What does Possums or NDC mean by evolutionary bodywork?

What are the key principles of traditional bodywork practice?

When using the term 'traditional bodyworkers', I'm referring to osteopaths, chiropracters, craniosacral therapists and myofunctional therapists. I acknowledge there are significant differences between these disciplines or practices, and a range of expertise and qualifications. However, traditional bodywork practices have a number of fundamental shared principles or understandings about the human body in common. These principles have been increasingly accepted and encorporated by mainstream musculoskeletal medicine throughout my life-time.

You can find out why Complementary and Alternative Medicines and my own profession have much to learn from each other here.

Here are the principles upon which traditional bodywork practices build.

• There is functional interconnectedness between all parts of musculoskeletal system, faciliated in part by the continuities of fascia or connective tissue.

• Dysfunction in one part of the body may create dysfunction elsewhere in the body.

• Spinal alignment is of foundational importance to the body's healthy function.

• There is a relationship between stress, tissue tightness, dysfunctional movement, and pain.

• Healing from neuromuscular dysfunction and pain requires change in neural and movement patterns, supported by practice (exercises) and mindful movement.

What do the Possums programs mean by evolutionary bodywork?

Evolutionary bodywork draws on the same key principles which have been taught to us (and to my own profession) by the traditional bodywork therapies, above.

Evolutionary bodywork is a new term which describes the kind of bodywork fundamental to the Possums (or NDC) programs. Evolutionary bodywork is a translation of the latest research emerging from the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology into practical bodywork strategies for helping babies born into busy 21st century families. Evolutionary bodywork aims to support an infant's flourishing sensory motor development in a way that helps parents to flourish too, enjoying a life with their baby that is as easy as possible.

Rather than treating the infant as a tabla rasa, or blank slate, upon which we perform exercises in order to make baby's sensory motor system function optimally, evolutionary bodywork views the infant as a self-organising process unfolding out of millions of years of evolutionary history, which is carried in his genetic code. This self-organising process occurs in the context of the mother's or parent's body, as a single biological ecosystem. This self-organising is also shaped by cultural heredity, that is, systems of cultural knowledge about how the parent body best interacts with the infant body.

Evolutionary bodywork acknowledges that the Homo sapiens infant is most accurately conceptualised as an 'exterogestate foetus'. That is, she is still developing neurologically at a rapid rate, similar to her rate of development inside the womb, except that now she is outside the womb. Because the human infant is an exterogestate foetus, she has a biological expectation for abundant contact with her mother's or carer's body for at least the first nine months after birth.

Evolutionary bodywork proposes that best possible infant development occurs in the repetitive daily interaction between the baby's body and his mother's body, and the baby's body and the external environment. This is the context in which ideal musculoskeletal alignment, healthy movement patterns, and neural pathways unfold or mature. Evolutionary bodywork proposes that for a bodywork intervention to be most effective and to best support spinal alignment, postural symmetry, and painfree efficient neuromuscular function (including of sucking), the bodywork therapy needs to be applied to the parent and baby as a single biological system, activating the parent-baby ecosystem's self-organising principles.

Evolutionary bodywork is not coming in from the outside with our fingers and hands or other tools to fix, improve, or make the infant's neuromuscular systems and fascia develop and function effectively. That way of thinking about healing - by applying an external fix - comes from the doinant biomedical scientific model of the past few hundred years (even when used by Complementary and Alternative Medicines).

Evolutionary bodywork calls forth the new human's two-million-year-old competence. It calls forth the great genetic powers, coded into our cells, which have been sculpting life on Earth into this strange and marvellous primate superspecies, the human, formillions or billions of years. We can trust the breathtaking mystery of the small child which has been two million years in the making, we can trust the unfolding of her evolutionary competence. As health professionals, our task is to help parents provide the physical context in which a baby's sensory motor systems can self-correct and flourish if problems arise.

When sensory motor problems emerge, NDC's evolutionary bodywork proposes that our most fundamental and powerful intervention is to set up an environment which supports the infant's self-organising, self-correcting, developmental unfolding.

• You can find out why breastfeeding goes best if we think of the mother and baby as a single biological ecosystem here.

• You can find the NDC or Possums steps for optimal support of infant neuromotor development here.

How evolutionary bodywork is offered in the Possums or NDC programs

In evolutionary bodywork, the interaction between the whole of your body and the whole of your baby's body, is driven by purposeful intent by both your baby and yourself (e.g. to feed, to carry, to dial your baby down, to communicate to and fro). You are offering your baby bodywork in your physical interactions, minute by minute, hour by hour. Here are elements of the Possums programs which we frame as evolutionary bodywork.

1. The gestalt method of fit and hold, for painfree and effective milk transfer. Evolutionary bodywork offers whole-of-ecosystem help for a breastfeeding mother and her baby. Any breastfeeding problems play out inside this single, physically connected (mouth-on-nipple) biological system, or during attempts to support this single, physically connected (mouth-on-nipple) biological system.

2. The NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to optimal infant motor development (eight steps) includes strategies which are hypothesised to prevent or repair of plagiocephaly and torticollis. You can find out more about the eight steps of the NDC approach to infant motor development here. Rich and diverse opportunities for motor development include

   • Symmetric and functional neuromotor patterns of movement and sucking

   • Building to and fro 'reciprocity chains' of parent-baby interaction (and social communication)

   • The fitting together of parents' and babies' bodies with carrying.

3. Frequent and flexible breastfeeds are a form of evolutionary bodywork, which

   • Protect a woman's capacity to produce enough milk to meet her baby's caloric needs, and

   • Protect an inflamed lactating breast if a breast inflammation arises. Frequent flexible breastfeeds can be conceptualised as the evolutionary bodywork approach to breast inflammation at a time when women are regularly advised to not increase frequency of breastfeeds from the affected breast, and to perform therapeutic massage of lactation, which is unhelpful.

4. Possums adopts the latest findings of evolutionary anthropologists when discussing infant sleep, place of sleep, proximity to an adult's body, and safety (considered in The Possums Baby and Toddler Sleep Program).

Applying the Possums programs and evolutionary bodywork is not the same as what is sometimes referred to as 'extreme' parenting. If someone suggest that Possums is a kind of extreme parenting, they're not up-to-date with the latest neuroscience or evolutionary biology, and how this knowledge is applied in the Possums programs to make life as easy as possible for families!

Evolutionary bodywork, drawing on the principles of traditional bodywork, understands that all parts of the body are connected. Evolutionary bodywork is concerned with functional connectivity. Evolutionary bodywork offers the kind of physical treatment which helps the whole of that single biological ecosystem, for instance, of the breastfeeding mother and her baby, heal, self-organise, and flourish.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge Isabelle Coffey RN IBCLC NDC Accredited Practitioner who coined the term 'evolutionary bodywork' during one of our NDC Live Network Hours. At the time I had written and spoken about holistic bodywork, whole-of-system bodywork, and the NDC evolutionary approach to bodywork. Isabelle suggested simply calling the Possums or NDC approach to motor development 'evolutionary bodywork'. With her consent, I've gone on to use this term in the Possums programs.

Recommended resources

• You can find out the main differences between traditional bodywork therapy and Possums' evolutionary bodywork here.

• You can find out about the NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to optimising your baby's motor development here.

• You can find out about why it's best to think of you and your baby as a single biological system here.

• You can find out how evolutionary bodywork helps repair breastfeeding problems here.

• You can find out about the eight steps of the NDC evolutionary bodywork approach to protecting a baby's motor development here.

• You can find out about the gestalt method, an evolutionary bodywork approach to fit and hold in breastfeeding, starting here.

• You can find out about evolutionary biology and the Great Synaptic Flourishing of your infant's brain here.