Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (13 page)

LISTENING TO YOUR BODY AND ITS NEEDS

We can generally trust our gut feeling about someone or something to be accurate information. This is because the solar plexus, the place in the body where we generally feel the gut reaction, is in fact a primitive brain. It is also a major intuitive center, the part of our body that lets us know whether we are safe and whether we are being lied to. Columbia researcher Michael Gershon, M.D., is a pioneer in the field of neurogastroenterology. In his book
The Second Brain,
he details the discovery and gradual scientific acceptance of the enteric nervous system, which actually operates independently from the brain in the head. Dr. Gershon also points out that 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the gut.

Each of us must develop ways to tune in to our body’s needs. We can start with simple things. When you’re tired, rest. When you have to go to the bathroom, go. If you feel like crying when you read a certain passage in this book, let yourself cry. If you simply can’t read certain parts of the text, notice them—they may refer to subjects that are painful to you. Just make a note of your reactions. Be aware of your breathing as you read: Does it speed up or slow down depending upon the material you’re covering? What is your heart doing? Is it racing or is it slow? Does reading about the uterus or the menstrual cycle unearth any old memories of body feelings?

I often ask women to pay attention to what their bodies feel like in the moment. In order to heal our bodies, we have to reenter them and experience them. (Right after I wrote that, I noticed that my legs were numb. I’d been sitting too long and had ignored my need for move ment. After a ten-minute barefoot walk on the lawn and some deep breathing, my body felt much more alert and happy.)

We have to give our bodies credit for their innate wisdom. We also don’t need to know exactly why something is happening in our bodies in order to respond to it. You don’t need to know
why
your heart is racing or
why
you feel like crying. Understanding comes
after
you have allowed yourself to experience what you’re feeling. Healing is an or ganic process that happens
in
the body
as well as in the intellect. So if you are feeling out of sorts or off balance, just be with that feeling; allow it to come up. After you have allowed yourself to experience it, take a moment and go back over the events of the last few hours or days. If you are feeling ill or having symptoms, reflecting on recent events may give you a clue about what preceded the symptoms.

Here’s an example from my own experience. While writing this book, I woke up with the visual signs and numbness of hand and face that are the symptoms of an impending migraine headache. I had developed classic migraines at the age of twelve, had one or sometimes two headaches approximately every month until my sophomore year in college, and then didn’t get another one for twenty years. While growing up, I was a definite migraine personality, pushing myself mercilessly in school and in all my activities. Stress “shorted out” my body’s electromagnetic system on a regular basis.

So when I began to get that old, familiar, sickening feeling, I immediately used it as an opportunity to learn. I put an ice pack under my neck, lay down, kept the room quiet, and concentrated on making my hands warm. (I had learned from a biofeedback therapist that migraines often can be aborted by relaxing totally and warming the hands.) By doing this I managed to avoid getting a full-blown headache that would have left me in pain, nauseated for most of the day, and very weak. After about one hour, I was able to resume my activities but felt very subdued. I thought back on the previous three days.

I had been tearing around the house, trying to pick up and organize years of clutter in two days. Toward the end of the weekend, my temper had been short, I had scarcely taken time to eat or go to the bath room, and I hadn’t taken a break from the bending and cleaning for hours. I had gone to bed with a dull headache. The next morning, I woke up with the migraine symptoms. It was clear to me that my ability to put my bodily needs for rest, recreation, and nurturing aside for long periods of time was intact. Only now my body wouldn’t let me get away with it nearly as much as it used to. Hence the migraine. I took it as a warning.

The healing principle that summarizes this learning is this:
If you don’t
heed the message the first time, you get hit with a bigger hammer the next
time.

The purpose of emotions, regardless of what they are, is to help us identify and move toward the fulfillment of our needs, dreams, goals, and desires. When our needs for rest, touch, acceptance, and recognition (to name just a few) are satisfied, we feel good. And we thrive. When we feel left out, frightened, or angry, on the other hand, we can be sure that we have a need that we haven’t identified, let alone figured out how to satisfy. (For an extensive list of feelings and the needs they point to, go to
www.cnvc.org
or read
Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life
[PuddleDancer Press, 2003] by Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D.)

To become aware of our inner guidance system, we must first learn to trust our feelings. This isn’t always so easy, because many of us have been taught to live our lives as though we were in a constant emergency situation. We think, “Oh, I’ll deal with that painful emotion later. Right now I don’t have time. I have to get that report out,” or cook dinner, or whatever it is. This delay or denial requires our bodies to speak louder and louder to get our attention. The next time you feel moved to tears or moved to laughter, stop and experience it. It doesn’t take that long. And it improves the quality of life enormously!

Many women have been taught to think—not feel—that we should be upbeat and happy all the time, an approach that inevitably results in squelching needs. Sadness and pain are natural parts of life. They are also great teachers. No one gets through life without experiencing sadness or pain. Yet our culture teaches us that there is something wrong with pain, that it must be drugged, denied, or otherwise avoided at all costs—and the costs are very high.

We are not taught that we have an innate ability to deal with pain, that our bodies know how to do this. Crying is one of the ways in which we rid our bodies of toxins. Crying allows us to move energy around our body and sometimes to rechannel it or understand it in a different way. When we don’t allow ourselves to feel our emotions and instead use addictive activities or substances such as running or tranquilizers to get a high, we actually create hormones (enkephalins) that repress tears (and full emotional expression).
¹
Tears contain toxins that the body needs to get rid of. When we allow ourselves a full emotional release, our body, mind, and spirit feel cleansed and free. Insight about what to do in a given situation often comes
only after
we feel our emotions about it and shed tears if necessary. Interestingly, tears of joy and tears of sorrow are physiologically and chemically distinct from each other, even though sadness and joy are very much related.
²
We cannot feel the height of our joy unless we have allowed ourselves to feel the depths of our sadness. Though joy and sadness express different emotions, both are natural parts of how our body processes and “digests” feelings. Making sounds (like moaning, crying, or singing), moving, and deep full breathing are also part of the body’s emotional digestive system. They help us move through painful emotions quickly and efficiently.

Many illnesses are quite simply the end result of needs that have been buried, unacknowledged, and unexperienced for years. One of my former patients with a long history of migraine headaches told me, “I finally hit bottom with my headaches when my neurologist wanted to put me on lithium. I knew I didn’t want to deal with the effects of that drug on my body. I started biofeedback so that I could learn to relax. I had a childhood that was so painful, I had nowhere else to go but into the pain. Now I realize that I don’t have to have the pain anymore. I notice that I start to get a headache the minute I stop taking care of myself. If I don’t rest or get enough sleep, or if I don’t stand up for myself with my family, the headaches start. I see that all along the headaches have been trying to show me something.”

EMOTIONAL CLEANSING:
HEALING FROM THE PAST

Healing can occur in the present only when we allow ourselves to feel, express, and release emotions and unmet needs from the past that we have suppressed or tried to forget. I call this
emotional incision and drainage
. I’ve often likened this deep process to treatment of an abscess. Any surgeon knows that the treatment for an abscess is to cut it open, allowing the pus to drain. When this is done, the pain goes away almost immediately, and new healthy tissue can re-form where the abscess once was. It is the same with emotions: They, too, become walled off, causing pain and absorbing energy, if we do not experience and release them.

Children release emotion naturally and immediately, and each of us is born with the innate ability to do this. Yet because our culture wor ships emotional control and extols the virtues of suffering in silence, we learn early on how to suppress our natural emotional releases, and also to distance the messages behind them. When a woman is having panic attacks or crying spells, I know that some emotional material is coming to the surface to be processed. To observers who haven’t experi enced deep process (or emotional release), she may appear to be “losing it,” “going off the deep end,” or “getting out of control.” She is not “out of control,” however; she is simply allowing a healing process to arise within the body. Only the intellect has lost control—it has taken a backseat to the innate wisdom of the body.

Too often, health care providers prescribe drugs in cases like this. As a result, a woman’s natural healing process can get stagnated for months or years. And even if drugs are not prescribed, most people in our culture are uncomfortable with the emotions that arise when they are watching another person feel her emotions. They therefore rush to comfort the person who is beginning to cry or “lose it.” This stops the person’s emotional process and at the same time protects the comforter from feeling his or her own feelings. The healing process stops for both of them.

On the other hand, if a woman is encouraged to stay with what she’s feeling, to go into it, to make the sounds she needs to make, and to cry or yell as long as necessary, staying completely with her inner most self, she’ll often discover that her body has the innate ability to heal even very painful memories and events from her past. When we are willing to be with what is instead of running away from it, we will often be able to work through painful experiences that have lain dormant and taken up our energy for years. Stephen Levine, a meditation teacher and author of
Healing into Life and
Death
(Anchor Press, 1987), calls this experience “the pain that ends the pain.”

When we have allowed ourselves a full emotional release, we end up experiencing compassion for the hurting part of us that has been crying out for acknowledgment and validation. As adults, we come to realize that we now have the skills and strength to get those unmet needs of long ago met directly. As a result our body, mind, and spirit feel cleansed and free. Insights come up and long-buried self-understanding returns. I’ve watched people forgive themselves and others after deep process work because they are finally at peace with painful events in their pasts. This can happen even after years of intellectualizing that never really healed them. They naturally lighten up and are eventually able to laugh at themselves and their pasts.

One striking example of this was the deep process of an infertility surgeon I’ll call Carol. Carol had found it very painful when she was not able to help a woman become pregnant, in spite of using all of the current technology at her disposal. Though the treatment of infertility is not an exact science, she took her couples’ failures to conceive very personally. This made her emotional attitude toward her professional life fraught with sadness.

During a workshop I was leading, the discussion turned to the subject of mothers, and many of the participants began to cry. Carol got down on a mat and allowed herself to cry and wail. During this process she kept repeating, “I don’t need to create any more mommies. I don’t need to create any more mommies.” When she was finished, she realized that she herself had never really had a mother in an emotional sense. She had been beaten repeatedly by her mother when she was a child. She had chosen to be an infertility physician in part be cause of her unresolved early childhood pain: On an unconscious level, she was trying to “create mommies” in an attempt to create the mother she emotionally needed but never had. Following this deep insight, she was able to go back to her work refreshed and free, finally released from assuming complete responsibility for her patients’ conceptions.

DREAMS: A DOORWAY TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

Dreams are another part of our inner guidance system. Scientific evidence shows that the amount of activity in our brain when we dream is identical to the amount when we are awake. During dreaming, our inner guidance works with our brain to lay down a map of the activi ties or goals that we desire or need for a healthy balanced future. Dreams also show us the beneficial and nonbeneficial directions toward which we are focusing our energy and how and where we need to make adjustments. Dream expert and clinical psychologist Doris E. Cohen, Ph.D., reminds us that every player in a dream is a part of our own unconscious.

One of my former patients who was healing from chronic pelvic pain related to me that as she healed, she became more and more competent and powerful in her dreams. She said it was fun to go to sleep at night to see what she’d be capable of next.