Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (16 page)

Unfortunately, instead of using our feelings as inner guidance, we’re brought up to fear or deny our negative emotions and feelings or judge them as “bad.” Though remaining emotionally calm and collected under pressure can be admirable and is often necessary, we cannot afford to allow this emotional control to become so ingrained that we lose touch with the richness of our emotional life. Men are even more at risk for being out of touch with their feelings than women, since they learn early on that “big boys don’t cry.” A friend of mine was taught that if she had to cry, she should bury her face in a pillow so that the rest of the family wouldn’t have to hear it. Yet crying and making sounds are all a part of our emotional “digestive” system and a way to keep energy flowing evenly throughout our bodies.

I recently rewatched the movie
Sense and Sensibility,
based on the Jane Austen novel of the same name. Elinor, the main character, has spent her entire life being “sensible,” attempting to keep a lid on her own needs and desires. One of those desires is to marry a particular man with whom she’s in love. She never lets on about this, always waiting for him to approach her and bring up the subject. At the end of the story, when her beloved finally shows up to proclaim his love—after all kinds of plot twists and turns—the emotional dam within her bursts and she begins to sob uncontrollably. This scene is almost painful to watch when you realize that Elinor is not at all unusual. She is trying so hard to accept her lot in life and be sensible about her needs and desires. But underneath her calm exterior is a tornado of power and life force, just waiting to be unleashed. Luckily, none of us needs to have Mr. Right show up in order to unleash our inner guidance in the first place.

For thousands of years, our culture has had a kind of “nonliving” orientation that is now being transformed. This orientation has encouraged us to keep a lid on things, as in “Don’t make waves.” By learning very early on that emotions are bad or shameful, we learn not to trust our inner guidance or our bodies. When we are encouraged to be out of touch with what we know and what we feel, we are systematically trained out of moving toward the fulfillment of our in nermost desires and needs. Even our religions teach us to squelch our innate joy and creativity and that feeling good is a sin. As Matthew Fox points out, “Our civilization has not done a good job with the energy called delight and joy.”
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We need to know that the very essence of a life based on inner guidance is abundant delight and joy. Anthropologist Richard Grossinger, Ph.D., puts it this way: “Guess what? God created beings not to act in a morality play but to experience what is unfathomable, to elicit what can become, to descend into the darkness of creation and reveal it to him [or her], to mourn and celebrate enigma and possibility. The universe is a whirling dervish, not a hanging judge in robes.”
⁷

Every smiling, laughing three-month-old baby I’ve ever met reflects the true, joyous nature with which we were all born. The late anthro pologist and social biologist Ashley Montagu, Ph.D., once said that most adults are nothing more than “disintegrated children.” Fortunately, our inner guidance is always available to remind us of our direction toward fulfillment. When we realign with our inner guidance and stop judging our bodies and our feelings as bad when they are offering us information, we are on the pathway to a life filled with growth and delight.

4
The Female Energy System

Look beneath the surface of the world—the world that includes your clothes, toaster ovens, philosophies, your skin—and you will discover a universe of swirling and subtle energies. While we do not know exactly what these energies are doing or how they are doing it, we do know that they are “here,” forming the energies that underlie physical reality. They form
you
.

—Cyndi Dale,
The Subtle Body:
An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy

U
nderstanding that thoughts and emotions affect how energy works in the female body can help us decipher our individual bodies’ unique language. The location of disease within the body—where it occurs— has psychological and emotional meaning and significance. Specific mental and emotional patterns are associated with specific body locations. Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are reflected or patterned simultaneously in the brain, the heart, the spinal cord, the organs, the blood, and the lymphoid (immune) tissue, and in the electromagnetic field that surrounds and penetrates all those areas. Understanding the different dynamic patterns of energy that our bodies give rise to and operate within can help you appreciate how positive or negative energies can manifest themselves in your individual body.

THE MATTER-ENERGY CONTINUUM

Our body’s vibrational system is always changing, and the
potential
for healing or disease is present at all times. Precancerous cells, for example, arise regularly in our bodies. They form invasive cancers only when our own internal controls break down.
¹
Mental and emotional energy goes in and out of physical form regularly, bouncing on the continuum between energy and matter, particle and wave. Vibrational healer Deena Spear says, “Cancer moves in and out of physical reality constantly. But once you get a diagnosis, it really takes root and becomes established.” Quite simply, emotional and mental energy can become physical in our bodies.

When we have unresolved chronic emotional stress in a particular area of our lives, this stress registers in our vibrations as a disturbance that can manifest in physical illness. Here is how it happens: When we obsess about someone or something, or keep participating in self-destructive thoughts or behaviors, our life energy leaks away from our body. When we obsess, we tie up energy—
chi, qi,
or
prana
—in a negative process that diverts it from our cells. Vital cellular processes thereby become depleted. We leak energy in any situation in which our anger, fear, depression, or sadness is controlling our ability to move forward in our lives. While most doctors do not view the onset of disease in terms of these energy leaks, I have come to the conclusion that appreciating how thoughts and emotions affect our energy is a critical part of flourishing. It is interesting to note that more and more medical research supports this observation. In one study, for instance, cancerous cells were shown to “steal” energy (in the form of the ATP-like molecule DPN) from adjacent normal tissue.
²

Appreciating our bodies in terms of energy fields and energy leaks can help us understand and begin the healing process. When we persist in being angry with someone who has hurt us, for example, a part of our spirit is occupied with that person and is not available to us for healing. When a person has been severely abused, shamans believe, that part of the person’s spirit may flee in order to escape the abuse. One of the healing traditions of shamanism is called “soul retrieval,” in which the missing spirit is called back. Many women who have been sexually abused as children relate that they “left” their bodies during the abuse. Some remember that a part of themselves actually left and went up to the ceiling and watched. This split-off part of their spirit may not be available to them in the present for healing.

Many times we are not conscious of these energy leaks. But if these leaks continue without being healed, bodily distress is often the result. Bodily symptoms can serve to bring our attention to that area so that healing can begin. One of my former menopausal patients who came to see me with insomnia and depression told me of her sexual abuse as a child—something she had not been consciously aware of until a week before her visit with me. She had gone through a painful divorce in her forties and had had a recent breakup with her lover of seven years. She said, “I realize now that I’ve spent my entire life trying
not
to remember that I was sexually abused. Now that I know it happened, I realize why I’ve never had a satisfactory relationship. I’ve always pushed people away. I didn’t know how to be fully present in a relationship. But I didn’t know any better. I’m grieving from my early life and the fact that it has taken me this long to remember and release the past. But finally the chronic knot in my stomach is gone. I feel free. I am so relieved.” Her sleep problem and depression cleared up sponta neously as her memories of abuse arose and were released from her energy field.

How to Heal Energy Leaks

To stay or become healthy, it is useful for each of us to notice where we are leaking our energy. A good time to do this is when you go to bed each night. To begin the process of healing your energy leaks, simply notice who or what you are thinking about, worrying about, or obsessing about. What thoughts, emotions, events, or people keep coming into your mind? Are there any emotions or thoughts over which you are obsessing? See whom you’re holding resentments against. When you find these areas, you must call your spirit back. One way to do this is by using your will and your power of intent to call back the parts of you that are caught in past or present situations that don’t serve your highest good. It is helpful to do this out loud. Simply state, “Spirit, come back here—I need you with me.” As you’re calling your spirit back, it also helps to affirm your spiritual connection verbally. Repeat the following affirmation (or something similar), really feeling the truth of it: “I am always being divinely guided toward my highest good on all levels. Divine love now dissolves everything that is not on my divinely designed path.” The split-off parts of yourself are not used to this calling, but eventually they will respond to your efforts and your energy will return.

Most of the blockages in our vibrational systems are emotional in nature. It’s helpful to think of your vibrational system as being like a stream of water flowing along. As long as this energy flow is healthy and you are feeling good about yourself, there’s much less risk of disease. Environmental toxins, dietary fat, and excess sugar or alcohol (to name a few) usually don’t manifest in disease unless other factors have already set up the pattern of blockage in the body’s energy system in the first place.
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Environmental or dietary risk factors can be likened to debris carried along in the body’s energy flow. This debris stays afloat unless there is a felled tree or other blockage to the water flowing in the stream. When there is, the debris collects in the branches of the felled tree and accumulates. Over time, similar accumulations in the body’s energy flow can result in physical illness. In fact, scientific research has associated a failure of the flow of information between cells with the induction of cancer in those cells. A physical barrier of any kind that blocks communication between cells is a carcinogenic influence.
⁴
The fat and connective tissue that form a fibroid, for example, do so only when the energy flow around and through the uterus is already blocked in some way.

Our emotions are often stuck at the childhood level, when we were not allowed to experience them fully. Clinical psychologist Doris E. Cohen explains that the child part of us actually takes over our adult nervous system, re-creating the same unhealed fears we were unable to fully work through as children. The purpose of this is to bring healing into the unhealed places. An example would be a woman who, at the age of three, was abandoned by her father. Whenever she begins a new relationship, she begins to feel a sense of impending doom—the work of her inner three-year-old. And then she ends up sabotaging the relationship and repeating her abandonment. Nothing changes until she catches herself engaging in this repetition and learns how to comfort the frightened child within her who has been unconsciously running the show. In this culture, which teaches us to split our adult intellectual knowledge from our emotional reality and needs, one can have a Ph.D. from Harvard but an emotional body that is only two years old. The emotions of a frightened or angry two-year-old, if unexpressed and unacknowledged, become energetically stuck in childish patterns. Emotions that are expressed, felt, and named, on the other hand, simply flow through our energy system, leaving no residual unfinished business. Once stuck emotions are expressed and released, we must also acknowledge that we are no longer children. It’s time to put our adult selves in the driver’s seat of our lives.

We do not have to wait to develop cancer or other diseases in order to get the message that we need to change our vibrational point of attraction and begin creating health. None of us is completely free from the fear, anger, and stress that come and go as part of normal life. When these emotions become intense enough to affect our psychological and emotional well-being on a regular basis, we are heading for physical illness unless we resolve them in a healthy way. When our daily unresolved pain, anger, and frustration rob our bodies of vital health-producing energy, it is essential to bring healing and understanding into our daily thoughts, emotions, and actions.