Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (46 page)

When I saw Louise seven months after her initial visit to me, she had taken a job in another state, at a radio station where her work was truly appreciated. She had realized the degree of loss associated with her daughters’ leaving home and had taken the time to grieve that. While she was interviewing in the new city, she had realized that her relationship with her husband had been unfulfilling for years—that they had really stayed together only for the children. She saw it clearly and began plans for a divorce, which was accomplished mutually. She then met a new lover, something she had never dreamed would happen and hadn’t been seeking. This relationship proved very sensual and meaningful to her. She had changed her diet significantly and stopped eating dairy foods. When I examined her, the fibroid was almost completely gone. She had basically changed her entire first-and second-chakra energy.

Paula: Fibroids and Abortion

I occasionally see women whose fi broids appear to be related to an abortion or abortions. When I say “related” I don’t mean “caused by.” Abortion, in study after study, has not been associated with adverse physical effects on the body. The problems that women have after abortion, if any, are related to the
meaning
of abortion in their lives and in the society in which they live.

Paula came to see me for an annual exam at the age of thirty-six. She had had three abortions when she was in her teens and her twenties and had no children. I do not know the circumstances of her abortions except that she was matter-of-fact about them. She de veloped fibroids in her early thirties and had suffered from pelvic pain for at least five years. When I saw her, she was feeling well and healthy and believed that her well-being was related to the following story: “I was having increasing problems with bleeding between my periods and pelvic pain. Not happy with the prospect of surgery or hormones, I went to a Native American healer. He told me that I had to release the spirits of the beings who had been with me before my abortions. He performed a releasing ritual with me in which I liter ally saw and felt white wings flying out of my lower pelvis and away. I cried for hours with grief and relief. After that my periods went back to normal, and I’ve never had a day of pain since.”

Paula’s story is a dramatic example of the power of emotional release for healing. Though I could still feel an enlarged fibroid uterus of about eight-week size in her, this was not a problem that required more than regular checkups. She told me that it was a relief to be able to tell her story to a doctor, since she was certain that most doc tors would laugh at her and think she was nuts. That, of course, is why doctors rarely hear these stories of wonder and healing from their patients. The stories are common, and yet they are kept secret because they are too often discounted or patronized by medical professionals.

True healing, not just curing our body or soothing our mental anxiety, involves transformation of our energy field and consciousness. In the women I’ve just described, the healing came in part because each woman created meaning from the messages and symptoms her uterus was sending her about how she was using her creative power in the world. And then she took the next step. She affirmed her innate whole ness and followed an action plan to manifest it in the here and now. You can do the same!

7
The Ovaries

. . . she sings from the knowing of
los ovaries,
a knowing from deep within the body, deep within the mind, deep within the soul.

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

F
rom an energy medicine standpoint, ovaries are the female equiv alent of male testicles. They can be thought of as “female balls” because they represent exactly the same thing in the world. When a man goes out into the world to perform acts of difficulty or courage that require manipulating the external world of things or people, he’s said to “have balls.” For a female, going out into the world, particularly a male-oriented world, also “takes balls,” but she must use her ovarian energy. She should not try to imitate a man, because her ovaries and their energy field can be adversely affected by an overly masculine relationship with the outside world. To maintain health, she needs to understand how to use her “balls” in a life-enhancing way.

Our ovarian wisdom represents our deepest creativity, that which waits to be born from within us, that which can be born only through us, our unique creative potential—especially as it relates to what we create in the world outside of ourselves. Biologically, when a woman ovulates, the egg attracts the sperm to it by sending out a signal to the sperm. The egg simply waits for the sperm to arrive; it does not go actively seeking sperm. The resulting biological creation, a baby, has its own life and consciousness connected to, but also separate from, that of its mother. Although its growth and development are influenced profoundly by the mother, they are at the same time separate from her. She cannot use her will to force her baby to develop faster; nor can she use her will to determine when her child will be born. And once the child is born, she must acknowledge that her creation has and always will have a life and personality of its own, even though it was created from her own flesh and blood.

Similarly, all of the creations that come from deep within us, from our ovarian wisdom—whether they be babies, books, or works of art—have a life of their own that we have a responsibility to initiate and allow but ultimately not to control. Just so, our deepest creativity cannot be forced. It must be allowed the time and space to grow and develop in tune with its own internal rhythm. Like biological mothers, we as women must be open to the uniqueness of our creations and their own energies and impulses, without trying to force them into predetermined forms. Our ability to
yield
to our creativity, to acknowledge that we cannot control it with our intellect, is the key to understanding ovarian power. We must
allow
this power to come through us. This doesn’t mean that we passively sit by and wait for our creativity to “happen” to us, however. We are meant to use our second-chakra power drive to attract or go after the people, places, and circumstances that will help ensure the safety and nourishment of our creations (including children).

Society tries to overly control creativity through the imposition of deadlines (note the connotation of the word—sometimes the time factor literally kills our creativity), quotas, and productivity ratings. One of my colleagues, who has always maintained very healthy ovaries, used to do scientific research as an assistant in laboratories. The lab director would always tell her exactly what he wanted her to produce. Once, for example, he wanted her to manufacture an artificial cell called a liposome. Whenever she tried to create this cell model by running the experimental design according to his predetermined directions, using her will and intellect to try to control the setup and force the process, the at tempt failed and the artificial cell was nonfunctional. She felt miserable. She then looked beyond the lab director’s specific demand and asked herself, “What do I want to know in this situation? How can I find out more about an aspect of life by doing this experiment? What can this teach me about cells in general?” At these times she connected with the broadest possibilities inherent in the experiment, which she described as like “touching the hand of God.” Invariably, in the liposome exper iment and in others, she would design an experiment that yielded far more information than had been originally expected of her. The end result was never exactly what the lab director had asked for, but it was usually far more valuable and enriching. In the liposome experiment, my colleague ended up creating not only an artificial cell model but an experimental design that could potentially be used to produce a vaccine against a serious disease. A by-product of this was that the lab director was always thrilled with her results and eventually learned to allow her to design her own experiments without interference. Her scientific work was brilliant. By remaining true to her deepest creative wisdom, her end results benefited everyone concerned. This is feminine creativity at its finest. We can do this in our own lives and jobs by always considering how one task is connected to others and by remembering our interconnections and how one act can give birth to or build bridges to others.

Because many women get both ovarian and uterine problems simultaneously, as the previous chapter mentioned, the relationship between the different issues they signal is worth underscoring. Basically, ovarian energy is more dynamic and changes more quickly than uterine energy. That’s because the biological gestation time for an egg is only one lunar month, while the biological gestation time for the fetus is nine lunar months. In the reproductive years, healthy ovaries release new seeds monthly in a dynamic way—and when this dynamic ovarian energy needs to get our attention, the ovaries are capable of changing very quickly. A large ovarian cyst, for example, can grow in a matter of days under the right circum stances.

While uterine health is directly related to a woman’s belief in herself at the deepest inner level, ovarian health is related to the quality of a woman’s relationships with the people and things outside herself. Ovaries are at risk when women feel controlled or criticized by others or when they themselves control and criticize others.

ANATOMY

Ovaries are the small, oblong, pearl-colored organs that lie just below the fallopian tubes on each side of the uterus. Ovaries produce eggs. A woman has the greatest number of eggs in her ovaries that she’ll ever have— about 20 million—when she is a twenty-week fetus inside her mother. Although the number of eggs starts to decrease from that point on, all females continue to have far more eggs than they ever need. Though it has long been believed that the mammalian ovary loses the ability to create new eggs after fetal life, new research in mice has established the existence of cells that replenish new eggs throughout a female’s reproductive life.
¹
Some results of this research hint at the existence of egg stem cells in adult women as well. In commenting on this research, Roger G. Gosden, Ph.D., Sc.D., who was at the time the scientific director of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, where the research was done, said, “The mind boggles at the implications. The ability to make more eggs would be a revolution in women’s health. In theory, it would allow you to have better control over the timing of menopause, to grow more eggs for one’s own fertility treatment, to prevent premature menopause, to recover fertility after chemotherapy, and on and on.” Though these findings are preliminary, they allow us to think about our ovaries and our eggs in a whole new, more positive way!

Ovaries release eggs about once a month, from about age fourteen or fifteen onward—sometimes earlier, sometimes later. After a girl’s first period, it takes two or three years for ovulation to get going regularly, just as at menopause it takes a number of years for ovulation to cease altogether. Because ovulation always produces a small cyst in the ovary, it’s very common for ovaries to have small cystic areas in them that are either the result of newly developing eggs or ovulations that have al ready occurred. As the egg begins to develop each month, a nourishing fluid-filled area forms around it, so that it is encapsulated or walled off from the rest of the ovary. This fluid-filled area, known as a cyst, is physiologically and completely normal, a fact that many women don’t appreciate. At ovulation, when the egg is released and picked up by the fallopian tube, the cyst actually bursts as part of the ovulatory process, and the surrounding fluid, known as the liquor folliculi, is released into the pelvic cavity along with the egg.

After ovulation, in the space where the egg used to be, a second small cystic area, known as the corpus luteum, develops and begins to secrete progesterone. The corpus luteum eventually gets reabsorbed by the ovary. Frequently the process of egg development begins and a small cyst forms, but ovulation doesn’t occur in that particular site. In this case, a small cyst will be left in that area of the ovary for a while. Because of this monthly process of egg development and cyst formation, it is perfectly normal for a woman to have small fluid-filled ovarian cysts at almost any time throughout her reproductive life. In fact, ovaries almost always have small cysts in them.

Whenever a woman gets a pelvic ultrasound for chronic pelvic pain, a fibroid, or any other reason, her ovaries are also scanned and these cysts show. Small 1-to-3-centimeter cysts are almost always normal, because producing small physiological cysts that come and go is part of what normal ovaries do. They gestate little eggs, little cysts—or, in energy medicine terms, young ideas ripe with potential.

Ovaries also produce hormones—including estrogen, progesterone, and androgens—throughout the life cycle, though the amounts they produce change (not necessarily declining), depending upon a woman’s age. Androgens, the hormone type associated with libido, were thought in the past to be produced almost entirely by the adrenals, which are the endocrine glands located at the top of the kidneys. In the last two decades, however, various studies have established that both premenopausal and postmenopausal ovaries produce a significant quantity of androgens, perhaps as much as 50 percent of the body’s supply.
²