Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (19 page)

I loved my father dearly. We were a lot alike, and I looked up to him. He was a pioneer in what we would now call holistic dentistry. My dad often said that you could tell the state of someone’s health by looking in that person’s mouth. His philosophy of health and disease, in direct contrast to that of his sister and brother, who were conventional physicians, became the basis of my own holistic medical practice. My father could do no wrong
in my eyes. But long after his death, I was stunned by how much resentment lay buried deep in my mind and body. I thought that everyday misunderstandings and the ordinary mistakes our mothers and fathers make in the course of parenting couldn’t possibly cause wounds that can remain unhealed for a lifetime.

We can love our family members dearly and make a conscious choice to forgive them for whatever hurts they have caused us. In fact, this step in our healing is crucial. But it’s not enough. We still need to clear old hurts, anger, and grievances from our bodies. The health benefits of this are immense.

When the pain of staying stuck is greater than the pain you have to go through to get free, you have the opportunity to let go of the heartache of the past and be free to bloom. Once you get to the point where you’re ready for the breakthrough, the emotions will appear one way or another. If you ignore them or repress them again, they’ll come back up. And the longer you wait, the more likely they are to come up accompanied by physical ailments meant to awaken you to the need for healing.

There are four crucial truths about stored emotions that you must know if you want to be an ageless goddess:

~ We store our emotions in our energy fields and tissues, where they can remain for years, suppressed and waiting for us to have the courage to express them.

~ Unprocessed emotions of anger, grief, sadness, and shame are a serious threat to health and well-being. They cause the body to create and hold on to stress hormones that lead to cellular degeneration, inflammation, and all sorts of physical ailments we associate with aging, as you’ve seen.

~ You must process your emotions. You do that by learning what need they signify and then releasing them through movement, sound, and tears. It can take a lot of repetition—using techniques like the ones you’ll learn about in this chapter—to bring the emotions up and out of you. I know that letting yourself feel and release so-called “negative”
emotions is easier said than done. Shame is endemic in our society, and we’re taught to feel ashamed of ourselves and our strong emotions that make others uncomfortable, especially our anger. As shame researcher Brené Brown says in her book
Daring Greatly,
“We’re all afraid to talk about shame…. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.”
¹

~ There’s no need to fear the emotions that come up, because they won’t last forever or overwhelm you—though at first you may think they will. The good news is that we’re designed biologically to feel and release emotions regularly and easily.

Many of us were taught that as long as we mentally acknowledge that we’re ticked off, or sad, or jealous, or embarrassed, or ashamed, and we think through why we feel that way and make some conscious choices about our thoughts
and behaviors, that’s the end of it. Wrong. Emotions have an energetic and physiological reality that doesn’t magically disappear when you think to yourself,
I don’t want to be mad at my mother anymore, so I’ll just go along with her holiday plans and try not to let her get to me.
They don’t disappear simply because you’ve cried a few times, or shouted at someone, or talked to your therapist. Shifting your thoughts is very important, but it’s not enough. You have a lot of emotional energy to release too. As Dr. Joe Dispenza says, “Emotions are the language of the body. And they are also a record of the past.” We can’t change our bodies or our health simply by changing our thoughts. True transformation involves changing both our thoughts and the emotional connections that keep us stuck in the past.

The
only
way to get rid of your anger, guilt, shame, grief, or fear thoroughly so that it doesn’t affect your health in the long run is to start a process of emotional release. Learn what you can from your experiences. You might want to do this with the help of a coach or therapist—there are many who incorporate emotional release work into their sessions. However, after you’ve gleaned what you need to know about the origins of your feelings and behaviors, don’t talk about your childhood traumas over and over again in lieu of doing emotional release work. As author Anne Wilson Schaef said to me once, “We take our shit and we put it on an altar and worship it!” And unfortunately, we expect everyone else to worship it too, which is why “victims” can be so manipulative. How many of us have been taught to repress our inconvenient feelings and walk on eggshells around others who have unfinished business that may have nothing to do with us? Maybe you were told, “Don’t talk about that in front of Aunt Mabel. You know that she lost a daughter in the past and has never gotten over it!” It’s always important to be kind. But worshipping the family wounds for generations is just not healthy!

All of us are given a certain amount of crap to compost. Get it out of you so that you can mix it into rich soil and create something new. Learn from it, write a poem expressing it, and dance or cry it out of you to heal yourself. Create something better from the crap so that it doesn’t define your life or make you sick. And while we’re composting, let’s throw onto the compost heap the old belief that suffering is redemptive. You are not getting a ticket to the VIP seats in heaven by torturing yourself on Earth today. The atonement archetype has to go. And it’s deeply embedded in most of us.

When it comes to painful emotions, it’s important not to indulge their inherent drama. There’s a difference between bringing emotions to the surface of your awareness so that you can release them and artificially keeping these emotional experiences alive in you. Don’t be fashionably cynical. Don’t identify with your depressive feelings and tell yourself that the world is out to get you so you might as well anticipate the worst. Better to indulge in “pronoia,” which writer and astrologer Rob Brezsny defines as “the belief that the world is conspiring to shower us with blessings.” Now
that
is a mind-set that supports health.

So stop waiting for the moment when it’s okay to be happy—when you’ve lost the weight, stopped making financial mistakes, or achieved whatever goalpost of perfection you set up for yourself. Put on the music and dance
now.
Your unrestricted, luscious, rich joy serves not only you but the planet. So move those lower chakras, open your heart, and let your life force express itself like
the most succulent, juicy fruit, the most redolent and colorful flower, or the loudest and most raucous song. After that, make a commitment to getting rid of all the old emotional toxins that have become stuck inside you so you can live freely and agelessly.

Let’s look at the emotions you hold on to, how they affect you, and how to get rid of them when they’re no longer serving you so you can bring in the healing forces of love, laughter, pride, and sheer delight in being alive on earth.

LEARN FROM YOUR EMOTIONS

By midlife, you’ve had your heart broken at least once, and probably more, by someone or something. Heartbreak is how your heart becomes wise, because it has to be cracked open for you to experience your divinity. The more you try to avoid heartbreak and dull the pain through drinking, smoking, eating, or denial, the worse the pain gets and the deeper it buries itself. Fortunately, the heartbreak you’ve survived gives you the strength to face the emotions you’ve been encouraged to avoid.

Anger, fear, sadness, betrayal, abandonment, and shame are the more challenging emotions we tend to avoid, to our detriment. Shame is the most painful because it stops us from facing the other emotions. There really aren’t any “negative” emotions because all emotions have a function. They serve as our innate guidance system, alerting us to what we truly need and what we need to change. Anger and fear—and those are closely related—are experienced in the primitive limbic brain system that evolved to help us avoid danger. When faced with danger, the limbic brain begins a process of reaction that involves anger, fear, and the urge to fight or run away. But we also feel anger and fear in response to thoughts, and to situations or people that aren’t actually dangerous.

It’s good that we have a fear response, because fear and anger can remind us to slow down and sort out what we think and feel before saying yes to whatever’s being asked of us. However, fear and anger aren’t supposed to be a way of life. As Stephen Covey wrote in
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families
(St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), quoting Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and
response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Agelessness happens in that space where we choose to step into joy and possibility rather than remain stuck in a vicious cycle of anger, fear, and grief. This experience can also be called wisdom—which Dr. Joe Dispenza brilliantly refers to as “memory without the emotional charge.”
²

Grief is a little different from anger and fear. It tends to have less energy—in fact, it zaps us of energy. Becoming sad is a part of life, but if you carry your grief for too long, it will age you very quickly. Don’t suppress your grief because you feel pressured to keep your tears to yourself. What’s the first thing you do when you see people crying? You probably tell them not to cry and try to talk them out of their sadness. And chances are you also hug them—as a way to stop their pain. Then they feel obligated to stop crying because it’s making you uncomfortable.

There’s a happy medium here. One mother says to her sensitive daughter after a good ten minutes of her daughter moping on the living room couch, “I know you’re sad about this and I’m sorry you feel that way. Maybe you should take some time in your room to cry.” She’s not banishing her daughter, or saying her daughter is being too sensitive. She’s just teaching her that sometimes it’s best to be alone with your tears. Now, this mom checks in after a while to make sure her daughter hasn’t gotten stuck in her mood, but she gives her daughter room to be sad. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we all encouraged each other to let it out but not indulge sadness to the point where everyone feels the need to flop in a chair and begin weeping?

Thoughts and beliefs can fan the embers of sadness just as they can rekindle any emotion, so it’s important to look at any depressing, pessimistic attitudes and stories you have about your life and decide whether you want to replace them. Recently I had some old slides that I hadn’t looked at in decades scanned into jpegs. And I was utterly astounded by how lovely I looked in the early years of my marriage. But back then, I didn’t feel beautiful at all. It didn’t help that the man I was married to was always happy to tell me that I could stand to lose weight. I spent many years certain that I was too fat and not desirable
as a woman. Those beliefs—and the shame and grief that were part of them—eventually showed up as a frozen shoulder, chest pain, and a large fibroid in my uterus. I have reversed all of these conditions through bringing the beliefs and the feelings associated with them to consciousness to be felt and released. And with each layer of the onion that I’ve shed, I have become healthier and happier—which is really the body’s natural state. What old beliefs and feelings do you need to release? What sadness are you holding on to?

I don’t mean to minimize how strongly you can be affected by anger, fear, or sadness. It’s incredibly scary to contemplate the end of a relationship, losing your job or your home, and so on, and those things can happen, forcing you to accept that change is a part of life. You can’t freeze your circumstances and avoid future suffering, but you can choose to live in fear or live in faith. Most of what’s called security is an illusion anyway. You can create a sense of security even when you’re in a transition or your circumstances aren’t what you would like them to be. Your inner power to generate emotions such as confidence and faith is incredible. And the ability to do so literally rewires both your brain and your body. But to do this, you first have to connect with the Divine.

The actual problem isn’t what we fear so much as the emotion of fear eating away at us. Many women, myself included, share a primal fear that somehow we’ll end up homeless and living alone in a cardboard box on the street. (I shared this scary daydream with a friend recently and she quipped, “You had a box?” Apparently in her version of the daydream, she didn’t even have that!) This fear of being completely helpless and broke is irrational for most of us—but there it is, seeping up from the collective unconscious. In general, we humans tend to look out for each other, and support can come from unexpected places when you turn your life over to the Divine Beloved. To live as an ageless goddess is to release fear and strengthen faith.

Name your fear and transform it instead of hanging on to it. One of my favorite prayers to heal fear goes like this: “Divine Beloved, please change
me into someone who trusts that the perfect outcome to this situation has already been chosen. Change me into someone who can relax and let go.” Say this prayer (or something in a similar spirit, such as the Twenty-third Psalm) when your fear of the future or the unknown has you in its grip. Over time, it will become a habit. Letting go and letting God is a learnable skill.

MANY FORMS OF SHAME

Fear and anger are like weeds that feed on shame—and shame is a toxin we need to release if we want to be ageless! Again and again, we get the message that our needs aren’t important and that we’re being selfish and bad if we take care of ourselves. No wonder we’re afraid to feel our emotions. A patient of mine once told me, “In my household, I was so certain I wasn’t wanted, I was afraid of breathing deeply because I might take up oxygen other people needed.” Guilt serves a purpose, waking us up to something we need to correct, but shame is downright poisonous. Brené Brown distinguishes between guilt and shame this way: guilt is feeling you
made
a mistake while shame is feeling you
are
a mistake. That said,
healthy
shame serves the purpose of alerting us when we’ve truly been selfish and even cruel. It creates good boundaries between people and leads us to create a balance between our needs and those of the people around us. Our conscience makes us feel ashamed when we’ve acted shamelessly, oblivious to anyone else’s feelings and needs.