Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (9 page)

RADIATE PLEASURE!

Your nature is joyous radiance. You don’t have to ask permission to seek or receive pleasure. Your happiness serves the world and yourself, keeping your vibrational energy high.

Here’s how it works: Your heart’s electromagnetic field reaches out from your body and interacts with the field of energy we all share—you’re actually wired to reach out and connect to pleasure. This energy field radiates throughout the universe via the electromagnetic field. Scientists know about these fields, but don’t necessarily think of them metaphysically. They’ve discovered the Higgs boson particle, which is the evidence theoretical physicists have been searching for because it explains how energy coalesces into matter. Unity Minister Catherine Ponder’s term for the Higgs boson is “divine substance.” Others have called it “the God particle.” When you have fun, your energy changes and so does the field around you, and that shapes physical reality—creating nitric oxide and endorphins in your own body. How that energy of pleasure manifests in the physical world outside your body is a marvelous mystery.

So adopt this motto:
Fun is important.
Fun is what keeps you ageless. Dream up a pleasurable adventure, get out there and do it, and chances are someone else will do it with you. Drive into the city to take a tango lesson. Book the cabin for a girlfriends’ weekend in the woods during the dark months of winter. Pull out the card game or board game, get some people together, and laugh yourself silly over a trivia question.

The time for pleasure is now. I remember when I finished my medical residency at age 30. I’d been a nonstop student since I was in kindergarten and now my peers were choosing postdoctoral specialties. I wondered when I would get a chance to stop following the carrot on the stick and finally have some fun in the present instead of someday. I’d had enough. I said no to doing an
ob/gyn subspecialty fellowship. It was time to live my life. How about you?

Learning tango or singing in public may not be giving food to the homeless or helping as a hospice volunteer, but these pleasurable pursuits are important. We’re taught that good women spend their free time endlessly giving, selflessly serving, never caring about themselves. Tango is all about me, being in my body and feeling pleasure, but my dancing the tango gives others permission to indulge in their own gratification. Joy starts in our bodies, as nitric oxide and neurotransmitters, and then its positive energy heals our cells and then radiates outward to heal others and the planet. Dancing is a form of healing—in fact, any ecstatic experience can be healing not just for you but for others. Therapy is good to help you think differently and break patterns of pessimistic thinking or negative self-talk. But we have to be joyful, dance, and bring pleasure into our lives deliberately.

Life’s too short to settle for the lousy theater seats, so buy the best or figure out how to become a volunteer usher so you can sit in the orchestra section. Get in touch with what really makes you feel good. Become an ageless Alpha Goddess of pleasure. In fact, make pleasure a sacrament. That will be a gift to yourself and the world.

CHAPTER THREE

GODDESSES USE THE HEALING POWER WITHIN

Women, delve deep into your primal power, beyond the
appearances, customs, and religions of this day. Delve into the
knowing that you have always had and always will—a knowing
that no religion can ever encompass and that no culture can
ever define. Delve deep into your belly and the brain that lies
there: the primal brain, your original voice, the voice that will
never betray you and will always lead you to the truth of love in
action, the being of joy, and peace: The Voice of Life itself.

— P
ADMA AND
A
NAIYA
A
ON
P
RAKASHA
,
W
OMB
W
ISDOM
: A
WAKENING THE
C
REATIVE AND
F
ORGOTTEN
P
OWERS OF THE
F
EMININE

T
oni had a recurrence of her Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer that affects the blood and lymph nodes. Hodgkin’s tends to lower your hemoglobin, or red blood cells, and
Toni was in the hospital with a fever and anemia. Her hemoglobin was dangerously low. A transfusion was ordered. No stranger to the power of the mind to influence the body, she asked her physician if she could hold off for a couple of hours and take the test again. Then she called a couple of natural healers who work over the phone and, with their guidance, envisioned rich, healthy blood cells traveling throughout her circulatory system. Sure enough, when the test was repeated, it showed her hemoglobin levels had jumped upward. In fact, she had as many red blood cells as if she had received the recommended transfusion of a unit of blood.

When Toni shared this story with me, I wasn’t surprised. I thought about how when I went to medical school, we were trained to see health mechanistically, without regard to the power of the mind to affect our health. The influence of emotions and thoughts on our physical bodies is known as the placebo effect. This powerful effect is considered at best a medical curiosity and at worst a phenomenon that makes it difficult to test the efficacy of new pharmaceutical drugs. I have learned through decades of experience with patients, as well as countless scientific studies, that the placebo effect is powerful physical medicine. It can be harnessed consciously to create better health. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that?

“BODY, HEAL THYSELF”

As children, we’re fascinated by our bodies’ ability to heal a scraped knee or broken bone. But as adults, we often forget about the body’s remarkable capacity for self-repair. The key to this repair is understanding there is a balance between immunity and pathogens. None of us is completely free of threats to our health. Every body has cancerous cells in it along with microorganisms that could cause illness if not kept in check. Everyone’s body has manmade toxins in the bloodstream and organs. There’s no way to live a perfectly clean life, free of all pathogens. In fact, the fear of pathogens making you sick will depress your immune system, making it more likely that you
will
get sick.

The very origins of Western medicine are rooted in the study of pathology: the paradigm of war and fighting invaders. Health and those things that contribute to it are almost never studied or taught. So starting in utero we are programmed to think of our bodies and our environments as war zones requiring an armamentarium of pills and surgery to wage war on germs and on the body itself. We have largely overlooked the power of our immune systems and our innate ability to boost our immunity. The medical mind-set—and the fear that drives it—has to go. It’s time to reclaim the wisdom and power of the healer within.

There’s no doubt that Western medicine can be very useful in addressing certain conditions that are acute. When you fall off a ladder and break your arm or get a concussion, of course you want to go to an emergency room for assistance. I’m a huge fan of Western medicine and its remarkable ability to replace a worn-out hip or address acute trauma. When an illness is life threatening, you want to be able to access the best medical tests and treatments available. However, most medical problems are not acute: they develop over time after a long process that we can intervene with at any point. As Myron Wentz, Ph.D., a world-renowned microbiologist, puts it, “We die too long and live too short.” Most ailments aren’t simply caused by a virus or single physical agent. They always have mental, emotional, and spiritual or energetic aspects to them. The best approach to health conditions is to acknowledge and address them through a holistic mind-body-spirit approach to wellness, not just a physical intervention.

Diseases and disorders are part of nature’s way. Illness can give us that all-important nudge to look inward and deal with the emotions we’ve been avoiding for a lifetime. Years ago, Bernie Siegel, M.D., with whom I served as co-president of the American Holistic Medical Association, said, “The fundamental problem that most patients face is the inability to love themselves.” This is so true—and not just for patients but for all of us. Our challenge is to learn to love ourselves just as Spirit does: unconditionally. We should love ourselves not because of some achievement or service we provide to others, but simply because we are precious beings. This is the primary message that those who have
passed over in death and then returned have to share. We are loved and appreciated more than we can ever know. And we can learn to care for ourselves from a loving standpoint—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually—as we would a precious child. Then our vitality is automatically boosted.

Women have been taught to be perfectionists, constantly on the go, doing for others without stopping to rest until it’s absolutely necessary. Too often, we treat food as something to grab on the run. And we spend many hours sitting as we drive, work on computers, and so on. Exercise can seem like just another item to fit onto an overcrowded To Do list. We exhaust our bodies and our spirits trying to pack in all that we think we’re supposed to do.

But our bodies were never meant to sit for prolonged periods. Nor were we designed for nutrient-poor fast food purchased at a drive-through window and eaten in quick bites at red lights. Sleep and rest are essential, as Arianna Huffington so powerfully demonstrates in her book
Thrive
(Harmony, 2014). A life devoid of movement, sleep, and nourishing food is draining and will age you quickly as it overtaxes your immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems. I consider sleep my number-one medicine. Having a good night’s sleep solves most of my problems within a night or two because it boosts vitality, as does releasing any emotions and beliefs that restrict you from expressing your divine, goddess nature. And continual daily movement—as simple as standing up and then sitting down at your computer or while watching TV—about 32 times per day—will boost your immunity and put the health-giving effects of gravity to work for you!

Your immune system will naturally have highs and lows. The lymphocytes, or white blood cells, can be observed in whorls in the walls of the uterus waxing and waning with the menstrual cycle, just as the moon does. Consequently, your immunity is low just before your period, which is why you might notice that you’re more prone to colds, migraines, and other ailments during those days just before and at the beginning of your period—if you’re still menstruating, that is. This monthly dip in immunity tends to disappear after menopause. To boost immunity, you have to do extra self-nourishing—which is why the menstrual cycle is such a
powerful natural tool for learning the art of self-care. Anything less than loving, nurturing care for yourself will often result in cramps and PMS.

The incredible inner healer in each of us is empowered by the ultimate healer: Divine Love (God). Working with this force, allowing it to fuel our lives, is the key to healing our unhealed wounds. Asking Divine Love to take away our anger, sadness, and resentment over unhealed traumas of the past is the answer. It’s only when we’re awakened to our exquisite sensitivity and empathetic nature that we can acknowledge the need to heal. Pain in all its many forms—whether emotional or physical—is actually a most powerful path to Divine Love. Only a direct connection with the Divine will heal us permanently.

The ultimate healer, Divine Love, is an inner gardener of sorts. She tends to the plants without worrying that weeds will overtake her seedlings and block their sunlight. She prepares for new growth. She’s not a warrior out to battle a disease or virus and stomp it out with the help of a well-oiled medical army of procedures and pills. She’s a healer who knows the power of the body’s ability to generate and regenerate healthy cells, tissues, organs, and biological systems, and we can turn to her for help instead of just expecting a physician to heal us. Doctors can aid us in healing, but it’s the body and the Divine who do the work.

Speaking of the body, a goddess has to let go of the ingrained belief that her body is unclean, ugly, or flawed. We’ve been taught that the experience of the Divine is transcendent and the body is unclean and impure: it poops, pees, and bleeds. But while we’ve been taught to see our bodies as ugly, it’s through the body that we discover our divine nature. We should marvel at how beautifully designed our bodies and their systems are, and enjoy the gift of having an inner healer—the ability to boost our immunity, cleanse toxins, and repair our cells. We reflect Mother Earth’s ability to recycle and regenerate, reabsorbing the hormones we don’t need after they have served their purpose, pruning away what’s no longer needed, and creating new cells and neural networks in the brain.

The body is not uncivilized and in need of taming, but the vessel for our creative life force and the temple in which we’re
designed to live heaven on earth. When we recognize that we came here to live heaven on earth, we start to realize that our bodies are the only place in which we can do this. We stop denying our needs, start releasing the old emotional and physical toxins that have clogged up our energy centers, reclaim our energy and vitality, and awaken our inner healer. That’s when the real magic happens, from reinventing our lives to rebooting our health.