the (revolutionary) wisdom of the breast

I've been exploring the somatics of the breast (as in, the old way of referring to the chest, inclusive of but not exclusive to the mammary glands, breasts, heart, lungs…)

Did I lose you?

Isn't it actually unbelievable that in embodiment spaces -- even those almost exclusively made of up women,  even in classes focused specifically on "the heart center" -- nobody ever mentions the breasts? As if our breasts are exclusively an impediment to graceful movement (which is true in Western dance forms, even really in modern dance, as I've experienced it). This might explain why we experience our breasts in this way -- in THE way. As if our breasts have nothing to do with our experience of our chests, or the intricate relational workings of our heart and our lungs? As if the energetics of the physical seat of the fourth chakra don't in any way include the breasts, and so we are not to mention them, and not, for god's sakes, ever to touch them. Repression is an amazing thing. The water we swim in. We stop even noticing the rules we obediently follow.

I want to ask: what do the breasts know? How are the breasts, plural, the quintessential expression of the wisdom of The Breast? I think the breasts' special form of knowing is pretty revolutionary, actually. If you have been or have ever been around a nursing mother, you know what it's about. It's an experiential encounter with a way of being that requires a total dismantling of individualism. Some of us need to actually work at developing the relational sensibilities to be able to make it happen, the latching and the flowing. Neither the mother nor the child can do it alone. Both need to attune to one another, to fall into a profound one-ing that is based on relaxation. At the risk of falling into a kind of gender essentialism that discludes a queer experience of the chest: the true function of the breast is not to be bullied around to look a certain way, not to be groped like a plaything or a security blanket, but to remind us how to let in, let down, and let through. To nurse a baby is to literally create the milk - the life-giving force of the goddamn universe - and to channel it through the tunnels of the body in order to nourish another life. 

So now, to risk blasphemy: how in the world did anyone ever come to replace this simple, organic, obvious example of the life-giving sacred current that flows through all things with the  complicated story of bread and wine and god-as-flesh and sacrifice and etc. etc. etc.?
When they had mother's milk the whole time?
Patriarchy is just wild.  

So anyway we did that, this week! We practiced breast-centric prostrations, to capture in movement this feeling of "letting down." How it operates in a relational field, when you feel cut off from someone you love because you get stuck in a contracted, judgy way of being. The relief when you can experience them again from your chest, when you can let down into this flowy, compassionate, relational mode of nurture. It's the good side of heartbreak. ​