Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (170 page)

Try hypnosis. I’ve been sending smokers for hypnosis for years—often with very good results.

Use acupuncture. Acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine are known to be of benefit in helping with withdrawal from cigarettes and other addictive substances. In New York City, the March of Dimes and Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital advocate acupuncture-based treatment for addicted clients. One three-year study involving 2,282 cases demonstrated that acupuncture had a 90 percent success rate in a nico tine detoxification program.
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Generally it only takes one treatment. An added benefit is that acupuncture lessens your chance of gaining weight after you stop.

If all else fails, try pharmacological help. Some women have been helped by nicotine gum or the nicotine patch; both are available over the counter and have been heavily promoted as a way to “taper off” smoking. The short-term success rate of each is comparable, and both work better when combined with psychological support. The data on long-term outcomes are mixed. My own preference is for the programs listed above. You want to get rid of nicotine in your system as soon as possible, and these simply draw out the process. If you do try them, follow the package directions precisely, or you could actually overdose on nicotine.

APPRECIATE THE ENERGY OF FOOD

The energy of food has emotional and psychological consequences. Foods aren’t broken down completely into anonymous fats, carbohydrates, and proteins when they’re digested—they retain some of their original energy.
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Like humans, food is more than the sum of its parts. It is affected by the way it is raised, processed, handled, and cooked. In short, food has its own unique energy field,
prana,
or
chi
. In ancient monasteries, only the most enlightened monks were allowed to cook and handle the food, because it was felt that their energy field affected the food.

On a couple of trips to Italy, I have been simply amazed at how good the lo cally grown food tastes there. There is, of course, a rich food tradition in this area of the world. Food is locally grown on mineral-rich soils, harvested at the peak of freshness, and enjoyed in season among family and friends. Eating there versus gulping fast food in the United States are two entirely different experiences. I believe that this approach to food and eating, as much as anything else, is responsible for the healing benefits of the Mediterranean diet.

A number of studies have documented the link between food, behavior, and mood. Studies on schoolchildren and the observations of many parents have supported the fact that foods that are low in nutri ents and high in sugar, caffeine, and food additives sometimes produce erratic behavior. Alexander Schauss has documented the link between diet, crime, and delinquency, showing the connection between diets high in sugar and preservatives and subsequent erratic behavior.
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On the other hand, if you were sitting on a beach in Hawaii reading nov els, you could eat almost anything you wanted and suffer few ill effects—even from foods that usually give you problems (provided, of course, that you like Hawaii and the beach). But when you’re under stress, hurried, or unhappy, digestion and food assimilation are adversely affected because of the adverse effect of stress hormones on insulin, blood sugar, and digestive function. This link is important to understand.

Digestion, absorption, and assimilation of our food are also depen dent upon our state of consciousness. So if you’re eating brown rice and vegetables out of guilt or as a way to beat yourself up, chances are they won’t have nearly the beneficial effects that they’re capable of providing.

A now-famous study on heart and blood vessel disease was con ducted at Ohio State University on rabbits. These rabbits were all ge netically bred to develop atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and coronary artery disease. The investigators fed the rabbits an athero genic diet to speed up the disease process. At the end of the study, when the rabbits were sacrificed, the researchers found that more than 15 percent of the rabbits had almost no coronary artery disease—their ar teries were clean. After much head-scratching, they discovered that the bunnies with the clean arteries were the ones whose cages were at waist level. The female graduate student who fed the rabbits used to take these ones out of their cages and pet and play with them awhile before their feeding.
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This study has been repeated several times, mostly because no one could believe it initially, but the results were the same. Studies like this fly in the face of what we normally believe is going on.

My advice: If you’re going to eat doughnuts, get a massage—or pray over them first.

The pioneering work of Masaru Emoto of Japan, author of
The Hidden
Messages in Water
(Beyond Words, 2004), has documented the remarkable effects that emotions have on the crystalline structure of water. Given that our bodies are 70 percent water, and given that food is largely water as well, it behooves us to prepare and consume our food lovingly, as well as to give thanks for it—regardless of its quality. This alone can transform its effects. In his book
Surviving Chaos: Healing with Divine Love
(World Service Institute, 2009), engineer Robert Fritchie points out that the healing energy of Divine Love has the ability to nullify the adverse effects of toxic food and water if we simply open to that energy before eating. (For more information, see
www.worldserviceinstitute.org
.)

Another example of the effect of consciousness on how food is assimilated in the body is the fact that people with multiple personality disorder can be very allergic to a food while they are in one personality; yet the same food doesn’t affect them a bit when they are in another personality—in the exact same body. Clearly, more is going on with food and nourishment than simply fat, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and calories. When all is said and done, diet is only one factor in creating health, albeit a very powerful one. According to numerous investiga tors, dietary patterns that are associated with low cancer and heart dis ease risk are usually present in those individuals who have other lifestyle factors that are associated with a low risk of cancer. These in clude lower consumption of alcohol and fast food, more exercise, and an optimistic worldview.

Commit to the joy and pleasure of eating whole organic food most of the time. But also understand that your consciousness around a food can change that food’s effect on your body. For me, the pleasure of eating out at a restaurant where I can relax and be served almost always outweighs the damage of any partially hydrogenated fat in the salad dressing or on the fish. Melvin Morse’s study of long-term survivors of near-death experiences showed that they eat better than controls and in general take better care of themselves. They do this not to avoid dying but because, as a result of their near-death experience, they value their lives more than ever before. Eating well is a way of valuing and nourishing ourselves.
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The late comedian George Burns, who lived until he was one hundred, once said, “If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” Part of George Burns’s longevity secret was his sense of humor. Don’t lose yours—and don’t eat without it! Keep food in perspective.

18
The Power of Movement

Our body creates our soul as much as our soul creates our body.

—David Spangler

Very little is known in our day of the magic which resides in movement,
and the potency of certain gestures. The number of physical movements
that most people make through life is extremely limited. Having stifled
and disciplined their movements in the first stages of childhood, they resort
to a set of habits, seldom varied. So, too, their mental activities respond
to set formulas, often repeated. With this repetition of physical
and mental movements, they limit their expression until they become
like actors who each night play the same role. With these few stereotyped
gestures, their whole lives are passed without once suspecting the
world of dance which they are missing.

—Isadora Duncan

O
ur bodies were designed to move, stretch, and run. Exercise is natural for children, and it should be natural for all of us. It feels wonderful to have a strong, flexible body—including a strong heart for endurance. Physical exercise or regular movement of some kind is a vital part of flourishing, which is why the USDA food pyramid includes it as an important part of a healthy lifestyle. Even women who are disabled or confined to a wheelchair can ben efit from strengthening their upper bodies and increasing their cardio vascular fitness.

Movement needs to be part of your commitment to yourself. It’s easy to put it off until the house is clean, more work is done, or you’ve gone through the mail. But the endless household and work duties will always be there, even after you’re dead. Think of it this way: Given that exercise adds an average of seven years to your life, you’re
saving
time by exercising. If we wait to take care of ourselves until everything else is done, there will never be time for exercise. If we don’t create exercise time, we’ll never have it. Exercise is an essential part of weight control. Though I have a family history of heart disease, I don’t exercise because I’m afraid of heart disease; I do it because it feels good and my body loves it! The old feminist adage “How you do it is what you get” ap plies to exercise just as it does to any other area of life. Getting to this point took me more than forty years. First I had to overcome the “no pain, no gain” legacy that I grew up with.

OUR CULTURAL INHERITANCE

Many women have to heal their early perceptions of themselves and their physical capabilities before they can become comfortable with physical activities. Ever since their school days, they’ve felt bad about their physical prowess simply because they weren’t “good” at sports. John Douillard, D.C., Ph.D., author of
Body, Mind, and Sport
(Three Rivers Press, 2001) and a pioneer in the field of fitness and consciousness, cites a Louis Harris poll that discloses that upward of 50 percent of Americans experience their first major feeling of failure in sports! The rea son many girls don’t have the skills to succeed in sports is that no one ever taught them. One of my friends who was a pro baseball player told me that when boys are first learning to throw, they also throw “just like a girl.” Boys learn to “throw like a boy” from practicing over and over again with those who are more skilled than they. It’s part of their cultural heritage.

Are you someone who was never picked for the school softball team? Did you feel you had to quit playing sports with the boys when you started to grow breasts? Check to see if your history and any messages you received as a girl are preventing you from enjoying physical activity now. If they are, bring them to consciousness so you can experience them fully, and then let them go. Of course, even if you still don’t enjoy sports, there are many other ways to stay fit. Being good at batting a ball and being physically fit by engaging in exercise are not necessarily related. Brian Swimme, Ph.D., physicist and author of
The Universe Is a Green Dragon
(Bear, 1985), said it best: “To exercise actually means to bring into action. When we exer cise, we bring into action our ancestral memories. Our bodies remem ber that we lived in trees and forests. We need to crawl and climb and run if we are to develop our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacities. . . . We tend to think of exercise as losing weight, as trimming off the fat. But to exercise is to enable the body to remember its past, so that it can stretch out with all its intertwined powers of being and thought and reflection.”
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I love this quote; it always makes me feel good!