Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (12 page)

For healing to occur, we must come to see that we are not so much responsible
for
our illnesses as responsible
to
them
. The healthiest peo ple I know don’t take their diseases or even their lives too personally. They spend very little time beating themselves up about their illnesses, their life circumstances, or anything else. They take their life one day at a time, as it unfolds in its own way and its own time. A young woman stated this attitude beautifully when she wrote, “I take full responsibility not for getting cancer in the first place, nor for ultimately surviving it, but rather for the quality of the way I am responding to this bit of chaos thrown into my life.”

Healing and Mystery

The story of Martha, a close family friend, provides a most striking example of the mystery of illness and body symptoms. Though unusual in many ways, her story illustrates the range of experiences available to us when we are open to healing in whatever way it presents itself.

When Martha was in her late fifties, a series of painful childhood memories began to surface spontaneously. She allowed herself to feel fully how painful her childhood had been. She expressed and released these feelings through sobbing for hours over several days within the space of about a week. During this process she fully remembered the details of being taken to run-down bars by her bootlegger father. While she was at these places she had often watched him kissing women who were strangers. She recalled being left with an aunt for a few days while her mother broke her father out of jail. The aunt kept her and her younger sister in a cockroach-laden room with only crackers to eat and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. As Martha let herself remember those and many other things that she had “deep-sixed” fifty-five years before, she was able to cry and wail for as long as she needed to as a trusted friend sat with her. This cleansing went on for several days, off and on. Afterward, she said, “I realized that there was nothing of beauty in my life when I was a child. It was worse than I ever let myself remember.”

Once she was able to see this part of her life for what it really was and express her emotions around it, the chronic neck and shoulder pain that she’d had for years and that had been ascribed to “degenerative changes in her spine” went away completely. It has never come back.

One spring, Martha called me to say that she was experiencing terror of death to a degree she’d never known possible. Based on her past experience of trusting her symptoms, she decided to stay with her feelings and symptoms to see what they could teach her rather than running away from them or trying to suppress or “cure” them with drugs.

Martha is no stranger to death, having lived through the deaths of two of her children and her husband—two of these in the space of one year. Her fear of her own death, which she told me followed her to bed at night and confronted her in the morning, was accompanied by vague left-sided upper abdominal pains, which she at first misinterpreted as being related to taking penicillin for a dental infection. Her terror was so awful that she couldn’t really talk about it for quite some time.

As her terror and the stomach pain became worse, her intuition suggested that she should drive across the country from New England to Taos, New Mexico, where one of her daughters lived. She wanted to be alone, and she felt that driving a long distance would be the right thing. I had never heard her so upset, but I was not worried. I trusted that she had something to work through and that I would hear from her afterward, when she was ready to talk to me. Several days later she called, still quite shaky. “It all started out on the prairie,” she said. “For a couple hundred miles I drove, and then I felt this enormous emotional and physical pain. I was driving past the stockyards. There were all these cattle up to their bellies in the excrement. It hit me how we all live in all this crap and then gloss it over with scented toilet paper. I felt such sadness for the state of the world, for all the environmental problems. I thought of all the fear we always have. I found myself trudging across the prairie as a pioneer woman. I ‘saw’ thousands and thousands of women, of all races, all ages, trudging across the prairie, holding up the world through their labors. I felt the fear and the pain of all those women, the endless work.” As these images were washing over her, she said, her stomach pain was getting worse and worse, and she had to stop the car and pull her legs up to her chest. She tasted blood in her mouth, but when she spat into a tissue, nothing was there.

“Then the flash came. I was a Viking, a male Viking. I had a huge sword. I killed a woman about to have a child. I killed them both with this sword. It was so awful to think of that. I just kept driving with tears and agony. To think that I was capable of doing such a thing! I felt such compassion for men because they were trained to do this. This pain in my stomach, the tears, the agony—this went on for about four hours. When I went over the mountain pass in the Rockies, the sun came out and I thought the pain would go away. But the horror still came. It was like some horrible dream that was real, but it wasn’t.

“I needed to do this alone in an environment that wasn’t ‘home.’ All night Friday on the day I left, the pain was on the left and seemed to be leaving. But on Saturday as I continued my trip, I’d get these waves of dread in the left side of my abdomen. That’s exactly where I [the Viking] put the sword.

“When I got to Taos, I had a session with Mary, a gifted intuitive. She did a reading and felt it was not necessary for me to go any farther. This vision of the pioneer women and me as a Viking killing a pregnant woman has helped me to release my fear of death.

“I know I need to put a closure on this, I need to acknowledge it and close it. Perhaps it was necessary for the female to be killed. It was the worst thing I have ever done, the thing that I have tried to hide from God and from myself. The other thing I realized is that all of mankind has done this. We have all killed and murdered. I feel as though I have just died from another lifetime. Now I’m giving birth to myself. I can never go back to what I was before, because too much has happened to me. I can’t be what I was before.

“I haven’t felt my full physical energy for some time. I’ve always been at a physical high pitch. This experience helped me in a realization of my own death. The environment, the earth, and what we’ve done to it is very deep in me. I think that now I have also successfully dropped my ties to my children in the sense of holding on too tightly out of fear. I can move on now.”

Martha realized that a full intellectual understanding of what had just happened to her was not necessary for her healing. She did not have to interpret the vision or experience of “being a Viking” as a past-life experience or anything else in order to heal. What was necessary was that she
feel
all of what was coming up from deep within her. After she acknowledged the act of murder, she felt freed of its burden and thus renewed. She also realized that she had to change the way she had been living. She needed to stop spending time with friends who contributed nothing to her life, in friendships that were based on habit, not mutual enrichment.

When Martha returned to her home a week later, she still felt some residual fear and dread from the experience and wanted to be free of it. She wrote down the whole thing, then went out into the backyard un der a night sky full of stars, dug a hole, and burned her writing. She buried the ashes and stood up, and finally, after weeks of dread, she felt completely released.

About three weeks later, she was visiting her aunt and uncle in Ohio. Her uncle Roy took her aside and said that he didn’t feel that he had much longer to live and that he had something he wanted to give her. He took her into a back room, reached up on a shelf, and handed down a bronze statue. It was a Viking with a sword.

We share our amazement at this bit of synchronicity. (“Synchronicity is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” says Bernie Siegel.) Martha said, “I can have this statue in my house now. It is a symbol for me of healing. I know that if I had not allowed myself to experience this mem ory or dream or whatever it was, I would have developed a fatal stomach condition. I am certain of this.”

This story illustrates profoundly that the notion that we are to blame for our illnesses in any conventional sense is irrelevant and narrow. In some mysterious way, our conscious intellect is
not
in control. Another part of us—our highest power, soul, or inner wisdom—is. The concept of the self needs to be expanded. Studies have documented the power of prayer to heal at a distance, instantaneously. Time and space are not absolute. We are acted upon by forces outside of our conscious control. We can be open to learning from all of life, from our inner selves, and from all that with which we are connected.

We have the body we have because it is precisely the vehicle in which we can best do what we came to do. Stevie Wonder has said that his blindness helped him feel the love that is all around him more than he would have if he were sighted. Perhaps he couldn’t do the creative work he’s doing if he were in a “normal” body. The late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pointed out that when our bodies are sick or nonfunctioning, our spiritual and mental capacities often expand way beyond what they would normally be. She used the example of children with leukemia who seem wise beyond their years.
²³
I accept the truth of this on faith. We can’t really hope to figure it out with our logical, intellectual selves. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

Be open to the messages and mysteries of your body and its symp toms. Be eager to listen and slow to judge. What you learn can save your life.

3
Inner Guidance

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying “Amen” to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

R
ight after Mary Lu was diagnosed with breast cancer, she called me to discuss her treatment options. I told her that part of her healing would be to learn how to trust herself to make her own decisions about her treatment after gathering information from a num ber of experts. She later wrote me, “I remember that I felt scared when I heard you affirm that in recovery, I would know what to do to deal with the cancer. I remember thinking that these were life-and-death choices and not on par with deciding how to spend some weekend. Then what flashed for me was that my soul has always been at stake all these years. Anne [Schaef] reminded me that I had come to my first group session with her back in 1981 concerned about my health. It was right after a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis and I was afraid I was killing myself. I do believe in the mind-body-soul connection. With decisions to make concerning my cancer treatment,
I had this sense that I
would have a real chance to trust my inner guidance.
Trusting myself at such a deep level was frightening to me, but I gratefully say now several months later that this ‘stuff’ really does work, that I have trusted my process a lot through this. And each time that I have guided myself to my own healing, it gives me renewed courage to continue to trust.”

Our inner guidance directs us toward that which is most life-enhancing and life-fulfilling for us. Following it can be lifesaving in medical situations as well as life-enhancing in daily situations, even those as minor as choosing what to wear. Mary Lu learned not only that she could find the surgeon she needed to work with and the treatment that worked best for her but also that she could enjoy her life at the same time, even while dealing with something as frightening as breast cancer. She did this by
allowing herself to be led by
how she was feeling in each moment of the day
. Each step of the way, she moved toward the decision that felt best to her. When you move toward that which is most fulfilling and life-enhancing, healing follows.

Our inner guidance system is mediated via our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and bodily feelings. Our bodies are designed to act as receiving and transmitting stations for energy and information. Living in touch with our inner guidance involves feeling our way through life using
all
of ourselves: mind, body, emotions, and spirit. When I refer to this process in this book, I mean the various ways we listen and use our inner guidance to make conscious changes in our lives, behavior, relationships with others, and health.

TABLE 3

S
OURCES OF
G
UIDANCE