look, how men respond to them. Why is it ok for our teenage girls to expose their breasts ... to gain love and connection and attention they yearn for? The young Heidi who had ten surgeries in one day and can not legally in the US have a bigger breast implant. My goodness, what do these boys and girls really want? What do these men really want? All misplaced ... poor little babies.

All of this can be ENDED by giving the utmost care to the human new born being, male and female. We have to stop the harming and help those who were harmed to heal.

I'm curious about the men who were not breastfed and who were circumcised as they now choose to keep their baby whole and they support breastfeeding. How do they come to this decision? How do they deal with their own feelings of loss and of being violated? Does it change their perspective? Actions (like porn and masturbating), and does it change the quality of their own lives, their relationships with their partner? With their mother?

Watch out!! These are the kinds of questions I asked years ago about men in the hospital room with their babies being born. People ask me how I came to know to do this film -- focus on fathers. So many people, even homebirthing women, tell me they never really thought about birth impacting their partner. WOW. That's amazing to me. I have come to realize profoundly, not surprisingly, since I've known it all along, but it is because of my own birth. I was very traumatized, and almost died, as did my older brother, the first. Our sister born second was born "unassisted" in the labor delivery room while my father was trying to find a nurse. It was quite rare that my father was in the hospital room with all six of us, born between 1949-1970. OF COURSE, MY baby self KNEW how important it was that he was there, and now I know, a part of me has always known also how wounded he was watching it all. Just recently he told me that he was off to the side, could see blood, could hear it. It was not like today when men are able to be right there. I was very sad that my dad did not get to see me come out. I realize that has been a huge loss for me, and explains an issue with him, a confusion -- "you WERE THERE. Can't you acknowledge how hard it was for me?" This is what I see in babies ALL THE TIME, even today. We all want our mother and father to acknowledge us, our experience, as they share THEIR story, to see ours, the baby. I experienced deep sadness for my dad, a shared moment we never got to grieve or process together ... in 53 years. Another piece of healing my own birth that allows me to sit with and witness and support babies with their parents in their experience. My dad does not remember the last three I learned when I sit down to find out my three younger siblings birth stories. We always hear the stories of us three older ones. I said he couldn't remember them -- he was there, but because the first three were so hard he sorta checked out, he guesses. Fifty some years and I am just hearing this ... what I've always known, and I see it in the relationships with those younger three. And, I see the impact, "good" and "bad" in his relationship with us three older ones.

WHAT is YOUR baby self's story? What is YOUR story in relationship to your mom and dad's story? So many women from the 30-70's can't remember their story. It's such a big black hole in so many people's lives. Your body, mind, and soul know ... it's in your preverbal brain. You can know the story, grieve it, embrace it and become whole again, or at least BE IN the process of becoming whole, rather than living in the patterns of trauma, loss, and grief of disconnection from the mother.

There are many modalities now to assist ... but the best one, I believe, is my teacher, Ray Castellino's method.
http://www.castellinotraining.com/referrals/graduates.php
Others related to this modality are: www.myrnamartin.net, www.healyourearlyimprints.com.

Buy It!

Part One: The Other Side of the Glass: a Birth Film for and About Men officially released in digital download format on June 2, 2013. Go to www.TheOtherSideoftheGlass.com to purchase a digital download.

Men have been marginalized in birth for a long time. The old joke is that a man was sent off to boil water to keep him busy. I believe they were making the environment safe. Birth moved to hospitals and for forty years women were separated from their partners who was left to wait in smoke filled waiting room. Finally, he would see his baby from "the other side of the glass." Now a man can go in the birthing room and even get to hold his partner's hand during surgery. But they are still marginalized and powerless, according to the fathers I interviewed around the country.

Historically, birth has been defined by the medical establishment. The midwifery and natural birth movement now advocate for need "to educate and prepare men to protect their wife and baby" in medical environment. Seems logical ... if we process with the same illogic that got us here.

Through the voices of men - and doctors and midwives - men share heart-touching stories about how this is not workin' out. A man is also very likely to be disempowered and prevented from connecting with their newborn baby in the first minutes of life.

Now is the time for men to take back birth.

The film is about restoring our families, society, and world through birthing wanted, loved, protected, and nurtured males (and females, of course). It's about empowering males to support the females to birth humanity safely, lovingly, and consciously.

Donors, check your emails or email me at theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com for info to download. Release on DVD is not planned at this date.

FREE online! watch Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 10 at www.vimeo.com/75767434

"Doctor's Voices" - Stuart Fischbein, MD - Part 1

Doctor's Voices - Michael Odent, MD

Human Rights Violations

Resources - Healing Birth Trauma

"The Other Side of the Glass" has the potential to open up feelings that have been denied and ignored for a very long time. How to heal the trauma of birth at any age will be addressed in the film. Meanwhile, these are pioneers in the field.

Raymond Castellino and Mary Jackson - www.BEBA.org

David Chamberlain, Ph.D. - www.BEPE.info

Judith Cohen - www.judithleecohen.com

Myrna Martin - www.MyrnaMartin.net

Karen Melton - www.HealYourEarlyImprints.com

Wendy McCord, Ph.D. - www.WendyMcCord.com

Wendy McCarty, Ph.D. - www.WondrousBeginnings.com

And, many, many more all over the world at www.BirthPsychology.com
In both relationships and life trust begets trust.
Generosity begets generosity.
Love begets love.
Be the spark, especially when it's dark.

--Note from the Universe, www.tut.com

"Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so children have very little time with their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of the peace of the world." - Mother Theresa