Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (15 page)

If you find yourself tired or irritable at the end of a day, ask yourself what needs didn’t get met. Also ask what thoughts, activities, or people drained your energy during the day.

On the days when you are feeling wonderful, ask yourself what thoughts, activities, or people enhance your energy flow.

Keep a journal and begin to notice and write down everything that contributes to a positive energy flow that replenishes you. Paying attention to these things will draw more of them into your experience.

Practice appreciation and gratitude, writing down all the blessings in your life. Remember that what we pay attention to expands.

Tap into the power of attention. Consciously directing our attention to thoughts, emotions, and circumstances that feel good and up lifting is powerful medicine. Paying attention to and appreciating what is working well in your life changes your vibration rate—the frequency at which you resonate. And you will attract more good things.

One of my former patients, a social worker, originally came to see me complaining of PMS and mild anxiety attacks. In going over her history, I noticed that she never had any time to herself and that her life was overrun with taking care of others’ needs while neglecting her own. I told her that she must practice noticing what activities replenished her energy and which ones drained her. Then I told her that in order to reverse her symptoms, she had to spend at least one hour each day recharging her own energetic batteries by resting or doing something she liked. She did so, and a month later all her symptoms were gone. She told me that she was learning how she drained her energy in her daily life. She said, “When I lie down or sit down to write in my jour nal, I can literally
feel
the energy coming back into my body. Knowing how crucial this is to my physical and emotional well-being is a revelation.”

All of us receive messages from our bodies regularly about what serves our health and well-being and what doesn’t. Our bodies know immediately when we are doing something or even thinking about something that doesn’t support us fully. One of my friends gets diarrhea and stomach cramps when she just thinks about going to visit her par ents. She was abused both physically and emotionally throughout her entire childhood, and this abuse has continued into adulthood. Her body knows that visiting her parents will not be good for her, and it gives her symptoms as messages to stay away. When she gives herself permission to stay away, her stomach problems resolve immediately. (She has also had to learn how to soothe the anxiety that arises from the ingrained belief that not visiting or doing what her mother expects makes her a “bad” daughter.) In time, she may well be able to visit without it having to “cost” her anything. But that’s Ph.D.-level healing work!

In order to flourish and stay healthy, we need to pay attention to the subtle signals from our bodies about what feels good and what doesn’t. Foggy thinking, dizziness, heart palpitations, acne, headaches, and back, stomach, and pelvic pain are a few of the common but subtle symptoms that often signal that it is time for us to let go of what we don’t want in life and start using our own power to improve things. Here’s an example from my own life.

Back in the 1980s, when I had two young children, I was working too many hours, and I often felt that aspects of my work weren’t respected by my colleagues. My face often broke out in large blemishes, which I had never had as an adolescent or at any other time in my life until then. I tried taking vitamins, changing my diet, and using a variety of skin creams. Nothing helped—until I left my place of work. Within six months the problem cleared and has never returned.

Clearly, my face was a barometer of my well-being during those years. Through my skin condition, my body had been telling me that my work setting was not supporting me optimally. My complexion had been registering my “thin-skinned” sensitivity and my anger at not being completely accepted by my colleagues. (I hadn’t completely accepted myself, either, at this point, and my work environment was a reflection of that.) All of these emotions lay just below the surface, though I couldn’t appreciate this at the time. Once I faced my inner most needs and left the situation that simply was not supporting me, my complexion improved automatically. As my life cleared up, so did my face.

Negative emotions exist to let us know that we are not facing the clearest path to what we want. When we realize that our bodies and their symptoms—feelings—are our allies, pointing out what serves our highest good and what doesn’t, we become free. Whenever you feel an gry or upset, or have a headache or a bodily symptom, take a moment to reflect upon what unmet need the symptom is trying to bring to your attention. When I am caught up in a downward spiral of negative feelings, I instantly know that I am out of touch with my inner guidance and that I’m giving too much attention to what I don’t want. I have learned to notice when I’m feeling bad and stop for a moment. If I can catch myself at the beginning of the bad mood, I can often get my energy flowing positively again by going through the following process:

1.
I acknowledge what I am feeling
without making any judgment about
it
. I avoid wallowing around in the negative emotions and prolonging them, but I definitely
feel
them fully. I stay with the feeling.

2.
I acknowledge that there is a reason why I am feeling the way I am. And it’s almost always an unmet need of some kind.

3.
I spend twenty seconds or so identifying what is causing my energy to flow negatively. For example, a while back I was angry because a staff member didn’t get an important message to me in time for me to return a phone call promptly.

4.
Having identified the source of my negative emotion, I then ask myself what I need. Sometimes the need isn’t immediately obvious, especially if you’re in the middle of a downward emotional spiral that seems out of proportion to the situation. The reason for this is that any given event might trigger memories (even if not conscious) of a whole host of past events in which a similar need wasn’t met. Given that, it can be very helpful to have a trusted friend present to help you home in on the actual need, rather than wallowing in the emotion.

5.
I then state my need, which, in the example in step 3, is to be respected and acknowledged by my staff. I would say, “I want to receive my telephone messages on time so that I can respond to them promptly and efficiently.” Stating our needs is powerful because it defines them clearly, allowing our creative energy to flow toward them. When we make a statement of pure positive energy with no negativity in it, it helps draw what we want into our experience. This turns the situation into something positive with an actual solution.

6.
Finally, I affirm that I have the power within me, via my inner guidance and my power of intent, to get what I want.

Remember the law of attraction. The people and circumstances we attract to us are always a reflection of our own thoughts and beliefs. In my early days of practice and work, I quite often felt unsupported both at work and at home. I operated under the belief “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” Over the years, I slowly changed my beliefs about support and realized that I truly need it—and deserve it. I learned not to feel ashamed of that need. I learned that it is possible to ask for support and get it. As a result of this inner change, I now enjoy an amazing support system both at home and at work. I call it “assisted living.”

Going through this process helps me acknowledge my emotions, feel them fully, and use them as guidance toward getting my needs met. I regularly sit down with a notebook and make a list of exactly what I want in a given situation. This aligns my thoughts with my inner guidance, and it feels good. Inspiration about what to do generally follows. Please note that I don’t try to figure out what to
do
about a certain situation until I’ve gone through the entire process of looking in the direction of what I need and desire. And I don’t try to figure out how to fight
against
something I don’t want, because that just creates more of what isn’t working. This is why I suggest you remove the notion of “fighting” cancer or other illness from your vocabulary.

In the past, for example, my former husband would often spend many hours at the hospital and wouldn’t come home for dinner on time. I used to look out the window and wait for him, trying to keep the dinner warm, feeling angry with him and sorry for myself. The more I demanded that he show up on time, the more of a problem it became in our relationship. One day, I simply decided to go ahead and eat dinner myself and then get on with the evening’s activities and enjoy myself. I did this whenever he wasn’t home when he said he would be. Eventually, he began coming home on time spontaneously, or calling to say he’d be late. I realized that my attention to his continued absence was actually holding the painful pattern in place. I also realized that I was operating under the outdated notion that it was my job to provide a warm supper for him each night, even though we both were working in surgical specialties at the same hospital. When you acknowledge that you are attracting your experiences vibrationally, you have put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life. You also have to be willing to let go of the notion that someone else is responsible for meeting your needs. That’s your job. You must also stop making the behavior of others your excuse for unhappiness. Most of the time, your loved ones will be very happy to assist you when you learn how to make requests, not demands.