Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (11 page)

If we’re going to advocate awareness, here’s what to be aware of at all times: The body is a marvelous creation designed by the Creator to be in a continual state of regeneration and repair to keep all its systems humming. Cells are constantly replacing themselves with healthy ones. Your body is designed to intervene with the disease process at every point and to prevent, slow down, and reverse this process to restore you to your natural state of health. Your immune system is designed to kick into gear and fight any pathogens or germs that enter the system. As you make choices that strengthen your immune system—such as finding things to feel joyful about—it becomes better able to surround, weaken, and kill pathogens.

The tools of Western medicine should be used when appropriate, but not as the first and only way of maintaining health and fostering agelessness. A physician can help you monitor symptoms of imbalances and pay attention to signs that you need to do more to enhance your health, but it’s the Creator working within you that heals. Real health comes from Divine Love and infuses your body with vitality.

PRESCRIPTION MEDICATIONS

Seventy-five percent of people over 65 are on medications, and on average, they’re taking five different drugs.
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Most of these medications aren’t necessary. The “tribe” I hang with vibrates in another reality entirely. I’ve heard my friend and colleague Gladys McGarey, M.D., say, “Ninety-three and prescription-free.” She’s still actively involved in changing the culture of medicine by lobbying in Washington and traveling around the world improving maternal and fetal health. Our unthinking acceptance of concepts like “prescription drugs for seniors” points to a mentality that drives people to see aging as an inevitable process of deterioration and decline.

If you do have chronic health issues that need to be addressed, you may benefit from medications that control symptoms and, in
some cases, halt processes such as inflammation or control conditions like high blood pressure. But do yourself a favor. When you take your medication each day, affirm your ability to be whole and healthy and well. It’s entirely possible that your need for the pill will just go away on its own. In the meantime, be grateful for the availability of a medication that is helpful!

Although Western medicine is too focused on medications and surgery, there is some good news on the medical front. Improvements include team treatment, such as ob/gyns now assembling obstetrics teams that include different types of medical professionals. Kaiser encourages group appointments for diabetics and other groups who can swap recipes and form wellness circles, whether in person or online. Medical schools are teaching new doctors about inflammation and the disease process. And ob/gyns are finally questioning the high rate of C-sections and labor inductions, which have doubled the rate of maternal death over the past 30 years. Labor inductions have also contributed to the birth of far too many premature babies—simply because we’re so intervention driven! Pregnancy serves as a good metaphor: the body has its own timing and we have to stop aggressively intervening to try to control it. As more patients and healers recognize this truth, we’ll see more changes in our health care systems—but don’t hold your breath waiting. Access your own healing power now. It’s right there waiting for you.

DON’T FEAR YOUR GENES!

Genes are a blueprint, not a destiny. It concerns me that so many women have been influenced to have unnecessary drastic surgery because of fears of their genes betraying them. We now have women undergoing a voluntary double mastectomy not only after breast cancer but also, sometimes, just out of fear that they might get breast cancer because they carry a gene mutation that might put them at high risk. Every woman should be respected for making her own health choices, but the story that so often plays out in the media goes something like this: “Brave mother sacrifices breasts so her children won’t suffer.” In any given case, we don’t know how the risk of developing breast
cancer was calculated, and putting a number on an individual’s risk is very difficult given the research we have. What the media tends to ignore outright is the role of epigenetics, or gene expression, in disease. Scientists now know that our DNA contains not only coding in the form of genes, but also some of the triggers that turn on certain genes at certain times to specific degrees. We have more control over epigenetics than most believe.

When the Human Genome Project began in the 1990s, researchers believed they would identify more than 120,000 genes. To their surprise, they found we have only 25,000—fewer than can be found in an ear of corn or a fruit fly. It’s not the genes, but the
expression
of the genes that determines the vast majority of our experiences. The science of epigenetics is still in its infancy, but we know that gene expression is strongly influenced by beliefs and emotions as well as by lifestyle choices. The so-called “junk” DNA, which scientists first believed was unnecessary duplicate coding, may be the key to understanding gene expression—and learning how to influence it. The fact that we initially assumed that this important part of our DNA must be “junk,” just because we didn’t see a purpose to it, says a lot about how closed-minded we can be about the incredible systems in the human body.
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Scientists know your DNA reflects the genetic legacy of your parents, their parents, and your ancestors. It’s possible that it also reflects their emotional experiences. As researchers learn more about our DNA, maybe we’ll find that our cells have encoded the traumas of our ancestors. Experiments in mice have shown that aversion to certain smells is passed down to the offspring after the parental mice were trained to avoid a certain smell by being shocked every time they smelled it.
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While we know that a family history of heart disease may mean close relatives share genes and genetic markers, if we look back, we can often see in family stories hearts that are broken, conflicted, and prevented from loving fully. In my family, people tend to die of heart disease prematurely. My maternal grandmother died of a heart attack at 68. But my mother, who is nearly 90, says, “That has nothing to do with me.” She is not living under the emotional constrictions that her mother did, and she’s living a healthy, active life. If she
has a “bad gene” for heart disease, she hasn’t expressed it yet and may never do so.

Energies outside of our bodies affect our health as well. None of us is an island, and we are affected by the beliefs of our families, friends, and cultures. You may also find yourself taking on the emotions of others empathically, which will affect your stress levels. Have you ever walked away from a conversation or even a phone call feeling as though you could lie down and fall asleep? That’s because that person was, literally, draining your life force. Dr. Mario Martinez points out that our experience of our health is also very much dependent upon the beliefs held within our culture. Migraines are one example; they’re perceived and treated differently in different countries. In France, they are seen as related to the liver. In England, they are considered digestive. And in the U.S., they’re thought to be neurovascular. Consequently, the treatments differ from country to country.

Radiation and pollution are just two external forces that influence what happens in our bodies and which genes are expressed. Radiation causes DNA damage that can lead to cancer unless the process of cellular damage is quelled. Thankfully, sunlight—which produces radiation—also helps your body generate vitamin D, a vital nutrient for good health. In fact, experts estimate that having optimal levels of vitamin D in the body cuts your risk of cancer in half!

It’s counterproductive to worry about your genetics and whether you’ll inherit the diseases and medical conditions that run in your family. It’s not the genetics per se that are a problem so much as worrying about what terrible disease may befall you, along with the long-term stress caused by a fearful, pessimistic belief system. The fact that you have a gene for a particular disease doesn’t mean the gene will express. It’s estimated that 80 percent of all illnesses begin in the mind. Metaphysical healer Edgar Cayce said, “The spirit is the life, the mind is the builder, the physical is the result.” In other words, work with Spirit to design the house (your health) and let your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions serve to build it. If you like a garden metaphor, you can think of Spirit as the wind, rain, and sun. The mind plants the seeds. The body is the garden. Are you going to plant fear or are
you going to plant faith and water it with a positive mind-set and good health habits?

When you choose to take care of yourself not just by focusing on the physical health of a particular organ or system but by relaxing into your oneness with the Creator—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—you are influencing your genes’ expression. Love and live with a fullness of heart, free of any fear of what might be encoded in your DNA. You can’t change your genes, but you can change your inherited emotional patterns. Here’s a prayer to inspire you: “Divine Beloved, please change me into someone who completely trusts my body and my genes.”

LET YOUR INNER HEALER GUIDE YOUR CHOICES

Should you test for genes that, if expressed, would cause a serious illness or disease? My feeling is that you should make your decision based on what you plan to do with the information—and ask yourself if it’s really information you need. Are you going to make positive lifestyle changes to reduce your chances of developing the disease? If so, why not do that anyway? If you’re going to use the negative results as an excuse for not taking the best care of your body, why would you do that? Fewer than 5 percent of cancers are associated with genetics. Finding out you have, say, the BRCA1 gene mutation associated with breast cancer doesn’t mean you will get breast cancer. Finding out you don’t have it doesn’t mean you won’t get it, either. What’s more, genetic tests can be very unreliable because they usually sequence only a small sample of your complete genome, so making a decision based on a genetic test is like trying to figure out someone’s personality from looking at one snapshot.

A woman named Naomi has a family history of a fatal, untreatable autoimmune disorder that affects the lungs. You can’t slow its development, nor can you cure it—the only hope is a lung transplant. Naomi has lost several close relatives to the disease, including her mother, and knows she can do tests to track her lung health to determine her risk if she chooses to. There is also a genetic test that will show whether she inherited a gene mutation that may be associated with the disease. However, she’s
decided not to do genetic tests or baseline lung function tests. Instead, she’s choosing to live as healthfully as possible and to stay apprised of the research that is showing promise for people who develop the disease. She breathes freely, figuratively speaking—free of fear that she might hurt someone’s feelings or disappoint them. Perfectionism and people pleasing, she says, are a family trait she’s refusing to carry on or pass down to her own children.

Naomi says that growing up, she saw that whenever her mother or her mother’s sister got angry with the other, they avoided a confrontation and complained to their mother, who conveyed the message to the other sister. Because the women never directly confronted each other, anxiety ran high among the three women. How can you relax when you never know whether someone you love is angry at you? Naomi grew up following her mother’s pattern of trying to read people’s minds, walking on eggshells, and worrying endlessly about whether anyone was upset with her. At one point, Naomi realized her anxious behavior patterns were too painful to live with anymore. She began exercising regularly and underwent cognitive behavioral therapy to learn how to break her anxious thought processes. After her mother developed the disease and had to use oxygen tanks to breathe, Naomi began a mindfulness meditation practice. “When I saw how terrified my mother was not being able to breathe easily, and heard her tell me her worst fear was to die not being able to draw breath, I knew that learning to breathe in every sense of the word was key to my own well-being. I knew I had to slow down and focus on my life and stop running around worrying about everyone else and what they might think of me.”

Naomi feels she is using her inner healer as inspiration—to see all aspects of herself so that she doesn’t need to manifest an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune disorders, 80 percent of which occur in women, result when the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues—essentially, the self attacking the self. It’s interesting that many women develop autoimmune diseases after the chronic stress of spending years caretaking for their ailing parents. That’s a route Naomi had no interest in taking. The anger and cellular inflammation that were present in her body and spirit weren’t working for her, and she decided she would
rather be healthy and happy than hold on to all that old resentment, even if she did believe she was entitled to it. “It really stunk that I had to lose so much time to caretaking, and that my decision to put my parents’ needs so high on my list meant neglecting the needs of my family and myself, but it was my decision and I decided to accept that I’d made it, even though I wasn’t happy with all the consequences,” she explained.

The worst thing you can do for your health is hold on to anger, fear, and sadness rather than release them. You want your vital life force to be strong so it can support cellular repair and regeneration, lower inflammation and cortisol levels, more stable blood sugar levels, and reduced oxidative stress (the activity of free radicals in the body, which you’ll learn more about later). Naomi is listening to her inner healer and making inspired choices for herself—choices that are divinely guided, not fear based. She knows the importance of boosting her immunity by learning to accept herself, letting go of her anxiety about how other people see her, and getting in touch with her natural healer.

Alleviating emotional stressors and avoiding environmental toxins can assist your inner healer to both tend the garden of your health and choose not to express genes for disease. And it’s also important to relax and realize that it’s not possible to avoid all toxins all the time!