Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (176 page)

Women all over the planet are finding the courage to break through the collective morphogenic field of shame, fear, and pain. This usually takes the form of rocking the boat of the status quo in one’s family. For example, years ago, one of my patients went home to tell her father what it was like to grow up in a household in which he had sexually abused her sisters and herself for years. She stood there and told all of it, not to change him but to break the years of silence. She later told me, “I am ready to go on national television with my father’s name. He not only ruined my girlhood, but also abused almost every girl in my neighborhood!” She finally had found the courage to feel her anger and pain. This is a first step toward transformation. True forgiveness can’t come until a woman takes this step. By releasing the secrets that kept her trapped, she is saying, “No more!” All over the world, women like this are changing the morphogenic field of fear and silence. From Africa, where women are speaking out about female genital mutilation and rape, to India, where selective abortion of females is being addressed, to the United States, where we no longer tolerate intimate violence—silence is everywhere being broken and healing abounds!

Breaking the silence takes courage. I know of no woman who has tapped her inner source of power without going through an almost pal pable veil of fear, often feeling as though her very life would be threatened by telling the truth. The journalist Vivian Gornick says, “For a woman, coming off fear is like an addict coming off drugs.” I don’t know any way around this fear except to name it and then go through it with the help of others who’ve also experienced it and come out on the other side. Millions of women healers and wise women, and the men who have sup ported them, have been killed for telling the truth. It is little wonder, given the collective history of women and the feminine, that we have been afraid. When we deny this fear or discount its presence in others, we only give it more power. Experiencing the fear we collectively hold is a very important step toward healing—we need not judge it in others or in ourselves.

But as each of us acknowledges, feels, and moves through her fear, it becomes that much easier for the next woman to heal, and the next one after her, just as when a world record is broken. We are changing the morphogenic field together, as thousands of women the world over break through their fields of fear at the same time. The first women who told the truth about their incest were accused of making it up. Now, when a woman remembers and speaks—no matter what the in dignity she has suffered—support, books, the Internet, and meetings are available for her. She need no longer feel alone, like she’s crazy or the only one this has happened to.

And then the magic starts. As you allow the life force to guide your life, the exhilaration comes. Once you break through this fear and begin living your life according to your inner wisdom, you find you have everything you need to create a life for yourself that is based on freedom, joy, and opportunity. I have seen this repeatedly and have experienced it myself. So take heart. There is great hope, joy, and love—all around us, all the time—when we clear ourselves of past habits, change our thinking, and embrace our power.

In 1993, I wrote the following: “I often think of myself as standing on the shoulders of all the strong women who came before me and being supported by them, women who had the courage to speak their truths even in the face of great opposition. I reassure myself with the thought, ‘They can’t burn me this time. There are too many of us this time. This time I am safe.’ ” Back then, I never expected that my work would be accepted in my lifetime. When the first edition of this book came out, I was terrified to go into the hospital and face my colleagues. I kept moving forward anyway. Now, years later, I am not only safe but also freer and happier than I have ever been in my life. I have more abundance, more love, and more joy than I ever dreamed possible. I look back on where I was in 1993, and I smile with compassion for who I was then. And I want you to know that I see my own journey reflected daily in the lives of women the world over.

OUR DREAMS: EARTH’S DREAMS

Women are rising like yeast all over the planet.

As we heal, through feeling our grief and our joy, the earth heals. Part of the rise of the feminine that I see happening all over the world is the strengthening of ties between women. Gwendolyn, one of the women we met earlier, said that as a result of her healing, “What has come into my life are beautiful female relationships. This never happened before because I put so much energy into men. Now a sisterhood is starting to happen. When you take the time to tune in to yourself and your needs, the sisterhood starts happening.” I see the bonds between women—all women—growing stronger and more powerful every day. The more we support other women, the more we all thrive. There is no competition. When I see a beautiful woman, I feel uplifted by her beauty. She’s part of me and I’m part of her.

I couldn’t do the work I do without the support of my sisters throughout the world. My women friends and colleagues sustain me. I feel supported and blessed. Brian Swimme, Ph.D., once wrote that we humans are the space where the earth dreams through us. Our heart’s desire is the desire of the earth—it is what She is asking you to do. The dominator system has told us that “if it doesn’t hurt, it is not worth doing—no pain, no gain.” But often just the opposite is true. If what you are doing gives you no joy, no pleasure, no sense of purpose, no sense of fulfillment, it is not worth doing. Your state of health is the barometer of this. Your cells know what you need to do— listen!

Every cell in your body responds to your inner dreams and to pleasure. All children know this. Joy and pleasure are necessary for your health and for that of our planet. The dreams the earth dreams through you are different —Sonia Johnson from the ones She dreams through me. But I need to hear your dreams, and you need to hear mine—otherwise we don’t have the whole story. The dominator system has had a vested interest in keeping us from hearing each other for centuries. But our time has come. Let’s listen to one another.

Personal Healing Is Planetary Healing

For all of written history, the earth and the natural world have been viewed as feminine, with “virgin resources” to be “exploited.” What happens to individual women and what happens to our planet are linked. Our personal and collective degradation of nature, women, and the feminine is drawing to a close, one person at a time.

Outmoded Newtonian science will not save us because it is obsolete. It lacks the voice of intuition, the feminine voice, the voice that speaks from our bodies. We require balance now. We require embodied wisdom that is filtered through all of us—including what the mind of our bodies and our inner guidance is telling us.

I recall a cover of
Ms.
magazine showing a crowd of women with the headline
RAGE
+
WOMEN
=
POWER
.
⁵
This message made me uncomfortable until I saw the potential embedded in it. The anger and rage of silenced women, when used as fuel for positive change, is indeed power. But it must be power from within, power that is fully grounded and centered—not rage directed
against
someone or something. Rage
transformed
is power. Rage
transformed
is strength. It can be likened to fire—fire can destroy your house, or it can cook your dinner. It all depends on how you use it!

To name your work “political,” especially when it comes to your body and to things that are womanly, is an act of power. If you are a mother, believe me, your work is political. If you are a nurse, a child care worker, or anything else, your work is political. If you’re healing a fibroid tumor or remembering your incest, you are doing political work. Breast-feeding is political.

How refreshing to see our body’s healing as political. Let us give it the importance that it deserves! Gloria Steinem once said, “Any woman who is up off her ass is part of the women’s movement.” I like that a lot—it leaves room for a wide range of interpretations. We have many choices. No one but you gets to define your healing or your politics for you. Do you need to take six weeks off from work to heal from pelvic surgery? Think of it as political. And then when you’ve learned from it, see if you can channel future energy outward from your body into work that is positive and life affirming. Or if you need to take six weeks off just to enjoy and get in touch with yourself, that, too, is political!

In the epilogue to her book on her recovery from breast cancer,
A Burst
of Light
(Firebrand Books, 1998), poet Audre Lorde writes, “I had to examine in my dreams as well as in my immune function tests the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the dif ference. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
⁶

In a political system that has not represented womanly values, each woman must represent herself and become a lobbyist for her own needs. Caring for yourself as well as you possibly can,
whether or not
you are sick, is indeed an act of political warfare.

Physician, Heal Thyself—Revisited

My inner guidance came to me through the mind of my uterus while I was in the process of writing the original edition of this book. I was diagnosed with a fibroid tumor that made my uterus about thirteen-week size. I had no symptoms. I had been eating an essentially dairy-free, low-fat diet for years. (I didn’t know then that my intake of bread and high-glycemic-index foods was probably contributing to the problem.) At first I was saddened and didn’t want anyone to know about it. I grieved for the loss of my “normal” uterus. When one of my colleagues did a pelvic exam and told me about the fibroid, the first thought I had was, “I better get this book finished, because I’m sure this growth is related to it.” I felt intuitively that it had started to grow in the early stages of my writing process, two years before. I also thought, “Damn, I’ve been hanging around too many women with fibroids. Maybe I caught one.”
⁷

I felt as though I had done something wrong, as though I had some how failed. I was reminded that our emotions don’t always match our level of intellectual development. I was humbled. Later that night, as I lay in my bed, I put my hands over my lower abdomen and said to my uterus, “Okay, now I have to take my own medicine and tune in to what you’re telling me.” My uterus gave me the following message: “This fibroid is a reminder that you need to learn how to move energy through your body more efficiently. If you take care of yourself now and pay at tention, you’ll avoid more serious problems in the future. This is also a wonderful opportunity to teach other women by example. Remember, the work you’re doing with others applies to you. You’ve always believed that it is possible to dematerialize fibroids. Here’s your chance.” I meditated on creativity and what was needing to be birthed through me.

The next day I began a regimen of castor oil packs, and I started a course of acupuncture, something I’d been wanting to do as a general preventive measure for a long time. My acupuncturist told me that my kidney and triple warmer meridians were very low and had been for some time. This was related to overwork and stress and adrenal exhaustion. I was reminded of a chronic energy pattern that Oriental medicine refers to as “stuck blood” or “stuck
chi,
” on the right side of my body. My previous migraine headaches had been on my right side; Caroline Myss had once diagnosed energy leaking out of my right hip, manifesting as a hip problem on the right; my breast abscess had been on the right; and now I had a fibroid on the right side of my uterus. All were on the right side of my body—the “masculine” or yang side—and all were related in an energy sense. What that meant to me was that it had been important to develop a strong foundation for my work and to take it out into the world—that was my “masculine” task. Up until the late 1980s I had been afraid of doing so fully because of my perception that the world wasn’t ready to hear it and that it would be dangerous for me. Hence, the repeated “wounds” on my right side. The fibroid was simply the latest manifestation—and a timely one at that, given my life’s work with women. And despite an ongoing recovery from rela tionship addiction, I realized how much I still wanted the approval of others, and I finally understood how powerless I am over what people will think of me. It became clear that the fibroid was about more than the book and the depleted acupuncture meridians. After several months of acupuncture and castor oil packs, it seemed to get larger, not smaller. My learning had to go much deeper. What did I need to learn?

I knew that fibroids are related to pouring your creativity into dead-end relationships or jobs. I assumed that mine was related to my work. I realized that my entire relationship with my office and with my profession needed to change—that I was in bondage to an obsolete form. While my heart wanted to write, lecture, and teach women a whole new way of being in relationship with their bodies, my intellec tual sense of responsibility dictated that I continue to practice medicine in the way I had been trained: see patients, do surgery, and do my share of emergency calls like everybody else (my relationship addiction in yet another guise). I realized that I needed more freedom. I needed to change my practice to teach more of the material in this book. I needed to be responsible to my deepest dreams and my innermost wisdom.

Women’s health will never change substantially unless large groups of women begin to reclaim the wisdom of their bodies collectively. For me to do this meant letting go of being “the doctor” to the hundreds of women I’d enjoyed working with so much over the years. I didn’t want to leave the practice of medicine—I wanted to transform it. I knew that I could no longer do primary care with all of its cultural assumptions, assumptions that were chaining me to limits that I could no longer tolerate.