Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (130 page)

Several years ago, I led a Blessing Way ritual for my brother’s fiancée to celebrate her upcoming wedding and to welcome her into our family. Seated in a circle around her were my daughters, my niece, my sister, the mother of the bride, my sister-in-law, the bride’s sister, and two of my mother’s friends. The age range in that circle of women was sixteen to eighty-three. I felt blessed to have the wis dom of three strong, powerful, and capable older women available for all of us in this circle, but especially for my daughters. What a gift it is to have honest, straightforward, physically healthy women over the age of eighty in our lives. They give us hope, courage, and guidance for the path ahead.

As a culture, we’ve been too long without those powerful, honest wise women of old—too long without the images of their beauty, power, and strength. Welcome them back. Whether or not you know any of them now, remember that they are inside each of us, waiting to be born through the initiation of menopause.

Part Three

Women’s Wisdom Program
for Flourishing and Healing

15
Steps for Flourishing

T
he steps in this chapter will help you tune in to the inner guidance of your body, mind, and spirit. By going through this chapter mindfully, you will be practicing preventive medicine at its best, whether or not you are currently being treated for anything. Use a journal to write down your responses to these steps and record whatever material comes up for you. This will give you an accurate record of where you are right now. I’d also recommend that you repeat this process every few months as a way to see how far you’ve come. It will be an affirmation of your own inner wisdom. I personally do this on the equinoxes and solstices. Read your journal a year from now and you’ll see that you’re not the same person!

IMAGINE YOUR FUTURE:
CHANGE YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS,
CHANGE YOUR CELLS

Healing always involves releasing the past as we move into the future. If we don’t release the past, we keep re-creating it—and it becomes the future. As we release, it’s also crucial to have a powerful vision of a hopeful and exciting future that draws us forward. For years, I had my patients begin their health journeys by exploring their pasts to find clues to how they were creating their present conditions.

Our cells keep replacing themselves daily, and we create whole new bodies every seven years. So it is not really accurate to say that our pasts are locked in our bodies, though sometimes it seems that way. What is really going on is that the consciousness that is creating our cells is often locked in the past—and that consciousness keeps re-creating the same old patterns via old subconscious nervous system programming. If, however, we can change the consciousness that creates our cells, then our cells and lives improve automatically, because health and joy are our natural state. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to imagine your future self in as much detail as you possibly can. Doing this will assist you through any healing process you’re currently involved in. So before you dive into the steps listed here, invite your future vision to accompany you on your journey.
If you were in optimal
health and truly flourishing, what would your life look like?

This question may be answered in the form of an exercise, with a friend who fully supports you; in writing, without worrying about revising or spelling; or out loud to yourself as you look in a mirror.

Answer the following questions (have your friend ask you the ques tions one by one, or write for three to five minutes without stopping, or talk to your image in the mirror): If anything at all were possible, quickly, easily, and now, what would your life look like? Who would be in it? What would you be doing? Where would you be living? What would you feel like? What would you look like? How much money would you be making?

Don’t think about these questions before you answer. Pretend you’re a child, creating your life exactly as you want it, no holds barred. How would your life be? Your inner guidance knows exactly what your heart’s desire is. When you open your mouth and remove the brakes—and get the judge out of your head for a minute—your inner guidance will come up with the right answers.

If you need help getting going, imagine back to when you were eleven. What did you love to do? Who were you? Who did you think you would be? Imagine yourself now, telling the world who you are—and who you are going to become. Speak it to your image in the mirror—tell it to a friend or to the wind. Call that eleven-year-old back now. She’s got something to tell you. Take her into the future with you and let her become everything she ever dreamed she would be.

After you have completed the first part of this exercise, imagine that it is one year from today. You have been able to create everything that you wanted, plus more. Everything that you dreamed could come true is now true. You are celebrating and looking back over this phenomenal year. You’ve created all of it almost magically, through the power of connecting with your inner guidance and wisdom. After you feel this scene fully, tell your partner (or your journal, or your image in the mirror) in detail about everything that you’ve created; share how excited you are, and invite her or him to celebrate with you. Keep talking for two to three minutes without censoring yourself. Just let it flow—like a child playing make-believe.
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If you can’t dream up any circumstances for the future, just imagine feeling joyous, light, and happy.

This exercise is extraordinarily simple but very powerful. Part of the reason is that focused thought is what creates the reality around us. It has been said that if you can hold a thought or feeling for at least sev enteen seconds without introducing a contradicting thought or emotion, then you’ll see evidence of this thought manifest around you in the physical world. For example, start thinking about and talking about blue glass, white lilies, or something else that holds no particular “charge,” and watch what happens. I have experienced this repeatedly. This exercise is so playful and fun that it’s easy to reach and exceed the seventeen-second mark.
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You can change the time intervals by dreaming up your future self one week from now, one year from now, or even at the end of your life. In each case, have your future self look back and take in everything that you’ve accomplished and healed. It’s exhilarating and it will get you in touch with who you really are. I recommend repeating this experience at least four times per year.

Now, take this a step further. Pretend you are your future ideal self now. That’s right. Envision yourself as a confident, fit, prosperous, magnetic, attractive woman right now. Lighten up. Play with this en ergy now. Call this future self to you now. As you go through the rest of this section, bring your future self along with you. Call her in and let her wisdom and joy help you as you explore your past. She—and your inner wisdom—will always be there for you. You don’t have to do this alone.

STEP ONE: UNCOVER AND UPDATE YOUR LEGACY

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.
When you truly possess all you have been and done, which takes
some time, you are fierce with reality.

—Florida Scott-Maxwell

Every one of us inherits a specific legacy from our families that must be claimed and changed as needed. This legacy, from our own past and our family’s past, affects our energy, our health, and our potential for change in each generation. If it is not acknowledged, it will be unconsciously passed on in repeated behaviors, and consciously passed on in the form of advice. Our legacies often nail into place the upper limits of what we believe is possible in life.

It is our job to break through these upper limits with our intent and consciousness. One way to do this is to write down your family history (the medical aspects as well as the emotional ones), thus bringing them to the surface, where they can be examined. If, for example, all the women in your extended family have had a hysterectomy before the age of fifty, you may be influenced by a self-fulfilling medical family prophecy around the uterus that has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with belief. Putting that fact in writing may help free you from the necessity of repeating the experience. Because conditions such as alcoholism and depression often go unacknowledged within a family system, it’s important to address these areas di rectly by shining a light on subjects we tend to keep in the darkness (“I’m not really an alcoholic, I’m just a heavy social drinker”). Also, the emotional impact of a history that includes the premature death of a par ent, loss of a beloved pet, or loss of a significant relationship is frequently denied. This, too, is often revealed in writing down the family history.

In the past, scientists believed that our genes had a huge role to play in determining our health. This is known as “genetic determinism,” or “I’m destined to get cancer because it runs in my family.” But newer data have modified this approach considerably. Cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., author of
The Biology of Belief
(Hay House, 2008), explains that our genes are a blueprint. But a blueprint sitting in an architect’s office can’t do anything until it’s acted upon by a contractor who actually takes the plans and builds something from them.
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The same is true of our genes—ultimately, it’s the mind that is the general contactor, and the neurotransmitters that the brain makes when it thinks play a huge role in how a gene gets expressed. I spoke to a woman recently on my radio show,
Flourish!,
whose son has cystic fibrosis—a well-known genetic disorder associated with severe respiratory illness and premature death. Early on she decided that she wasn’t going to “activate” her son’s disease any more than was necessary. She has never restricted his activity nor tried to protect him from germs brought home from school by his siblings. He’s now twelve and has never had a hospitalization in his life. This is a wonderful example of how environment plays a huge role in the expression of disease—even diseases such as cystic fibrosis, which are without a doubt genetic. (Most diseases that run in families, such as diabetes, osteoporosis, and breast cancer, are actually multifactorial and are not inherited in a straightforward way.) The bottom line: Use your power to influence your genes, instead of being a victim of them.

Lois, a forty-three-year-old woman with a history of early cervical cancer and pelvic endometriosis, said, “I was a battered wife five years ago and finally got out of that marriage. Then my daughter was in a car accident and I had to take care of her for months. Then this summer I was in another accident and sustained a whiplash injury. I want to cry, but I keep pushing it down. It gets harder to do, though. Is this from early menopause?”

When I went over Lois’s history with her, it was easy to see that she had been through a very significant amount of change and loss in the past decade, which she’d tried to deal with by keeping everything in order, going to work daily, and appearing cheerful. She admitted that it seemed to be harder to keep her house in order these days, and that even though there was no cur- rent crisis, she still felt inefficient and emotional. In fact, her back pain from the whiplash was gone, her daughter was now in college, and her job was going quite well. What she realized she needed to do was acknowledge the losses she hadn’t grieved and give herself the necessary time and space for this.

What Lois was experiencing was what I call “breakdown to breakthrough.” She needed to feel what she was feeling. She took a week off from work and family, went to a small country inn, and spent the next week mostly in robe and slippers, reading, crying, drinking tea with the lady who ran the inn, and gradually getting back in touch with parts of herself and feelings that were long denied. When I next saw her, she looked fifteen years younger. “Now I know that those feelings you mentioned don’t come up when you want them to,” she said. “They come when they come. It took me three or four days of being quiet and by myself before I could really cry. But I also learned that I can go off by myself when I need to in order to do this for myself. My relationship with my husband [she had remarried] and daughter is better than ever. I learned that
when I take care of myself, everything
else takes care of itself
.”