Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (18 page)

This list is a very simplified version of how you can retrain your pelvic floor muscles. You can find more ideas and specific exercises for pelvic floor muscle health in the book
The Bathroom Key
by Kathryn Kassai and Kim Perelli, and use their website to find physical therapists specializing in helping women overcome incontinence and weak pelvic floor muscles.
²³

Also, I recommend authentic Pilates, which is great for developing pelvic floor muscle tone. Pilates is part of the treatment
many women’s health physical therapists use for strengthening our stabilizing core muscles, which respond so well to gravity. (The core is the part of the body that would be covered by a 1940s one-piece bathing suit.) And it’s worth mentioning that all of this strengthening and toning does wonders for a pleasurable sex life.

Perhaps the most important piece of information you can have about your body is this: no matter what is going on in your body right now, you can always access your ability to self-heal and be healthy. Support your well-being through habits that nourish and delight you instead of habits rooted in old defense mechanisms or shame. Addictions, avoidance behaviors, and people pleasing are common behaviors that become habits for too many women who are afraid of or uncomfortable with the regular expression of difficult emotions. We can push feelings like grief, resentment, shame, and rage back so far into our subconscious that we have no idea what we are holding on to. And these emotions secrete inflammatory chemicals into our bloodstream day in and day out, which causes aging. For a goddess to enjoy vibrant health, she has to learn how to grieve and rage without apology and then commit to experiencing more exalted emotions and experiences. That’s how these old, stale, and destructive energies can be released. And that is how we remain ageless, which is our birthright.

CHAPTER FIVE

GODDESSES GRIEVE, RAGE, AND MOVE ON

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding … And if you could keep your
heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your
pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.

— K
AHLIL
G
IBRAN

S
everal years ago, I developed what we call “frozen shoulder.” It’s very common in midlife women and, like just about everything else, it’s believed to be related to hormone levels and menopause—but I knew that wasn’t my problem. The pain started one day, seemingly out of the blue, while I was picking up a piece of wood to place in the wood stove. I developed immobilizing pain in my left shoulder, dropped the wood, and actually fell to my knees. The next day, I could not stretch my
left arm behind my back very far without wincing in agony, and the pain continued day after day. Because I hadn’t suffered an injury, I felt that the cause had to be emotional, and that the pain and immobility, real as they were, were ultimately rooted in unresolved emotions. The brain doesn’t recognize the difference between emotional pain and pain caused by a physical injury. In fact, brain studies have demonstrated that emotional pain registers in precisely the same areas of the brain as physical pain.

Because of my work with thousands of patients and my personal experiences with emotions and illness, I have long known that at their core, all illness and physical ailments—including those seemingly caused by accidents or viruses—have an emotional component. If we knew what the emotional issue was, we wouldn’t have to manifest it physically! So I was certain there had to be some old, unprocessed emotional wounds in the area of my heart, ribs, and shoulders, all associated with the fourth or heart chakra. Despite my intellectual understanding, though, I didn’t know the cause—and despite knowing my pain had to be psychosomatic, I didn’t get relief. With the help of a holistic chiropractor and my Pilates teacher, I spent months trying to open up my rib cage and move my shoulder, which helped ease the pain and expand my mobility slightly. But I knew that the key to complete recovery lay in releasing the blocked emotions related to my heart.

For several years, I had been romantically involved with a man I loved deeply but who was not emotionally available to me. I desperately tried to fix the relationship, which in many ways mirrored my failed marriage. Because I couldn’t get this relationship to meet my needs, I was doubting my desirability as a woman—an old issue for me. Could it be that my shoulder pain (and the occasional chest pain I had had about once a year for a decade) had something to do with my relationships with the important men in my life?

Much as I idolized my father when I was growing up, he was busy taking care of my mother and her needs, as well as earning a living. It was a time when I needed my desirability validated by the number-one man in my life: him. I remember one day when I was around middle-school age, I was waltzing in the kitchen with
him, trying to learn this skill. My father was a good dancer, and as we ended our dance together, I asked him what he thought, hoping he would approve of my moves. He replied, “You’d do okay if it was dark—and the man was drunk.” My Scorpio dad’s barb hit me very deeply, right in the heart. He made similar criticisms of my tennis playing even though I practiced for hours and tried so hard to please him by being a good player. He didn’t take the time to teach me or arrange for me to take lessons from someone else, but simply criticized me in his forthright way.

I’m sure his comments were the result of being irritable from overwork, or simply thoughtless in the way all of us can be at times. And I know many women have suffered far worse things than I did. But that doesn’t mean I should have made excuses for him or downplayed the emotional impact on me—“Oh, for heaven’s sake, that was decades ago! Are you still holding on to
that?
Just get over it!”

No matter what happened to you—or how long ago it happened—you must do the healing work that only you can do. Failure to do so just perpetuates pain and dis-ease. My father’s insensitive jokes and comments had created a wound that became buried in my tissues. Now that the old theme was playing out in my adult life, all these years later, the old emotions I had felt as a child were expressing themselves as pain and immobility in my shoulder. My body was telling me to heal the old hurts.

I didn’t realize this right away, however. It began to dawn on me during a session I had with Doris E. Cohen, Ph.D., author of
Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth
(Hay House, 2008). Dr. Cohen has been a clinical psychologist for 40 years and also works on the spiritual level and with dreams. For a few years now, she had been suggesting that I look at my father issues, but until this point, I hadn’t been ready to face that possibility. It took the repetition of the original heartbreak with my father—in the form of an adult love relationship—to bring the issue to the surface by bringing on physical pain. The severity of my discomfort made me willing to look again at my emotional issues surrounding my father and begin a program of healing, as Dr. Cohen suggested to me.

For three days in a row, I set a timer for 15 minutes to do an anger and grief release session. During the first five to ten minutes of each session, I imagined my father sitting in front of me and let my rage fly. I just let him have it! I shouted at him for making those thoughtless, hurtful comments years ago. I swore at him, crying, “How the f--- could you talk to your daughter like that? What were you thinking, you bastard?!” In addition, I took a hand towel and snapped it against some sturdy woodwork, all the while yelling expletives of rage until I felt spent.

After these sessions—and sometimes, just a few minutes into them—I often found myself lying on my bed, curled up in a fetal position weeping and crying out, “I want my Daddy.” It was the cry of a little girl whose broken heart had been running her relationship life on some level for decades. My level of grief surprised me. But underneath anger there is nearly always hurt. My ever-present “witness” self stood watching while I went through these steps of releasing pure, unfiltered anger, getting in touch with my grief and letting it out, and nurturing myself and my body afterward. After this process each day, I took a bath with Epsom salts. As I sat in the warm water, I imagined all of the toxins in my body and mind leaching out of me and down the drain.

For three consecutive days, I used this anger and grief release process, and then I spent five to ten minutes a day for the next two days doing “active imagination” work, imagining exactly how I wanted my father to have responded to me during the times when he was so critical. I imagined him dancing with me in the kitchen, praising me for my beauty, grace, and skill as a dancer. I imagined myself glowing with pride, awash in his praise of my desirability.

Having cleared out the toxins from my cells, I was now reprogramming those cells with a new story. It was like removing the rocks from the soil and cultivating it before planting new seeds. I also did some of that towel work and raging to express my frustration, anger, and grief about the emotionally unavailable man in my life. Within about two weeks, the shoulder pain and limitation were nearly gone. It took about another month for full range of motion to return and all pain to completely resolve, but then I was pain-free even during my Pilates sessions.

One of the insights I had during my healing process, which I developed over the course of a few months, was that the imprint of lack of love toward myself was being mirrored in some of my closest relationships. People were reflecting my own beliefs about myself back to me! My well-developed intellect wouldn’t let me see that at first. But working with my dreams, with Dr. Cohen, and with exercises for releasing my feelings about my father, I came to appreciate my role in keeping myself stuck in old beliefs and behaviors that no longer served me. Notice I didn’t say I had no right to my old feelings, or no right to see my father as cruel in some ways, or no right to my defensive behaviors and choices—such as getting and staying involved with an emotionally unavailable lover. I said I rid myself of what was
no longer serving me.
I stood up for myself and my own worth. I declared that I deserved to be treated better, and that had to start in the only place I have any control over: how I treat myself. The fact that you are entitled to your hurt, grief, and defensiveness doesn’t mean it’s working for you. You get to decide whether the payoff of holding on to all that is worth jeopardizing your health, feeling lousy, and pushing away new opportunities because of your distrust, or cynicism, or avoidance behaviors. It’s up to you to make the choices. I’m just advising you to let all that crap go so you can flourish.

Healing is always a combination of emotional, physical, and spiritual work, and we all have our unfinished business with our parents or other important figures from childhood that has to be resolved. These patterns set the stage for our health and relationships for our entire lives because our early years are when our core beliefs about the world in general, and our self-worth in particular, are formed. As children, we don’t have the capacity to emotionally or mentally process our painful experiences. We may think that the harsh words of others have rolled off our backs, or that we’ve worked it all through in therapy or by writing in our journals. But then a physical ailment or an emotional crisis arises—or both do. That’s when we realize that there’s some old stuff buried within us that has to come up and out the way it went in: through our bodies’ energy fields and tissues.

Our bodies love us so much that they will do anything necessary to bring us to a place in which we recognize and release our unlovingness toward ourselves that’s causing us deep heartache. The message of illness and pain may be “It’s time to bring healing love into your energy field. You’ve been in emotional pain long enough. Let me turn up the volume by creating physical pain so you’ll pay attention and take care of your heart.”

WHERE EMOTIONS GET STUCK

When you don’t feel and release emotions regularly, they get stuck and eventually create illness. The older the trauma, the more deeply buried that trauma will be. We learn to wall off our pain and “soldier on,” and after a few decades, most of us are very skilled at this and have a lot of very old emotions stuck in us. Our culture doesn’t teach us how to release our emotions as they come up, much less when they’ve become buried.

In my teen years, when I was going through a breakup with my first boyfriend, my father hugged me and said, “Feelings are facts. And sometimes you just have to get them off your chest.” Much of what is required to truly flourish is embedded right in our everyday language. To “get something off your chest” means to free up your heart, your lungs, and your shoulders from the burdens of feeling unloving and unloved. Grief, rage, hurt, and resentment are all forms of being unloving toward ourselves and others. And though we are sometimes visited by a divinely inspired moment of grace and insight that quickly and easily lifts this burden of “unlovingness,” most often the burden is not lifted until we are brought to our knees by the weight of it. We don’t have to wait until that moment to free ourselves! We don’t have to create illness to awaken to our need to heal.