Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (132 page)

After you’ve filled out this form, you will have a better idea of what needs to be changed. Once you have expressed your desire to do so, be aware that you and your Higher Power (or broader perspective) have what it takes to make the changes that will help you flourish.

STEP TWO: SORT THROUGH YOUR BELIEFS

Commit yourself to setting aside some time to answer the following series of questions. You might want to do this with a friend or in a group. Your answers would make an excellent starting place for a personal journal that you can update regularly as new insights come to you. Writing your answers down is, in itself, a significant commitment of your time and energy toward creating health. You learn a great deal about yourself and your relationship with your body. This is health care that won’t cost you a penny.

Do you understand how inherited cultural attitudes toward our female physiological
processes such as menstruation and menopause have contributed to
the illnesses suffered by our female bodies? What are the thoughts that arise
when you hear the words breast, menstruation, child birth, vagina, vulva,
menopause, and so on?

If you’ve grown up believing that your menstrual period is “the curse,” for example, it’s quite likely that your attitude toward your female physiology is less than optimal.

To what extent have you internalized negative cultural programming about
the female body?

One of my patients became menopausal following chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease at the age of twenty-seven. Though she had gone on es-trogen replacement therapy for a few years, she eventually stopped it because “the thought of getting my periods back was chilling and repugnant to me,” she said. I found her statement of disgust and its implications about her attitude toward her body equally chilling, but such attitudes are all too common. Luckily, they can be changed.

Do you believe you can be healthy?

Women who have grown up in a household where the norm is to go to the doctor for sleeping pills, anxiety, headaches, and the common cold often internalize the belief that the human body is meant to suffer from all manner of ills and that there’s a pill for every ill. Enjoying ill health is the norm for some people. The possibility of a sound body that isn’t susceptible to every germ in the environment is inconceivable to them.

What challenges were part of your childhood?

Challenges are part of every childhood. They’re what build resilience. When it comes to the physical body, for example, childhood illnesses and germs are actually necessary to mature the immune system. Childhood challenges, then, are necessary. What’s important in adulthood is to update any outmoded beliefs and behaviors that are still lingering from childhood. Consider how your childhood experiences contributed to your current perceptions and experiences. A child hood history of incest, chronic illness in a parent, divorce in the family, or having a parent abandon the family are common occurrences that, if unresolved, can set the stage for later problems that have similar dynamics. Many women’s fathers left them when they were children and never returned. Other women have never talked openly about a parent’s death. Though the impact of these events is as variable as our fingerprints, there is always an impact. How we name, express, and fully release emotions surrounding such losses can be a factor in our physical health. Recall that this information is directly related to the health of our first three chakras and the organs they comprise.

One of my former patients, for example, developed panic attacks and severe PMS around her fortieth birthday, several months after her father was diag nosed with bowel cancer. Her mother had died suddenly from a reaction to penicillin when my patient was four years old. She was sent to live with an aunt with no explanation, no one ever cried in her presence, and she herself was never given permission to speak about or grieve her loss. Now with the possible loss of her father, all the emotions she had buried were working their way to the surface. But once she became aware of what was happening and why, she was able to express them in a healthy manner and release them over time.

What purpose does your illness serve? What does it mean to you?

A forty-two-year-old woman recovering from a car accident told me that there was no question that before the accident, the pace of her life was moving way too fast. To pay attention to her needs, she literally had to be forced to lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling for several months, as she was now. She regards this accident as a very positive turning point in her life. Leslie Kussman, a filmmaker who has multiple sclerosis, said that during one of her morning meditations it occurred to her that perhaps we need to rephrase the question from “What purpose does your illness serve?” to “What is the illness that will serve your purpose?”
⁴
Illness is of ten the only socially
acceptable form of Western meditation.
Our society is set up such that taking a nap or meditating in the middle of the day to recharge and renew ourselves is frowned upon as hedonistic or irrespon sible, but getting the flu is a socially accepted way to rest.

Without slipping into self-blame, think back on the last time you had to miss work because of illness. Was the illness a satisfying break from your routine? What did you get out of it? What did you learn from it? Do you see any way that you could get the same rest without being sick? A young female doctor developed breast cancer while she was pregnant with her third child. As a result, she changed her diet, her work schedule, and her life. Two years later she told me, “My life has never been better. Every day is a joy. I’m glad I had cancer. It saved my life.”

If you had only six months to live, would you stay at your current job? Would you stay with your current partner? Would it take a serious illness for you to begin making beneficial changes now?

Are you willing to be open to any messages that your symptoms or illness
may have for you?

Before you begin working with this question, please note that a willingness to be open to the message is entirely different from a need to control and figure out the meaning of an illness exactly, especially while it is happening. The former is associated with vibrant health. The latter is just manipulating yourself and is part of our illusion of control. Being open to meaning means that you allow the illness to speak to you, often through the language of emotion, imagery, and pain. Your intellectual understanding of your situ-ation may well come only after an illness is over with.

Back in the 1980s, when our culture was learning about the mind-body connection, people would actually ask questions like “Why are you needing to create cancer?” as though the intellect could figure that out through cause-and-effect thinking. These sorts of questions keep the intellect running in circles and take us away from our hearts—the place in the body that really heals us. Being open to meaning is an attitude, a process. It’s “waiting with,” not “waiting for.” And it connects us with our soul’s voice. Glenda Green, author of
Love Without End
(Spiritis, 2002), puts it beautifully: “The mind will seek to compensate for the discomforts of the heart. But the mind will never seek to cure or remove those discomforts.”

When faced with an illness, what is your usual reaction?

Learning the meaning behind the illness is a process that doesn’t lend itself to questions like “Why me, why now?” Evy McDonald writes, “Don’t get caught in the tangling web of why. The search for the explanation and meaning of your illness can lead to frustration and depression and can paralyze your ability to make decisions and take action.” As they say in twelve-step programs, “Whying is dying.”

In the days of the ancient Greeks, a messenger would be sent to the leader with news of the current battle. If the news was bad, the messenger would be killed. Your task is not to kill the messenger of illness by ignoring it, complaining about it, or simply suppressing the symptoms. Your task is to examine your life with compassion and honesty while cultivating detachment—which simply means caring deeply from an objective place. From this place, identify those areas of your life that require harmony, fulfillment, and love.

What is preventing you from flourishing?

“Waiting with” this question is a good meditation. Don’t expect an answer to spring forth immediately, though it sometimes does. Back in the days when I had two small children and a busy practice, I repeatedly asked myself what changes I needed in my life and what I needed to do next. The answer that kept coming was simple:
Rest. You’re burned out.
Taking action on that insight took over a year. Why? Because at the time, I honestly believed that adequate rest was incompatible with my chosen life’s work. It was, and always is, a process.

Some people never heal because they believe that if they were healed, they would be alone and abandoned. Being sick in this culture can be a very powerful way to get our needs met legitimately. Saying to someone, “Please hold me—I feel ill,” is quite different from saying, “Please hold me—I want to be held because it feels good and I like it.” The first sen tence uses illness to justify the universal human need for closeness. The second sentence simply states the need clearly. Many people don’t know that intimacy is possible without using our wounds to get it. We are brought up to be ashamed of our needs for touch, love, and companion ship, so we learn very early to bond with each other via our wounds.

During my residency training, I was very proud of the way I had handled a certain woman’s care, and I decided to tell one of my nurse colleagues who also knew this patient well and who could celebrate with me. When I told her, she said, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.” I was stunned. I had simply been expressing a natural human need to share my success with a colleague who would understand its implications. When I was growing up, my parents had always believed that each of us children needed his or her place in the sun. We were routinely recognized for our gifts and achievements, and we felt good about ourselves and each other when these were shared. (We still do this.) But my nurse colleague had obviously learned that it was not okay to “blow your own horn.” Often, the only time good things are said about the life of another person is at their funeral. This is tragic. Each of us needs to accept that no matter how strong, independent, and healthy we become, we will always need others for companionship, celebration, and joyful living. And we need others who will reflect our worth back to us!