Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (14 page)

Another patient, recovering from incest, said, “I recently dreamed that a little four-year-old girl was trying to tell me about someone who hurt her. I know that I am that girl—and that I need to listen to her in my dreams.”

Another woman, suffering from chronic vaginitis, asked her dreams for guidance about what to do, since none of our physical treatments was helping. She came back a week later and said, “I had the dream. Everything was black, and I heard a voice say, ‘When you get rid of Larry, the problem will go away.’ ” She eventually was able to tend to her relationship problems, and her condition began to clear.

I recently returned from a trip to Italy. When I arrived home, I dreamed that I was going to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants on the water. When I got there, I saw that a nearby store had a clothesline strung out front. On it were the two dresses that I had bought in Italy, from a line called Save the Queen! I couldn’t believe that this local store not only had the very garments I’d thought were so special in Italy but also had a whole lot more of the same brand that I hadn’t even seen while traveling. I began to try on other garments that were even better than the ones I had purchased abroad. And they all fit. In this dream, I was made aware of the fact that everything that I needed to present myself to the world in a royal fashion (the Save the Queen! label) was, in fact, right in my backyard. I didn’t have to travel to find it— kind of like Dorothy when she wakes up back in Kansas in
The Wizard of
Oz.
I found this dream very reassuring and fun.

Learn to pay attention to your dreams by writing them down first thing in the morning. Plan to remember them before you go to bed at night. Keep a notebook and pen beside your bed.

INTUITION AND INTUITIVE GUIDANCE

Intuition is the direct perception of truth or fact
independent of any reasoning
process
. It is the ability to make the right decision with insuf ficient information. A very good example of intuition is when you walk into a dark room and somehow know that someone is in there, even when you can’t see anything and haven’t been told anyone is there. We are all born with this ability, and all of us were highly intuitive as children. Most of us, however, were trained out of this way of knowing by the age of seven, when the frontal lobe reasoning centers come on board and tend to drown out the intuitive voice. The more education we get in this culture, in general, the less we trust our natural intuition. Because our society glorifies mostly logical, rational, left-brain thinking, we are taught to discount other forms of knowing as primitive or ignorant.

Thus, our intuitive capacity has become suspect and underutilized. Yet it is a skill that can be relearned at any time because it is a com pletely natural way of knowing. Although addictions keep us out of touch with what we know and what we feel and most of us are out of touch with our intuition much of the time, as we become more inner-directed and more in touch with our inner guidance system, we automatically gain access to our intuition. Our society admits that even the geniuses among us use only about 25 percent of their brain capacity. To use intuition is simply to use more of our intelligence than we are accustomed to using.

Intuitive guidance is the ability to read our own (or another’s) energy field. Intuitive guidance is centuries old and has been part of many ancient healing systems. Every traditional shaman has worked in this way, as have healers in the Wicca tradition.
³
Intuitive guidance can help us detect energy blockages
before
they become physical. We can act on this information and keep ourselves healthy.

HOW INNER GUIDANCE WORKS

One of my medical student friends who has a bad back has noticed that her back pain always emerges when she has to do something that she doesn’t want to do. (This is true in spite of the fact that she has a so-called physical problem that should, by itself, explain her symp toms.) Not long ago she was contemplating writing a research paper. Whenever she even thought about writing this piece and about the colleagues with whom she would be involved, she got neck pain and felt sick to her stomach. All her training had taught her that publishing this research paper was what she
should
do for her career. Yet her inner guidance, speaking through her body’s feelings, was telling her something quite different. She knew that if she was to remain healthy, she had to take the radical step of choosing between her inner guidance and what society was telling her was best. This friend eventually created a very satisfying career quite different from what she’d always thought she’d be doing—working in a hospital for a lab! Her body led her to it.

Our bodies are designed to function best when we’re doing work that feels exactly right to us. If we want to know God’s will for us, all we have to do is look to our gifts and talents—that’s where we will find it. Health is enhanced in women who engage in work that satisfies them. If a woman wants to know what her gifts and talents are, she can think back to when she was age nine to eleven, before the culture really put her into a trance. What did she love to do? What did she want to be? Who did she think she was?

Another way to get in touch with our gifts and talents is to ask ourselves what we would do or be if we knew we had only six months to live. Would we stay at our current job? With our current partner?

We are meant to move toward whatever gives us fulfillment, per sonal growth, and freedom. We are born knowing what activities, things, thoughts, and feelings are associated with these qualities. We must learn to trust ourselves and know that we can naturally move toward that which is healing and fulfilling.

Many people have been taught that they can’t have what they want and that a life full of struggle is somehow more honorable than one full of joy. We grow up believing that suffering buys us something. We have also been taught to distrust something if it is considered too fulfilling or if it is associated with too much pleasure or with having too much fun. How many times have you been laughing in a restaurant or at home and had someone say, “You’re having too much fun over there”? This belief is reflected in our bodies. An eminent hypnosis researcher once noted that negative effects, like blisters, were twice as easy to induce as positive outcomes.
⁴
Yet when we can clearly state what we want and why, we are instantly in alignment with our inner guidance. This is because it feels good in our bodies to think about and dwell upon what we want and why. We get excited and are inspired automatically by these thoughts and feelings, which in turn keep us in touch with our inner knowing and spiritual energy. The result is enthusiasm and joy—the feeling of heaven on earth.

Our culture has too often taught us that it is selfish to have our own wants and dreams and to enjoy ourselves. Many girls, when they are in touch with their inner power, have been told, “Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?” Too many of us have heard “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back” when we have done a job we’re proud of or have given ourselves credit for something that we loved to do, just for us. All of our lives, this kind of statement has stopped us dead in our tracks. We are accused of being selfish when we’ve given our own lives and interests priority. We have been brought up to avoid being seen as selfish at all costs. We learn to earn love and acceptance through self-sacrifice because we don’t feel worthy of the best that life has to offer.

In general, women in our culture have a difficult time going after what they personally want and need in an atmosphere in which it is assumed that they will perform and be responsible for all of the tasks of daily living such as child rearing and housekeeping. On the other hand, if these activities are precisely what a woman wants to do the most, she may find that these activities are undervalued and underpaid. However, nothing will change in a woman’s outer circumstances until she learns to value her own life and her own gifts as much as she has been taught to value and nurture the lives of others. As a friend of mine says, “If you want to be one of the chosen, all you have to do is choose yourself!”

Nearly every woman I know has been socialized to believe that put ting everyone else before herself is the right thing to do. Just the oppo site is true— we can’t really be there for others unless we’re there for ourselves first.

I love the way entrepreneur Danielle LaPorte puts it on her website, White Hot Truth (
www.whitehottruth.com
). She says:

I notice this in myself, I see it in other people: the happiness muffle. We feel the sparkle, really we do. We feel rich with gratitude, we’re keenly aware of a true smile curled in our cells. We tend to live on the light side of things. But we don’t pronounce it. As a new friend just put it, “We butt back the joy because . . . happiness is a form of power.”

Is that any way to treat happiness?

Happiness
is
power. Happiness is carbonated consciousness. It wants to spill out and radiate and be articulated. And every time we downplay our joy we confuse our synapses. Our brain is firing smiley neurons and our mouth is short-circuiting them. Repeated happiness muffling numbs our senses. If you keep it under the surface too long, it just might stay there—a light under a bushel.

So do us all a favour. No matter what the weather, the odds, the circumstances, the company, if you’re happy and you know it, by all means, say so!

I couldn’t agree more. As a physician, I can assure you that happiness is also healing. Here’s an example.

Dana Johnson, a researcher friend of mine and a registered nurse, recovered from Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS) by learning the power of love and happiness. After she had had the disease for some years, she began to lose control over her breathing muscles as well as the rest of her body. Her breathing difficulties made her think she was going to die. But she decided at that point that she wanted to experience unconditional love for herself at least once before dying. Describing herself as a “bowl of Jell-O in a wheelchair,” she sat every day for fifteen minutes in front of a mirror and chose different parts of herself to love. She started with her hands because at that time they were the only parts of herself that she could appreciate unconditionally. Each day she went on to other body parts. Day by day, her physical body began to get better as she learned to appreciate it. She also wrote in a journal about insights she had during this process, and she came to see that since childhood she had believed that in order to be of service, acceptable to others, and worthy, she had to sacrifice her own needs. It took a life-threatening disease for her to learn that service through self-sacrifice is a dead end. In fact, the effect of psychological factors has been strongly correlated with the length of survival with ALS. Given that ALS has no known cause and no known cure, the importance of these factors can’t be underestimated.
⁵
Although feeling good about being of service simply for its own sake is health-enhancing, far too many women bake cookies, make coffee, and clean up because it’s expected of them and they would feel guilty (and unworthy) if they didn’t do it. Service to others done under a sense of obligation creates exhaustion and resentment.

Knowing What We Don’t Want

In addition to knowing what we
do
want, we have the capacity to know what we
don’t
want. Knowing what we don’t want is inborn. Every baby knows what feels good and what doesn’t feel good, and up until about the age of six, a child will automatically go toward what feels good and away from what feels bad. This capacity is seen in its purest form in a two-year-old child who has just learned how to say no. (By the way, the only fears that a baby is born with are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Every other fear is learned.)

The ability to say no to what doesn’t support you is an essential part of your inner guidance system. It is never too late to start saying no to those things that drain you and yes to those that replenish you.

When a friend calls and asks for help, say to your friend, “Let me get back to you on that.” Then stop for a moment and ask yourself, “Do I really want to help right now, or would I prefer to do something else?” If your answer to a request isn’t an immediate yes, it’s probably a no. If the answer is no and your friend gets resentful, it’s time to question the validity of that friendship.

Check your body when someone asks you to do something. Are there areas of tension? Do you get a gut reaction of any kind? Does your body say, “Yes, this would be fun,” or does it say, “No, doing this would be draining”?