VIOLENT TEENAGERS

Today's cuppa: Peace Tea (ingredients: love, kindness and awareness)

Another boy has been shot by a teenager… it's becoming a regular news item here in the UK.

People (especially our ever-so-wise politicians) talk about tougher gun laws, stronger education, getting male role models for fatherless boys…but this is all so much ambulance at the bottom of the cliff talk.

Why is it so impossible for people to CONNECT THE DOTS? Really, it does my head in that there is such complete ignorance, at the highest levels of psychology, neuro-biology and medicine, in relation to violence and teenagers (and adults).

We're all born with biological needs which must be met if we're to develop optimally. Many of these needs are immediately met through breastfeeding, as the rich biochemical nutrients are vital for developing the neuro-transmitters which develop our capacity towards peace or violence. FORMULA DOESN'T CONTAIN THIS.

The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the further we seem to move away from our biological needs. There is always a price for doing so. And boy are we seeing the price for the child neglect and abuse which is happening DAILY on a massive scale.

We are inflicting violence on our children from the earliest age ~ even in-utero, with invasive tests and scans (which essentially microwave the baby's cells!!).

Many babies today are born by very violent means: suction, forceps or scalpel. Many c-sections babies even get cut. Modern babies are handled roughly, like lumps of meat, rather than souls who've just arrived Earthside in exquisitely-sensitive bodies.

Further violence, and it IS A VIOLATION to this sacred babe ~ and the mother, occurs when the baby is removed from the mother for routine and other testing. And more violence occurs when the baby isn't immediately put to the breast.

Violence continues throughout childhood in various forms ~ stuck in a prison called a 'cradle'; left to stare at a ceiling, rather than held by mother; left to cry; dummy as a replacement for non-nutritive sucking at the breast; left with strangers in day care; sent to nursery at three (at 3 for goodness' sake!); given dead, lifeless, processed food and drink (especially formula); compulsory, enforced learning before the first milk teeth have fallen out…and so it goes on and on. Of course, very few people would even consider any of these to be violence because we've become so indoctrinated with this as being 'normal'.

Eventually all this violence has to find an outlet. The baby grows into the toddler into the child into the teenager… Some of these children deal with their hurts in other ways ~ various dysfunctions, such as depression, eating disorders, a tendency towards suicide; addiction to televisual technology and consumerism. Some of our violently abused children will direct this hurt at themselves, and some will turn. They'll turn with a gun, a knife or other tool. But turn, they will. At no other time in our history have adults been scared of teenagers on the streets.

We need everyone to start connecting the dots……………………….

Find me one abusive, dangerous, tormented soul who had a gentle birth and was fully breastfed by an affectionate, loving mother, who carried and slept with her baby, and I'll shut my mouth forever ~ honest ~ not one more blog, not one more magazine.

I can guarantee that all the people who are committing violence against others, and themselves, had a violent birth, little or no breastfeeding (or weaned by mother before 2.5 years), and were deprived of an active in-arms experience with their mother.

So let's stop all this bullshit about tighter gun laws...we wouldn't even desire guns or to inflict violence if we weren't shot in the heart when we left our mother's womb!

Empowered Mothering

Today's Cuppa: Pure, living water (aka breast milk direct from source)

We are at our most empowered, as mothers, when we do not rely on modern technology to fulfil our role. This has been brought home to me many times this week when observing and listening to the many people caught up in the flooding of central and southern England. There are countless babies at the mercy of other people who are bringing in clean water so parents can make up counterfeit milk.

My heart absolutely goes out to everyone devastated by these floods…as much as to the 200 people who died in floods in China this week, and the 500 who've died in the Hungarian heat wave.

It does remind me, though, just how far removed we are from our natural mothering instincts that young babies aren't even drinking from their mother ~ someone who could offer them 'living water' on tap regardless of external influences.

We think we can replace breast milk with something as inadequate as a static 'formula'. We even have the cheek to call it 'milk', as if we were offering our babies the elixir of life! Collectively, we have allowed our culture to hypnotise us into thinking breastfeeding is an embarrassment, something reserved for primitives.

Hygeia Halfmoon, author of Primal mothering in a modern world, recalls being evacuated in Hawaii after a natural disaster ( I can't recall if it was an earthquake or erupting volcano) and sitting in a large centre with all the evacuees. All the babies were screaming from hunger as there was no access to formula or fresh water. She was the only one breastfeeding. Can you imagine how heartbreaking it would be to know you could feed a number of other children from your breasts, had they not lost their sucking reflex by being introduced to bottle-feeding?

Empowered mothering doesn't rely on man-made products, be they drink, food, sleeping prisons, monitors, bottles and so on. Your body, mind and heart contain everything needed to parent beautifully and with integrity for the reciprocal bonding of mother and child.