
In Ayurveda, the act of nursing a baby is treated as a flow of energy from the heart of the mother to her child. This gift spans the breadth of her whole self, taking bits and pieces of her hormones, vitamins and minerals, the taste of the foods she has eaten, her feelings outpour into her baby too.
It matters how you feel. I'll even go as far to say that, if your heart feels constricted or broken because of the way your feeding journey is going, it could even be getting in the way of the bonding experience many of us are after when we decide to nurse our babies.
How we feel matters and, in fact, has been shown to solidly connect with breastfeeding, lactation, and the postpartum experience. I had the immense joy and fortune to record an episode of the Baby Chick podcast with Anne Wanlund, co-founder and CEO of the Canopie app. Canopie is a maternal mental health app created to met mothers where they are and provide accessible support when feelings of low mood and depression start to creep in. You can listen to the episode here:
But the good stuff in a nutshell is right here. The basics:
Milk flows to out in response to oxytocin concentration in the blood, guided by emotions and thoughts, physical sensations, and a few other contributors.
How we feel influences the oxytocin levels, including how safe and nurtured we feel at the time of meeting our baby's needs. When we "pour from an empty cup" in the form of emotional distress and exhaustion, have experienced trauma in our bodies, if there is physical distress from illness, if we are depleted and undernourished, those oxytocin levels can be interrupted. Stressors are all going to kick up our stress hormones - physical, emotional, whatever, it all triggers the same chemical response inside.
Milk letdown is the real way baby gets the milk out - they're not sucking it out like a milkshake through a straw and it isn't like a faucet we open and shut. It is hard-wired responsiveness from interaction between parent and child.
When letdown doesn't allow adequate milk flow, it can cause problems. One of the problems many parents tell me they fear is a low supply of milk, which in my experience very often reflects poor milk removal - a side effect of that slower or less efficient milk letdown.
It matters how you feel!
It matters how you feel. It matters if you are supported and nourished and rested. It matters if your nervous system is in a soothed state. It matters that we identify the gaps in between any of these needs as we show up as fully as we can for our babies from the start.
To listen to the Baby Chick podcast episode I did with Anne Wanlund of Canopie, a maternal mental health app designed to support mothers through low mood in the postpartum period, please click here:
You will hear us geek out on the many ways our postpartum mental, emotional, and lactational experience are deeply intertwined.
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