Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (175 page)

And when that was over, I felt the grief of my grandmother, raised by her twelve-year-old sister after her own mother had died in childbirth. When that was complete, I went backward further still—until I was wailing for all women, for all the pain, for all the labors unattended, for all the injustice, for so many thousands of years. What had started as very personal became universal: not my pain, but
the
pain.

When it was over, several hours later, I knew exactly why I was on the earth and what my mission was: to work toward transforming this collective pain into joy. I knew in a flash that there are no mistakes, that I had been destined to become an obstetrician/gynecologist, and that no other path would have served as well. I knew why I had cried so many years before in medical school, when I had first witnessed the birth of a baby: I had tapped into the field of women’s experience—including all of the pain and fear. Seeing the birth had brought up emotions for me that I had no words for back in 1973. I only knew at the time that I had been moved beyond all reason by this birth and that there was no other specialty in medicine for me except the care of women.

Two days after the experience I had at the intensive, I got my period, confirmation for me that our deepest material often comes to con sciousness premenstrually—the time when the veil between the worlds of the conscious and unconscious is thinner. And about a week later, as I was relating my experience of this deep process to my mother, I heard a long silence at the other end of the phone line after I had finished. Then she said, “I was sexually abused. I remember the room, I remember the smell of his pipe. I can see it as though it were happening now. It was old Bill, the man who rented a room from my mother. He told me never to tell anyone. I felt dirty. I was eight years old.”

My mother, who was sixty-three at that time, had not remembered this part of her history before that moment. Somehow I had broken in to the family memory bank with my process—and suddenly the contents were easier for her to access as well. A few months prior to this, she had been having a recurrent dream in which there were horrid growths on her body. She’d awaken in terror. She now knew that these dreams were related to her long-suppressed abuse; the growths on her skin were symbolic of material coming up to consciousness “just under the surface”—ugly material, horrid material.

Mom was alone in her cabin when I called and she remembered her abuse. I asked her if she would be all right after we hung up. She said she would but that she’d call back if she needed support. I suggested that she be willing to stay with that which was “not acceptable.” She prayed for guidance and let herself experience the sickening feeling that had surfaced with the sexual abuse memory. She then went to bed. Her loft window was open—it was a warm autumn night—and she later told me that three blue lights came in the window, followed by a large gleaming sphere of white light. The next thing she knew, it was morn ing. She awakened feeling profoundly at peace, knowing that she had had an experience of grace.

OUR MOTHERS: OUR CELLS

Our memories are stored up in our bodies. Incest memories often surface after a uterine biopsy, and sadness often arises after pelvic surgery, all for a reason. We carry our personal history in the tissue that our consciousness cocreates. It remains there like data banks until we transform it. But we carry much more than what is simply personal. On some level, we carry everyone and everything—the collective—all there within and around our very cells.

It’s known that mitochondrial DNA, the DNA that carries out the daily activities of the cytoplasm of the cells, is inherited strictly through the maternal line. The entire human race can be traced back to a group of females in Africa.
²
This fact lends biological credence to my experiences and those of everyone who has entered into realms of experience that don’t fit logical thinking. Sometimes body symptoms are the doorway not only into our own individual pain but into the collective pain of others. Insights from quantum physics have now proved that the consciousness of one of us affects all of us.

An old Sufi saying captures the essence of what this means and what each of us must do with it:

Overcome any bitterness that may have come to you because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you.

Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is part of her heart and therefore en dowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing the totality of that pain.

You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. The secret is to offer your heart as a vehicle to transform cosmic suffering into joy.

Stephen Levine taught me that the work we do to let go of our suffering diminishes the suffering of the whole universe. When we have room in our hearts for our own pain, we have room for the pain of others and our compassion helps lighten the suffering of others. And then something magical happens: We find that beneath our pain and suffering lie unending joy, connection, and bliss.

A RITUAL OF RECLAIMING

Years ago, Brenda, a close friend from childhood, decided that she’d like to have her IUD removed in order to get pregnant. She’d been using IUDs for contraception for almost eighteen years with no problem, but now, at the age of forty, she had met a man with whom she wanted to share her life and have children. Because this decision was a major turning point in her life, she wanted someone close to her to share it. So she asked me to remove the IUD while she was here visiting in Maine.

We decided to do a simple ceremony prior to the procedure—to bring intent and consciousness to the process of removing the IUD and inviting in a child. So on a glorious Sunday afternoon in autumn, with the trees ablaze with color, we went over to Women to Women, set up a circle of cloth on the carpet in my office, picked a geranium from an office plant, and gathered a few seashells to place in our circle. We filled a shell with water, lit some candles, and then, sitting around our small circle, acknowledged the forces of nature, God, and the mysteries of life, and invited them to be present with us.

We called Brenda’s fiancé on the phone (he was at work in another state at the time). I asked each of them to speak about their fears and hopes for a child, which they did. The fiancé had already had a child many years before, but he was eager for a chance to participate more fully in the process this time. His support and love for Brenda were very evident and clear as he spoke; he had no doubts about his willingness to participate in parenthood. His commitment to support her was strong and inspiring. Their relationship felt like the very embodiment of the masculine at its best when it is in full support of the feminine.

Brenda herself, though eager to have a baby, voiced a concern that she wouldn’t know how to give birth. Despite her fear, she was ready to proceed with the IUD removal. We said goodbye to her fiancé, prom ising to call back as soon as we had completed the procedure.

Now we moved into one of my exam rooms, and I placed a small amount of local anesthetic in the cervix. Once Brenda felt ready, I asked her to cough while I pulled out the IUD. (Coughing while something is going into or coming out of the cervix often interferes with pain path ways and thus makes the procedure more comfortable.)

I told her that she would feel the visceral sense of her uterus as the IUD was pulled out and that this would be a good time for her to tune in to the information stored in there. I told her that the body holds memories and that these sometimes come to the surface during an office procedure such as an endometrial biopsy or an IUD removal. I explained that I would be taking some time after the procedure to “put her energy field back together” by placing my hands over the uterus. Her job was to simply pay attention to any thoughts or feelings that came up.

The IUD came out with no difficulty. I then took Brenda’s heels out of the stirrups, had her lie flat, and ran my hands over her body from head to toe several times, doing therapeutic touch. When finished, I laid my hands over her lower abdomen. She began to cry and laugh at the same time as her body released the tension and the emotional charge associated with this sort of procedure. I encouraged her to do whatever she had to do for herself. And I reminded her to simply stay with whatever was coming up.

After crying for a bit, Brenda closed her eyes and then began to laugh. She spoke of being in a forest, with light shining down through the tall trees. She described herself as being young, too young. Then she became frightened again. At this time, I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I simply remained with my hands over her lower ab domen. She told me that having my hands there felt good and she wanted me to keep them there.

She continued to recount being a young girl, alone in the woods. She was pregnant there, without the support of anyone. Her body began to go through what looked like labor. She kept saying, “It’s too soon. I don’t know how to do this.” She began to go through contractions and then pushing. (I’ve sat with enough women in labor to know what a laboring woman’s body goes through.) After about ten minutes she looked down at what sounded like a thirty-week-size stillborn child when she described it. And she asked me, “What is that white rope-like thing going into my vagina?” She was describing the umbilical cord. I told her what it was and said that she’d have to deliver the placenta. Her body then went into another contraction and went through the motions of pushing out a placenta. Brenda had never seen a thirty-week premature baby, a placenta, or a white translucent umbilical cord, but she was able to describe them perfectly—but with the curiosity of a young girl who didn’t know exactly what was happening to her, not a worldly forty-year-old.

At this point, the energetic labor and delivery complete, Brenda began to laugh and also to chant, “O-ne-an-ta, O-ne-an-ta.” It sounded like a Native American language. During this time she said, “I know the whole language.” I wish I had had a recording device—we might have figured out what language it was.

We stayed in the exam room awhile longer while Brenda returned to the twentieth century and stretched her legs. Both of us were amazed by what had just happened. I reminded her that her body did in fact know how to give birth—she had just gone through it, though not on what we’d conventionally call a physical level. Nevertheless, her body now “knew” or “remembered” what labor and delivery were like, and her fear of the process was gone. We returned to my office, sang a lul laby together, and blew out the candles. When she was ready, she called her fiancé and related the experience.

Brenda had tapped into the collective unconscious, had gained access to some ancient memory that still lived on in her cells. It was an extraordinary experience. I believe that in taking out her IUD and allowing her process to unfold, we were able to heal something deep, on a level that is available to all of us but that we rarely allow ourselves to touch or acknowledge.

Martha, when she had the stomach pain described in chapter 2, did the same thing.
Our bodies contain information that is beyond our mind’s capacity
to understand. We are much more than we think we are.
And when we acknowledge and then release our pain, our bodies and our lives become joyous and healthy. Martha has never had stomach pain again. And Brenda conceived three months after I removed the IUD, and eventually gave birth to a healthy son. The work we do to transform our pain into joy heals the whole world.

TRANSFORMING OUR FEAR OF OUR SHAMAN PAST

It is estimated that in the Middle Ages, up to 9 million women, many of them midwives and healers, were burned as witches. This witch craze, fueled by the Catholic Church, lasted for hundreds of years and has been well documented.
³
It’s not uncommon for women who are reclaiming their power or speaking their personal truths to have terrifying dreams of being burned. I have heard this countless times in my work. Joan Heartfield, Ph.D., director of the Divine Feminine–Awakened Masculine Institute, has shared with me that many women have reexperienced being burned at the stake during sacred spot massage. This doesn’t surprise me. The energy of love and light always makes space for our deepest sorrow and fear to surface and be released. The burning times have been suppressed for centuries but are now, at this time of increasing light, surfacing in our consciousness to be cleared and transformed so that the feminine and masculine energies can move into true partnership within each of us and men and women can co-create as equals. When I first wrote about this fear of our past, I had no idea how powerfully I, too, carried it. Only after the first edition of this book was pub lished and I started having nightmares about being murdered every night for a week did I see how prophetic my own words were.

When a woman enters into the work of healing her body and speaking her truth, she must break through the collective field of fear and pain that is all around us and has been for the past five thousand years of dominator society. It is a field filled with the fear of rape, of beating, of abandonment.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., a British biologist, posits that all the knowledge of the earth’s past exists all around us as electromagnetic fields of information, or “morphogenic fields.”
⁴
Jung called it the “collective unconscious.” Quantum physics calls it the “unified field.” When an athlete first breaks a world record, Dr. Sheldrake notes he or she often has to work for years to do it and is often told that it can’t be done—that it is not humanly possible. It was once felt, for example, that no one would ever be able to run a mile in under four minutes. But once Roger Bannister did it, athletes all over the world were able to do it, too. The same is true for many other athletic feats. Dr. Sheldrake explains that the morphogenic field around this world record is changed by the first person who breaks it, thus making it easier for others to equal that performance by tapping into the new morphogenic field. (For more information, see Dr. Sheldrake’s website at
www.sheldrake.org
.)