Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (10 page)

MORE THAN JUST A PRESCRIPTION

My understanding of our ability to access the healer within evolved over the course of several years. In medical school, I had learned to take a case history, diagnose, identify an appropriate intervention, give advice and perhaps a prescription, and send the patient on her way with the expectation that she would do the right thing for her health. I came to realize that helping women to get healthy involved much more than some educating and a prescription.

In the 1980s, women would flock to my clinic because I had a reputation for taking their PMS symptoms seriously, which wasn’t the case with many ob/gyns back then. I would prescribe a regimen of reducing stress; avoiding caffeine, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco; and taking B vitamins, natural progesterone, and other supplements. Soon after following my advice, my patients would report that their symptoms had disappeared. But three months later, many were back where they had started. They had let the substances they were supposed to avoid creep back into their lives while their daily stresses remained the same. Needless to say, their symptoms also returned.

Why didn’t my patients just continue to follow the doctor’s orders? I didn’t know how to motivate my patients to make the lifestyle changes permanent. I thought bloating, headaches, irritability, and mood swings would be enough motivation to make them stick to the program.

As I talked to my patients, however, I began to see common patterns of childhood traumas, sexual abuse, memories of abuse, unaddressed marital problems, and all sorts of hidden emotional
issues that rose to the surface during those days before their menstrual periods. I began to make the correlation between unresolved trauma and PMS symptoms. That’s when I realized that the menstrual cycle actually provided a powerful monthly opportunity for deep healing.

At that point, I began to question why it was that so many women suffered as part of a perfectly natural biological cycle that followed the 28-day cycle of the moon. Why would the Creator make women this way? Over time, I realized that I, too, was emotionally sensitive and deeply in touch with my spirit premenstrually and during the first couple of days of my period. I started to see that not only was my experience common, it was a gift, an opportunity to reboot my life on all levels. Think of it this way: Just before and during your period, the tide is out. And everything on the bottom that you don’t want to see will be revealed. Your true needs—for rest, for nourishing food, for pleasure, for nurturance, and more—are signaled by the depth of your emotions. This isn’t a bad thing. Experiencing anger, sadness, fear, or jealousy is a biologically supported opportunity to transform yourself. Use your emotions as a guidance system that directs you to your true needs. Learn the lessons your feelings have to teach you.

As I was educating myself about how women have experienced menstruation in various places in the world throughout history, I read that certain Native American tribes relied on the intuitive knowledge of menstruating women to guide the tribe. It occurred to me that a woman who is not struggling with unhealed abuse or trauma could spend that sensitive time just before and during her period in a state of restoration and replenishment—just like the womb itself. She could become deeply in touch with the voice of her soul. As I wrote in
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,
“The ebb and flow of dreams, creativity, and hormones associated with different parts of the cycle offer us a profound opportunity to deepen our connection with our inner knowing. This is a gradual process for most women, one that involves unearthing our personal history and then, day by day, thinking differently about our cycles and living with them in a mindful way.”
¹

Latham Thomas, the author of
Mama Glow: A Hip Guide to Your Fabulous Abundant Pregnancy (
Hay House, 2012), is a modern yoga teacher and life coach who lives this wisdom in the hustle and bustle of New York City. Every month, she books time off during her periods and chooses to use those days to rejuvenate. Like indigenous women who moved into a separate tent for the days when they were menstruating, she is recognizing the sacred nature of this time. In addition, she realizes that this consciously applied self-care ritual provides her with more than enough energy and stamina to make up for any perceived loss of time. Her impressive monthly self-care is all the more stunning given how difficult it is for most of us to unplug at any time—especially in this age of information overload!

According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, we human beings create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up through 2003.
²
Despite the revolution in information technology, our cyclic nature has remained the same for millennia. We are still strongly connected with the tides and the moon. Our deep emotional needs don’t disappear just because our To Do lists have grown much longer.

To achieve transformation, a woman has to get in touch with the emotions that lie hidden below the surface of her awareness. She needs to understand that each and every emotion signals a genuine need. She needs to rest and receive support and listen to her wise inner healer that is urging her to make changes in her life.

When we find the courage to do this, we experience the health and well-being that are our birthrights as goddesses.

YOUR EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM

The inner healer knows that emotions are a potent guidance system to what healer Mercedes Kirkel calls our “divine attributes.” The heavier, darker emotions such as grief and anger have to be expressed and transformed so we can flourish. We experience this healing release through tears, movement, and sound. The matriarchal cultures of old understood the power of dance and song to heal the tribe and reconnect the community to the
life force itself. As they danced, sang, or chanted, people experienced the full range of emotions from joy to sorrow. As the tears flowed, anger and grief left the body and returned to the sacred Source. Author Rita Schiano wrote, “Tears are God’s gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow.”

These so-called “negative” emotions are powerful indicators of unmet needs, and those needs are part of our humanity. For most of us, this is a revelation. We all have needs for connection, intimacy, validation, safety, love, belonging, and rest, to name just a few. (There’s a marvelous list of human needs you can find on the website of The Center for Nonviolent Communication at
www.cnvc.org
, where you’ll also find an emotions inventory.) But most of us have been led to believe that we should somehow sublimate our needs to the needs of others. When we do this, our emotions have to shout louder and louder—often through physical symptoms—in order to get our attention.

The next time you feel anger or resentment, just sit with the feeling—do
not
blame yourself or anyone else for it. Don’t kill the “messenger.” Just stay with what you are feeling so you can discover its message for you. Then ask yourself, “What is it that I need right now that I don’t have?” Then name the need. Here’s an example: You’re in a hurry and someone pulls ahead of you into a parking spot you were waiting for. In that moment, you feel anger or frustration. You take a moment and simply allow the feeling of that to wash over you. You feel the emotion fully, without trying to change it. Then you say to yourself, “What do I need?” The answer might be one of the following:
More leisure time so I’m not always in a hurry. Respect from the other driver. More sleep—so I don’t feel so frazzled all the time.
Simply acknowledging the need is the first step toward getting that need met.

Dr. Mario Martinez also points out the value of righteous anger—the kind that flares up when the innocence of someone around us, or our own innocence, is threatened. If someone is nasty to a waitress who is serving you, for example, it’s perfectly healthy to express how you feel about this rather than remaining silent. We must allow ourselves to feel our righteous anger when appropriate and take some kind of healthy action that is suitable
to the situation. Sometimes that might mean waiting till we get home to blow off some steam.

Affirm that you have the power to get that need met—either through another person or through your connection with the Divine. By listening to the messages your emotions bring you, and honoring them, you can experience ageless living rather than be weighed down by old resentments and grief that will affect you at a cellular level. You can bring in joy, generate nitric oxide, and tap the wisdom of your inner healer to repair your body, mind, and spirit.

HOW THE INNER HEALER WORKS

Diseases don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re the final result of a process that takes time to develop. They are, quite literally, an imbalance in the system that is usually the result of years and years of neglecting to engage in the causes of health, which include pleasure, exalted emotions, and righteous anger—most of which our culture has never taught us! If you listen to your body’s messages and heed them, you can very often prevent disease and reverse it long before it becomes established.

Most of us share a culturally supported belief that disease and infirmity are inevitable. They are normal in our culture, yes. But if you look at the so-called Blue Zones around the globe, such as Okinawa, Japan, and Ikaria, Greece—places with unusually high concentrations of healthy older people, first identified by explorer and traveler Dan Buettner—you find that ill health doesn’t need to be the norm.

The most common chronic degenerative diseases today—heart disease, arthritis, cancer, dementia, and diabetes—start with chronically high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. High cortisol levels, combined with a diet high in sugar that causes uneven blood sugar levels, create insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, and oxidation, which are the root causes of all chronic degenerative disease. If inflammation isn’t checked, it causes tissue damage in the lining of the blood vessels. Those damaged blood vessels then attract platelets that stick together and adhere to the walls of the vessels as plaques. The result is hardening of
the arteries—and this happens in the brain too. Oxidation causes cellular damage, particularly to the mitochondria, which are the power centers of the cells.

The vast majority of cancers also develop over time and in stages. In a healthy body, cells replicate and then die so that they can be replaced by newer, younger cells that are less prone to mutations. One of the important effects of cell death, or apoptosis, is to cause mutated cells to die before they can replicate and begin to form tumors. Cell death is triggered by the mitochondria. If a cell’s DNA has been damaged by a mutation (in most cases, more than one mutation), that cell’s mitochondria may not do their job properly. The damaged cell continues to live and reproduce, fed by promoters such as excess estrogen, trans fats, and excess blood sugar. The cluster of mutated cells that results has long been referred to as a carcinoma in situ, meaning cancer (carcinoma) in a specific limited location (in situ). It also means that the microscopic cancer has not invaded the surrounding tissue. Carcinoma in situ is commonly called stage 0 cancer—an unfortunate name that has led thousands of people to have treatments they didn’t need. That’s because up until recently, we did not understand the biology of this type of cell. Researcher H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., an expert on cancer screening, calls these kinds of clusters things we will die
with
but not
from.
³
In the vast majority of cases, the immune system simply prevents abnormal cells from growing any further. Unfortunately, it is this indolent, benign kind of change that is most often picked up on medical screening tests.

And it is also true that when abnormal cells are not destroyed by the immune system, if a network of blood vessels forms to supply them with nutrients, they can become a cancer that is invasive. Cells may then break off and travel through the bloodstream to other areas of the body, which is known as metastasis. Cancers are staged according to how far they have metastasized in the body, with stage 4 being the most invasive and widespread. Nearly all cancer deaths occur at this stage.

Now let’s put things into perspective. The conventional approach to cancer is “early diagnosis” because of the belief that removing a cancer through surgery, radiation, or drugs when it
is at its earliest stages is the best way to cure it. Unfortunately, this approach is far from benign. Consider that each of us makes cancer cells every day, but we never know it because our bodies heal themselves. A study published in the November 2008 edition of the
Archives of Internal Medicine
followed more than 200,000 Norwegian women between the ages of 50 and 64 for two consecutive years. Half received regular mammograms and breast exams while the other half had no regular screening. The women who underwent screening had 22 percent more breast cancer than the unscreened group. The researchers concluded that the women who weren’t screened probably had the same number of cancers, but their bodies had corrected the abnormalities on their own.
⁴

What happens when we become too aggressive in trying to “fix” conditions that our bodies might heal naturally? Since mass mammography screening was started in 1980, 1.3 million women have been diagnosed with so-called breast cancer that was really just ductal carcinoma in situ, which would never have become clinically evident. Far too many women have been diagnosed and then overtreated with bilateral mastectomies, radiation, or pharmaceutical drugs to eradicate cancer. Seventy thousand women were overdiagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 alone. Though some women obviously benefitted from earlier diagnosis, the vast majority did not.
⁵
(I’ll go into more detail about breast health in
Chapter 4
.)

We all know women who have died of breast cancer, so it feels like a very real threat to our health. Even so, most women overestimate their risk of dying from the disease. Sixty to 80 percent of breast cancer cases occur in postmenopause, are not aggressive, and do not metastasize. So while breast cancer can occur in younger women or be aggressive, neither of these scenarios is the most common. It’s easy to forget this when you walk by the local park during breast cancer awareness month and see a field of pink cutouts of women representing deaths from breast cancer, a display designed to scare you into getting a mammogram. Education and awareness about any disease can distort our perceptions of risk and generate a lot of unnecessary fear.
(For more information on postmenopausal breast cancer, see
www.breasthealthcancerprevention.com
.)