Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (137 page)

We are all spiritual beings with all-knowing souls or higher powers. Connection with spirit is inherently part of being human. For centuries our culture has tried to control our inherent spirituality via religion. Though some women may gain access to their spirituality through organized religions, too many religions rely on static dogma and rules that serve to split us from our daily spirituality. Spirituality is free-flowing and ever-changing. Though it is clear that most religions were originally based on the immediate and profound spiritual insights of their founders, most organized religions today lack the flexibility and ongoing evolution necessary to truly be spiritually connected.

Partly in response to so many years of male-based religions, many women today are drawn to different aspects of the Great Goddess. As women, we need “a sexually affirming image of power and beauty as a focus for prayer and meditation,” says Patricia Reis.
⁹
Having internalized God as male, we can find much-needed balance in the Goddess images that are now rising.

My mother is a dowser and frequently uses a pendulum for intuitive guidance. Others use runes, tarot cards, or Bible phrases. Spiritual guidance comes in all forms, so use the form that works best for you.

Regardless of what you believe about spirituality, it is important to bring a sense of the sacred into your everyday life. Spirituality pervades all that I do. My spirituality is not set aside for special days such as Christmas, nor do I practice it only in special buildings called churches, synagogues, or temples. My spirituality is every part of me. On some level I feel part of God/ Goddess/ All That Is—not separate from it. When I’m exercising, I’m in touch with my spirituality. When I’m writing, I’m very much in touch with my spirituality. I’m especially in touch with my spirituality when I’m assisting women in opening to their inner guidance system. This is because reaching out to another to help her heal and con nect with her spirituality also helps me heal and connect with mine.

Like many women, I feel a deep spiritual connection with nature. Many people find peace and comfort in a special place, a place that they may have gone to as children to feel held close by the nurturing qualities of nature. Women often tell me about special trees, rocks, hills, or other places that connect them very strongly with their own spirituality. Time spent alone in a natural setting is often a catalyst for connection with your spirituality.

A powerful way to tune in to the natural world is to notice what phase the moon is in and see if this natural waxing and waning has any effect on your body, emotions, or perceptions.
¹⁰
Notice what effect the seasons have on you. Does the coming of autumn wake up your senses and find you braced for new beginnings—or does this happen for you in the spring? Find out when the equinoxes and solstices are. For cen turies, people felt that more spiritual power was available to them at these times. All major religious holidays are held around these times. You don’t have to study anything—just be aware of the moon and the rhythms of nature. I live on a tidal river and enjoy the changing water levels outside my window, knowing that, like my body, they’re connected with the phases of the moon.

When I was growing up, my father used to go to church on Sundays because he liked the church and his family had always gone there. My mother, on the other hand, often went for a walk in the woods. “He has his church, I have mine,” she said. Each woman must find her own spiritual center and her own inner guidance. And for each woman it will be different.

Regardless of whether we believe in angels, God, Jesus Christ, the human spirit, Buddha, the Blessed Mother, the Great Spirit, or the Goddess Gaia, being in tune with our spiritual resources is a vital healing force. Committing ourselves to remembering our spiritual selves and receiving guidance for our lives is part of creating vibrant health.

D
IVINE
L
OVE
: T
HE
M
OST
P
OTENT
E
NERGY IN THE
W
ORLD

Several years ago, I received a flyer about the work of the late Bruno Groening (
www.bruno-groening.org/English
), a German healer. I went to the meeting, which was led by doctors from Germany, and learned that many healings from so-called incurable illnesses were well documented by the medical scientific group of the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends. The Circle of Friends teaches a way to tune in to the divine through a process called
Einstellen,
which is a way of sitting with the hands on the thighs in a palms-up position with arms and legs uncrossed. While tuned in this way, one can feel what Groening called
Heilstrom,
German for “the healing stream.” Beautiful music has been written to accompany this practice. I went to many meetings of the Circle of Friends and personally witnessed a number of remarkable healings, including a woman with multiple sclerosis and a man with insulin-dependent diabetes. I was also impressed with the scientific rigor with which the healings were documented.

Then I learned about the work of engineer Robert Fritchie, author of
Surviving Chaos: Healing with Divine Love
(World Service Institute, 2009), who worked with the late Marcel Vogel, a scientist who held more than a hundred patents in crystal technology with IBM. Fritchie and Vogel worked on the documentation of energy healing for many years. This healing force, which Fritchie calls Divine Love, is, in my experience, exactly the same thing as the
Heil-strom
that Bruno Groening referred to. Fritchie calls it the most powerful healing force in the world. And he, too, has used it to help heal everything from environmental pollution to cancer.

Vogel developed special crystals to amplify energy, but crystals aren’t necessary. Fritchie points out that we are all crystals, able to both send and receive healing energy transmitted through intent. (As I’ve noted, our connective tissue, teeth, and bones are all crystalline matrixes in which information in one area is instantly transmitted throughout the whole.) Gary Schwartz, Ph.D., the director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has documented this, showing also that the human heart emits light. Divine Love is available to everyone, regardless of religious background. I personally work with it every day. It’s the basis of many of the so-called spontaneous remissions that have been well documented for many diseases. As Fritchie notes, one must believe in a loving creator in order for Divine Love to work well. I have come to see that nothing is incurable and that the healing power of Divine Love is essential knowledge for everyone as we move through this time of change on the planet. (Robert Fritchie has an Internet healing group that teaches people how to work with both giving and receiving Divine Love. For more information, see
www.worldserviceinstitute.org
.)

STEP SEVEN: RECLAIM THE FULLNESS OF YOUR MIND

Women need to know that they are capable of intelligent thought,
and they need to know it right now.

—Adrienne Rich

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself
in the deepest way, and that’s heaven. You get a chance to know
who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a rela
tionship with your mind.

—Natalie Goldberg

If we are to reclaim the wisdom of our bodies, we must also reclaim our intellects, our minds, and our ability to think. Once we have experienced how intimately our thoughts and bodily symptoms are related and how intelligent we are, our thinking is less distracted by cultural hypno sis. We come to trust our inner voice. We question our assumptions more critically, thus freeing ourselves from the mental habits of a lifetime.

Journal writing, writing practice, and meditation are methods that many have used to successfully get in touch with their inner voices and get to know their minds. Proprioceptive writing (PW) taught me to trust my mind and inner wisdom. Originally developed by Linda Trichter Metcalf, Ph.D., coauthor of
Writing the Mind Alive
(Ballantine Books, 2002), this writing process engages the intellect, the intuition, and the imagination si multaneously and is done to Baroque music.
¹¹
(Baroque music has been found to synchronize brain waves at about sixty cycles per second, a frequency associated with increased alpha brain waves and enhanced creativity.) (For more information on proprioceptive writing, see the website for the Proprioceptive Writing Center at
www.pwriting.org
.)

In doing proprioceptive writing, I noticed that if I simply wrote down my thoughts as I listened to them, at first they seemed random and without order. When I wrote or thought of a word or concept, my mind immediately went in several directions at once—all of them rich with emotional con tent, and all of them related to one another equally, nonhierarchically, and nonlinearly. Thus, my natural thinking process is circular and multimodal, as it is for many women. But as I continued the process, I could see that my thoughts were weaving a web of interconnected meaning that was going in a certain direction. My job was simply to go along for the ride and record what I heard or felt. I would always come back to my initial point of departure, but with a deeper understanding of my beliefs and wisdom.

Through writing I have come to see that every word that comes into my mind has meaning and that this meaning is connected to my entire being. If I write the word
bra,
for example, my mind goes off in all the following directions almost simultaneously: I think of a woman’s relationship with her bra, how she purchased her first bra, what it was like for her, what that means about her relationship with her breasts, whether she’s ever used an underwire bra, what her breasts mean in this culture, whether she was breast-fed, and so on. I’ve come to appreciate that my ideas, thoughts, and wisdom come from all of me—my brain, my uterus, and my higher power—and that they may originate in any one of the numerous interconnected aspects of me. I have learned to trust my thoughts. Women’s (and some men’s) ways of knowing are not the logocentric left-brain approaches taught in our schools and universities. It’s staggering to realize how many highly intel ligent women feel that they are stupid and not good enough because of this training.

Writing practice is a profound tool for learning how to hear ourselves. For years, for example, the word
worthy
kept coming up in my writing because on some deep level I didn’t feel worthy. I spent hours asking myself what I meant by this word. Images of school, authorities, tests, and church always arose around this word. Eventually, my meditation on the word
worthy
led me to a breakthrough understanding of the original sin of being female. How could I have felt worthy, given my cultural programming?

If a word or phrase continually comes into your mind, it is important— it has meaning for you. Explore it. Write about it. Meditate on it. If a thought comes into your mind, learn to accept it without judgment. It will have meaning for you, no matter what it is. It is there for a reason. Linda Metcalf says, “There are no tourists in the mind.”

To change the conditions of our lives outside, we must make a change inside. Proprioceptive writing is a tool to explore what is inside. After all, if we don’t know where we are, how can we ever expect to get anywhere else? What I discovered within me were layers and layers of
shoulds, oughts,
and other impedimenta of my education and cultural indoctrination. Metcalf describes these as a “mangrove swamp, with all the roots twisted around each other.”

Through weeks, months, and years of writing, I gained direct experi ence of my own indoctrination, and eventually came to hear my true self emerging— my own voice. But I also ran smack up against my guilt about almost everything— not being a good enough mother, not being a good enough doctor, not having a perfect body, and not being able to fulfill everyone’s needs! Mine was the guilt stemming from what Anne Wilson Schaef, Ph.D., called “the ongoing sin of being born female.” This guilt seemed to be a part of who I was, neatly installed years before. Guilt for not being “enough” is a fantastic tool for keeping women in their place. It is a form of internalized oppression and fear that serves to maintain the status quo. Guilt immobilizes us with “What will they think if . . .” messages. I realized that if I continued to wallow in my own guilt instead of examining its voice within me, I would forever be ineffective at doing the work I am best at—and which I love the most. How could this possibly help me or anyone else? When I reclaimed my right to do my work and let go of guilt (mostly), I broke free from a set of health-destroying beliefs. It’s an ongoing process.

My writing was vital in helping me break free from those parts of my life that no longer served me. However you do it, you, too, can learn to respect your intellect, your mind, and the fullness of your intelligence.

Dialogues with the Body:
Listening to the Mind That Creates the Cells

I often ask women to carry out a dialogue with their bodily symptoms or with the organ that is giving them problems, through writing, meditation, or drawing. Sitting with your journal open while being receptive to your thoughts, ask your body what it needs or what it is trying to tell you.

One of my former patients, who was experiencing heavy menstrual bleeding and a fibroid, asked her pelvis to speak to her. In her journal she wrote, “What is the wisdom you are trying to convey to me through my bleeding and my fibroid?” Over the next several days, she “waited with” this question for about ten minutes per day.