Ecopsychology and transpersonal dreaming: Repairing a biological imperative

The purpose of this paper is to make a case for Ecopsychology to actively and explicitly support breastfeeding as an evolutionary imperative, joining in the efforts to call attention to this crucial aspect of infant care as essential species-specific practice. Fostering awareness on the importance of meeting the minimum standards set by the W.H.O. could help us restore our sense of belonging to an interconnected living organism and reap underlying emotional health benefits.  This paper equally explores the potential role of transpersonal dreaming as a mother’s portal to a deep inner wisdom where her personal developmental journey meets the larger social, environmental and spiritual dimension in an evolutionary continuum.

The deep psychological divide that humans currently experience from the natural world may be a consequence of early environmental disruption. Neurobiological findings of attachment theory suggest that the ecological unconscious might develop in the human newborn when in its natural habitat, which is skin-to-skin contact with the mother. In this habitat all newborns exhibit a programmed behavior to breastfeed.  The loss of breastfeeding and subsequent changes in brain chemistry caused by prolonged separation of mother and infant after birth could “normalize a disconnection from nature” (Olza & MacDonnell, 2010). John Bowlby famously used concepts from the scientific study of other primates to support his ideas regarding the importance of the mother-child bond and the harm that prolonged separation causes (Seedhall, 2011).

Ecopsychology concerns itself with the study of the association between humans and the environment (Plesa, 2019).  There is overwhelming evidence that all mothers should be supported in their breastfeeding efforts for its proven environmental and emotional benefits if we are to promote an understanding of the human and non-human elements that gather together to act for environmental and social change, in favor of a more compassionate, ecologically sound, future. From an ecopsychological standpoint it is necessary to recognize the implications of continuing to normalize artificial infant milk consumption.  Supporting a return to an original paradigm of more physiological childcare practices could lead to a dramatic shift in the development of an ecological mindset in the majority of the world’s population, and a vast improvement in an individual’s mental and physical health. 

Transpersonal dreaming could foster a return to traditional ways of knowing which would contribute to psychological as well as social processes.  Learning to work with dreams might help mothers navigate today’s jungle of information, putting them in touch with biologically appropriate practices that could help them enhance their emotional and spiritual health and repair wounds inflicted on our ecosystem. This deep knowing can offer perspective about our place and responsibility within this embedded universe (Bogzaran & Deslauriers, 2012).

With these considerations in mind, the current paper will explore the idea that supporting and promoting breastfeeding is a fundamental step to help address current ecological concerns, meeting ecopsychology goals of sustainable lifestyles and optimal mental health, probing into the possibility that transpersonal dreaming can shed light upon the path to individual and global wellbeing and redeem the spirituality of nature and women’s role in that spirituality.
 
Overview of the History and Importance of Breastfeeding
We can infer from paleo-ecological reconstructions and contemporary ethnographic studies  beginning with nomadic foragers, specifically of the !Kung from the Kalahari Desert, that widespread present day infant care methods, including child feeding, are inconsistent with those in the human environments of evolutionary adaptation (Hewlett & Lamb, 2005).
“If the monkey and the ape background to hominid evolution entailed a consistent pattern of care of infants and juveniles, one would expect it to have coevolved with aspects of normal or optimal development that might have become dependent on it. If so, this would presumably limit the range of facultative adaptations easily achieved in human evolution, or at least the range achieved without developmental consequences” (Hewlett & Lamb, 2005, Pp 19-20).

The history of infant feeding includes wet nursing, the feeding bottle, and formula use. Before the invention of bottles and formula, wet nursing was the safest and most common alternative to the natural mother’s breastmilk. Availability of animal’s milk, and advances in formula development, gradually led to replace wet nursing with artificial feeding. The advertising of formula products increased their popularity and use among society. Currently, artificial baby milk is widely consumed in the United States and Europe, and its use is expanding in the developing world.  However, it appears to contribute to the development of several common childhood illnesses, including atopy, diabetes mellitus, and childhood obesity (Stevens et al., 2020).

During the 20th century, simultaneously in the U.S.A. and in the U.S.S.R., news outlets distorted the health-giving properties of meat and cow’s milk based on political and economic interests and on contemporary nutritionists’ miscalculations about protein requirements (Palmer, 2012, McClaren,1974).  The worldwide retreat from breastfeeding is one instance in which evolution in parenting has gone astray. The World Health Organization stipulates that human milk is a complete food for humans until our 6th month of life, when breastfeeding should be exclusive, followed by a recommendation for breastfeeding, as important part of our diet, until -at least- the second birthday (2020).  However, globally only 40% of infants are exclusively breastfed, in those first six months, according to the W.H.O.  In the U.S., after World War II, very few women were left who knew how to breastfeed (Riordan & Auerbach 1999). It was no coincidence that the polio epidemic exploded in the U.S. after 1946, topping 58,000 cases by 1952, as infants and children were left without the antibodies normally found in mother’s milk (Evitts Dickinson, 2020).

For centuries, women have been persuaded that breastfeeding is inferior or unseemly. From cultural forces to the success of marketing campaigns, it is a fact that millions of women across the world have lost touch with the skills of breastfeeding (Grille, 2013).

The World Health Organization (2020) has made public the significant health promoting values of breastfeeding for both babies and their mothers.  This should not come as a surprise, as they connect us to our human mammalian heritage (Riordan & Auerbach, 1998, 2001).  In the U.S., only 18% of babies receive any breastmilk by the time they are six months old. It is a fact that a country’s infant mortality rate increases as breastfeeding decreases, and yet breastfeeding rates are declining around the world (Cunningham, 1995).  In the U.S., cultural factors are thought to be the major cause of the low initial and continuing breastfeeding rates. These reasons include: The perception of women’s breasts as mainly sexual objects, the belief that a woman’s time spent caring for children is not as valuable as her time spent working outside of her home and away from her baby, the perception that artificial milk is equally nutritious, and the belief that breastfeeding in public places is inappropriate behavior (Pollard Cleveland, 1999).

Liedloff (1985) after living with Tauripans in the Amazon jungle for over two years, observed that post-partum depression in Western mothers might be caused by an interruption of a mother’s species-specific need to hold her infant in continuous skin-to-skin contact. Her research points at the absence of post-natal depression in cultures where there is no mother-baby separation after birth, and where breastfeeding is the norm. Liedloff’s hypothesis is further supported by recent studies providing evidence that mothers who breastfeed typically exhibit lower levels of depressive symptomatology, and that lower levels of later depression can also be predicted (Hahn-Holbrook et al., 2013) in this group.  Zauderer & Galea (2010) also found encouraging evidence on the positive effect of breastfeeding on mothers diagnosed with postpartum depression.

Breastfeeding provides a renewable asset and prevents other forms of damage to the environment. It uses few resources and produces minimal or zero waste. The production of unnecessary infant and toddler formulas exacerbate environmental damage which should be a matter of global environmental concern since most formulas are based on powdered cow’s milk and the dairy and meat production industry contributes around 30% of global greenhouse gases. It has been calculated that the water footprint of milk powder alone is roughly 4700 L/kg. Methane production from livestock is second only to production by the oil and gas industry. Methane traps heat in our planet’s atmosphere 30 times more potently than carbon dioxide (Joffe, Shenker, 2019).
 
 
How Can Ecopsyhcology Help?
Ecopsychology concerns itself with the enduring psychological questions: Who we are, how we heal, why we suffer; connecting these to our relationship to the natural world. The current paper aims to support the notion that a sense of self as separate from our ecosystem is fostered in our babies from birth, when we break our species continuum by unnaturally breaking the mother-baby dyad. 

Our mental health does not seem to correlate to our high living standards or technological advances. Julian (2020) asserts that more than a quarter of all doctor visits in America now end with a prescription for anti-anxiety medication and that in just five years anxiety -disorder diagnoses among young people have increased 17%.  A Center for Disease Control data brief from 2018 reported that 1 in 12 adults have depression and that women are twice as likely to suffer from it.

Humans are social mammals. More than any other animal, humans have a biology that is shaped by social experience in early life (Narvaez et al. 2013).  Breastfeeding is the quintessential biosocial activity that is linked to various positive health and psychosocial outcomes, even when it occurs for a shorter period than the 4-6 years that are common in settings that resemble ancestral conditions (Hewlett & Lam, 2005).  Narvaez et al. (2018) alert us that childcare practices inconsistent with evolutionary principles may be causing much stress as infants’ physiological systems are maturing.  The quality of vagal nerve functions may be dependent on the quality of early nurturing.  Skin to skin contact while feeding the baby fosters proper vagal tone, which influences biological and emotional regulation.  There may be a link between nonoptimal early care, high levels of stress during development and overeating later in life, and social anxiety (Li, Magdia & Grummer, 2012; Ostrovsky, Swencionis, Wylie-Rosett & Isasi, 2012). There is a robust association between early weaning -under 2 weeks- and alcohol addiction later in life (Alati Et al., 2009).

A host of reasons both psychological and neurochemical suggest that the long hours of separation between mother and baby facilitated by artificial feeding methods, as well as the practice of allowing babies to cry themselves to sleep or night-time separation from the mother, may be directly or indirectly linked to the ongoing epidemic of depression (Watt & Panksepp, 2009).  It is the goal of ecopsychology to foster a reconnection between humans and nature, but first we must strive to reconnect with our human nature.

Industrially driven ecological disaster is a threat to our lives and our ecosystem.  Our environmental short-sightedness is caused by emotional injury and an interruption of our species continuum, as the result of widespread disruption in the emotional development of large segments of our population (Grille, 2013).  Understanding the deep implications that breastfeeding has from an ecological perspective, and for attachment, should encourage eco-psychologists’ explicit support of maternal efforts knowing that protection of the breastfeeding bond results in far-reaching mental-health benefits to both baby and mother (EIPMH, 2020).  Breastfeeding has no negative impact on our environment, no scarce resources are used, no pollution is caused by transport, and no garbage is produced by packaging.
Grille (2013) has speculated that a correlation exists between the countries with more progressive environmental policies and breastfeeding rates.  While a full comparative analysis of breastfeeding rates and environmental protection tendencies around the world is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that Iceland, Sweden and Norway share top spots as the greenest countries on earth according to Conserve Energy Future (2019) while at the same time have some of the highest breastfeeding rates in the developed world, while the U.S. lags behind in both areas. It is of interest to point out that Sweden’s breastfeeding rates peaked in the nineties, and the babies that were breastfed then would be of voting age today, supporting their country’s current progressive environmental policies. This point is speculative but due to the vast amount of data proving the numerous benefits that breastfeeding offers, to the individual and the environment, one would hope to see more research in this area. My personal experience, which I refer to in the next section, supports Grille’s assumption.

 
How Can Transpersonal Dreaming Help?
Transpersonal dreaming concerns itself with studying experiences in which the dreamer recognizes a wider awareness behind the dream in which the sense of self extends beyond itself to encompass the wider humankind, psyche or cosmos (Stumbrys, 2018).

According to Bogzaran & Deslauriers (2012) dreams reveal our personal developmental journey, and they respond to our political and environmental concerns as well, given that they exist at the edge where the self and the larger systems meet. Dreams offer cryptic visions of quandaries that tie self and society together in an evolutionary interplay and reflect our state of interdependence.  Bogzaran & Deslauriers remind us that, from an indigenous perspective, “the environment” is a conscious entity that envelops the sacred matrix of life. Dreams in this context are a portal to understanding our place and responsibility within this embedded universe.  Modern environmental psychology, as taught by Kidner (2006), also refers to a dynamic conception of the world which finds a base in Jung’s view that there is a continuity between psyche and the biological world.

While an evidence-based approach to how our dreams might bring us closer to optimal species-specific infant care would be important, there is a real-world personal example of how dreams have helped me transcend, ego, time, and space, and guided my steps in motherhood, in favor of a  more natural experience for myself and for my children.  This transpersonal experience supports the possibility of a connection between the dream world, breastfeeding and infant- care, and a sense of belonging to an interconnected living organism.  

What I always thought of as my first memory, came to me as a recurrent dream. I must have been five or six years-old when I started asking my mother about the time she was sitting on a high back, burgundy, arm chair with me suckling at her breast; someone rang the doorbell of our Madrid flat, and the door opened.  I let go of her nipple, distracted by the visitors. She told me then, and reiterated at my insistence many times thereafter, that what I so vividly experienced in dreams never happened!  That apartment was our home from the time I turned three until my seventh birthday, at which point we followed my father into exile in South America.  By my mother’s account, I was only breastfed my first six months of life. Therefore, my recurrent dream did not correspond to a memory, even if it felt like one.

Almost thirty years later I flew back to Madrid with my first baby, who was four months old at the time, and we stayed in our old flat before its imminent sale. One day, I had my baby at the breast, when suddenly the doorbell rang. My baby let go of my nipple, distracted by the hustle of someone letting the visitor in. It was then that I realized I was sitting on a high back, burgundy armchair. My baby raised her gaze to meet mine, and what I think I saw in her eyes was the same recognition of the moment that I was experiencing. I got goosebumps. Here we both were, aware of our connection to something larger than us.  Her birth, and the realization of my body’s nurturing powers, opened the floodgates of my limited ‘self’; this moment helped me identify the spiritual awakening underway (Grof, 2000).  Perhaps she and I have always been there.  Perhaps ‘there’ we will always be, defying time and space.  My sense of purpose became crystal clear.

I experienced a shift in my attention as breastfeeding connected me to others beyond my nursling: every mammal, every puppy, every river, every mountain. I became aware of a flow of life and I was just a speck, not the center anymore. I spent the next three years training as a lactation consultant, and for the next twenty I offered my volunteer services in grassroots breastfeeding support groups across two U.S. states, three different countries in three different continents. At the same time I became actively -if silently- preoccupied with caring for the environment: Recycling, refusing, reusing, what a ate and how. I felt a sudden need to be involved in a bigger picture.  
Night-time infant-care was my main challenge, as my first baby fought the crib from day one. Breastmilk is easier to digest than formula, and breastfed babies famously wake up more often for feedings. I struggled with lack of sleep as the little bits I could muster in between feedings were plagued by nightmares of my baby being abducted and of my own frantic search for her. The nightmares stopped when I finally eschewed the crib in favor of what is known as co-sleeping. My girl would sleep for longer periods when our skins touched at night, and I was able to feed her laying down, which made childcare and feedings so much easier. Until that moment it had not crossed my mind that mammals, primates, sleep curled up with their cubs. My bad dreams seemed to alert me that something was amiss, and only when I modified my night-time parenting in ways that mimicked those habits of early hunter-gatherers, like the !Kung or the Tauripans(op cit.) did the nightmares subside. UNICEF (2017) has been encouraging modern parents in recent years to reexamine the unnatural isolation of babies in cribs, as a more natural approach to childcare has been proven to support better health in the mother-baby dyad. A point that is often brought up when co-sleeping is discussed, is a presumed disruption of the parents’ intimacy.  However other mothers I met in breastfeeding support groups reassured me of the many ways that a couple can circumnavigate the family bed. The advice I received, new to me, was obviously ancient.

I have a sense that the close bond that started and developed with my two children through biologically appropriate infant care has promoted what is known as spontaneous telepathic dreaming (Ullman, Krippner, Vaughan, 1973). This is more evident now that they are both adults living far away from home.  I can rely on dreams to know if they are ill, homesick, or if they have had a particularly successful day. There is a lack of studies in this area, but Sheldrake (2020) is currently scratching the surface: He is researching apparent telepathy between the nursing mother-baby dyad, encouraged by accounts of other mothers with similar experiences.

Transpersonal dreaming has allowed me to sense the spiritual essence of the universe and a non-material existence (Krippner et al. 2002). Siegel (1991) cite evidence that both men and women have frequent animal dreams during a pregnancy. Is this an invitation to transcend a disengaged view of our place in the ecosystem? 

In support of Grille’s (op cit.) theory of a potential tendency of our nurslings to grow up caring about our environment, I can offer that my babies have grown up to prioritize environmental protection. My older child is graduating next summer as a human ecologist, while my youngest is planning a future in politics with the hope to repair our battered ecosystem.  I have been pleasantly surprised by their zeal.

Evidently my personal experience alone cannot serve as proof that dreams point at physiological infant care practices in a harmonic evolutionary path.  I hope that future research would benefit from a continued empirical exploration of this topic.

 
The Obstacles
The Innocenti Declaration, produced and adopted by WHO/UNICEF policymakers in August 1990, declares that:
“Efforts should be made to increase women's confidence in their ability to breastfeed. Such empowerment involves the removal of constraints and influences that manipulate perceptions and behavior towards breastfeeding, often by subtle and indirect means. This requires sensitivity, continued vigilance, and a responsive and comprehensive communications strategy involving all media and addressed to all levels of society. Furthermore, obstacles to breastfeeding within the health system, the workplace and the community must be eliminated.”

Thirty years later, this list of obstacles still stands.  Some progress has been achieved since then, still more than half of the world’s children are not being “optimally breastfed” (UNICEF, 2020). It is interesting to note that the countries that have been more successful at raising and maintaining their breastfeeding rates, like Iceland, Sweden and Norway, are offering enhanced work leave, workplace lactation, or additional help with housework or caring for children. 

Growing numbers of women participate in the paid workforce.  Two incomes are increasingly required to maintain a standard of living that used to be sustained by a single income.  This has coincided with an erosion of the social welfare state in the U.S. and a downgrading of responsibility for care work onto the family (Lee, 2018).

Mothers need support to ensure the financial viability of caring for their infants in sustainable and biologically appropriate ways.  In many countries parental leave is short or nonexistent.  A mother’s options are either staying at home and giving up her job, or planning her method of giving the baby food according to the possibilities her job gives her (Cato et al. 2018). Currently, more than half of mothers in the U.S. return to work after childbirth. Of these, four out of five start out breastfeeding, but less than half are still doing so at 6 months (Olson & Sigman-Grant, 2018).  Only forty percent of women have access to both break time and private space to pump milk for their babies.
This is still insufficient as baby and mother miss out on emotional benefits of breastfeeding. Our societies need to contemplate a future where it is acceptable for mothers to bring their babies to work. In most cultures where babies are held in close contact with their mothers’ skin, they rarely cry, which makes them inobtrusive; babies are sick less often and mother doesn’t need to be absent from work as much (LLLI, 2020). It is important to remember that for most of human history, mothers have brought their babies to work, as women have traditionally helped with agriculture. Mothers who stay at home and wear their babies continue to take care of a myriad of household chores, complete online studies, and do all sorts of administrative work with their babies safely wrapped around their bodies, making us wonder if the main obstacle to payed employment is a ‘visible’ baby. Nevertheless, New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Arden, has given us all a visual of a new paradigm:  She brought her three month old baby to a U.N. general assembly in 2018, carrying on with work as usual, she gave a speech (Ainge, 2018).

It is interesting to note that in recent years it has become trendy for some companies to allow employees to bring their dog to work; among them are Amazon, Nestle and Uber. None of these companies has extended the same courtesy to the babies of their lactating employees (Gravier, 2019).
In two decades of experience in grassroots activism, I have noticed a common complaint amidst mothers:  There seems to be a marked tendency among physicians in general, and among mental health workers, to advise a lactating woman, experiencing emotional exhaustion from maneuvering through cultural expectations, to interrupt breastfeeding and “take a break from the baby”.  The slogan “Breast is Best” precedes “but” and is followed by advise to introduce artificial feedings, against current guidelines of the W.H.O.   Transnational corporations, manufacturers of breastmilk substitutes, interfere with the effective implementation of polices that would protect, promote and support breastfeeding (Lhotska et al. 2019).  The conflict of interests they create at a personal and institutional level together with lack of physician knowledge, pose a large obstacle to surmount.  Studies have shown that physicians training is not adequate and the advice they provide is often not evidence-based. There is still no standard curriculum or core competencies required in the residence training programs for pediatrics, obstetrics, gynecologists or family doctors (Eden, 2018).  Grassroots organizations, like La Leche League International, are de facto custodians of evidence-based information, support, encouragement and education (Barron Smolinski, 2018) oftentimes in direct opposition with uninformed medical advice.  

 
The Spirituality of Breastfeeding
The list of health and emotional benefits of breastfeeding is long, as is the list of obstacles. The importance for the planet, and for the human race, makes this a worthy campaign. There is one more benefit to breastfeeding that might help tilt the scale: its spiritual dimension.

Numerous testimonials can be found online, from a first-person perspective, declaring a spiritual side to mothers’ breastfeeding experiences. Grassroots support groups thrive precisely because of an awakening in these women of a sudden need to be of help in their communities, supporting other mothers in forging a closer bond with their offspring and more compassionate communities.  In these settings many women describe breastfeeding as their “religion,” which is exactly how I came to view it.

If we are to evolve in ways that retain whatever it is that makes life worth living, we should not be too fast at denying our animal side. Sheldrake (2019) reminds us that the very word “animal” comes from the word, anima, which is Latin for “soul”.  He points out that in hunter-gatherer cultures, human beings do not generally think of themselves as separate from the realm of other animals, but as intimately interconnected: “The world around them is alive” (2019, p. 46).  Members of many animal species routinely show an understanding of unconditional love, and are prepared to die to save their young. Curiously, many among us mistakenly consider these altruistic behaviors proof of the extraordinary qualities that set humans apart from other animals.

Classic literature offers multiple instances of dreams connecting us to a divine element (Ullman et al., 1973).  However, the association of infant-care, extraordinary dreams and spirituality has not been rigorously studied (Wouk et al., 2020). One study conducted among African-American women with the objective of better understanding how breastfeeding is perceived in the daily experiences of black women (Chapman, 2015) reported that all 17 mothers who participated felt a sense of empowerment by successfully breastfeeding their babies, that they exhibited a closer bond with their infant and pride at being able to share their experience and knowledge by promoting breastfeeding in their community, and to further this argument, the subject of “spirituality” spontaneously arose from the transcripts, even though it was not a topic that was specifically probed. Fifteen of the seventeen mothers directly commented on spiritual aspects including breastfeeding as a “blessing” and a gift from God.

 
Summary and Conclusions
In recent centuries, changes in diet and behavior have happened extremely rapidly. In all likelihood, our bodies are still adapted to a time when the nutritional and attachment needs of humans were met in closer alignment with our primate relatives and our planet. Today, our dependency on the dairy and meat industry is detrimental to the environment, inhumane and conducive to artificial feeding practices in ways that break our evolutionary continuum.

Ecopsychology’s goals are in perfect alignment with the optimal, evidence-based breastfeeding guidelines recommended by the W.H.O., and it is vitally important to actively make that known in order to achieve optimal breastfeeding rates across our planet.  Comprehensive reconnection with nature will benefit from enhancing our understanding of our species continuum.

One avenue that could be particularly fruitful in helping new mothers make ecological, empowering and emotionally sound, infant-care choices is transpersonal dreaming. Dreams can provide access to a mother’s deep inner wisdom, her unconscious knowledge, and guide a mother’s attitude and resolve whenever possible, until that day when material obstacles will be removed.

Further research into the transpersonal -and transpersonalizing- aspect of breastfeeding is crucial in a continuous effort to integrate evidence-based science, inner wisdom, and respect for all beings. The potential is within us to take a big leap towards sustainable and psycho-social evolution in just one generation.  Going back might be the most efficient way forward.
 
 
 
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