Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (22 page)

A woman’s second-chakra organs are also put at risk when she herself becomes an aggressor or victimizer. Women participate in the rape archetype, for example, when they violate their children’s physical and psychological boundaries. Giving daily enemas and rough washing of the genitalia are other common examples of the ways women may act as violators. Women use emotional weaponry, while men add to that their fists. Women who victimize pay for it not only through disruption in the energy of their female organs in the second chakra but through problems with organs in the first and third chakras as well. According to Caroline Myss, aggressive behavior can be associated with cancer in the organs of the first three chakras.

It is important for us to understand and accept that women do have the potential for aggression. When we refuse to acknowledge a problem, we simply perpetuate it. Recovering from patriarchal influences isn’t about blaming men, because in our culture we’re all potential vic tims and potential perpetrators. When I first had a reading with Caroline Myss, for example, she told me that my body registered a rape between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-nine—the years that I was in medical school and doing my residency. Though I had not been physically raped, my body’s energy system had been emotionally and psy chologically “raped” by my medical training— something I had not been consciously aware of at the time. Myss states that almost everyone in this culture has suffered from a psychological or emotional rape of their innermost self at least once. That is one reason why so many women who have not suffered from overt sexual abuse nonetheless have chronic pelvic pain and other second-chakra problems. Many women feel stuck in jobs in which the rape or prostitute archetype is a daily reality.

When we continually see women only as victims, we do not acknowledge the damage women do to themselves and to others. If you’ve ever borne the brunt of female abuse or been an abuser yourself, you’ll understand the significance of this point of view.

Shame and the First Three Chakras

Another issue for many women is shame. Shame hits the first three female centers and the associated interior organs, including the uterus and ovaries. Shame can be a result of social programming that tells a woman she’s inferior or that her genitalia themselves are shameful. This point of view is embedded deeply in our culture. The major nerve to the vulva is called the pudendal nerve. The root word from which
pudendal
is taken means “shame.” Shame over a rape, whether it was physical, emotional, or psychological rape, affects the vaginal area. Shame about one’s sexuality can be a setup for vaginitis, pelvic pain, and so on. Shame can also come from family relationships, such as shame about a father’s alcoholism or a mate’s social status.

Research supports these energy dysfunctions. Henry Dreher, author of
Mind-Body Unity: A New Vision for Mind-Body Science and Medicine
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), points to a very large body of research showing that women who have experienced sexual abuse are significantly more likely to develop gastrointestinal disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome.
¹²

Other research points to differences in personality between women who develop interior cancers and those who develop exterior cancers.
¹³
An individual’s perception of whether her body is permeable and easily penetrated by external influences, either physical or emotional, is related to whether she is susceptible to cancer. Those women who perceive their bodies as permeable are subject to cancers that are located more deeply in their bodies—for example, in the ovaries or uterus. Those women who believe that their bodies are strong and protected against external influences are more prone to cancers in the external genital areas.

Research by Lydia Temoshok, Ph.D., author with Dreher of
The Type C
Connection: The Mind-Body Link to Cancer and Your Health
(Plume, 1992), found that women with more aggressive and life-threatening cancers (including both breast and cervical cancer) tend to be more self-sacrificing and less aware of their needs and feelings, in cluding physical sensations, than other women.

The Fourth Chakra

The bodily areas associated with the
fourth chakra
are the heart, breast, lungs, ribs, upper back, and shoulders. The fourth chakra is related to our capacity to feel, to express ourselves emotionally, and to participate in true partnerships in which both members are equally powerful and equally vulnerable. Giving and receiving equally from an open heart with no agenda other than appreciation strengthens all the organs of the fourth chakra. Our culture is loaded with references to the function of the fourth chakra: “When I heard that symphony, my heart soared”; “I wept for joy”; “I thought my heart would burst with joy”; “Watching that little girl cry broke my heart.”

Our fourth-chakra health requires a balance between anger and love, joy and serenity, sadness and happiness. Can we be stoic at times and at other times lose it emotionally? Can we allow ourselves to feel grief and loss fully? In partnership, can we allow ourselves times of intimacy balanced with time alone? Can we both nurture others and allow others to nurture us? The unmet emotional and psychological needs associated with ill health in the fourth-chakra area are an inability to give or receive love from self or others (nurturance), lack of forgiveness, unresolved grief, and/or hostility stemming from the inability to express and release anger or resentment. (It’s not surprising that right after the events of 9/11, the heart attack rate in our local hospital doubled.)

The second and fourth chakras have a unique interrelationship. The uterus is sometimes called the “low heart,” while the heart in the chest is the “high heart.” It’s been said that if the low heart has been closed, through rape, incest, abuse, or shame, a woman cannot truly open her high heart. In this culture, women also tend to shut down their low hearts, or their sexuality and erotic needs, because we’re taught that “nice” girls aren’t sexual. We’re also taught, however, that it’s fine for us to be in touch with our emotions and feelings, and so we’re set up for second-and fourth-chakra conflicts. In addition, women are taught that if we are powerful and successful financially, we’ll be isolated from others and won’t be able to experience intimacy fully. In addition, women are often socialized to believe that if we become powerful and successful with money and career (second chakra), no one will love us and we will lose out on intimacy (fourth chakra). Men, on the other hand, have been socialized to believe that their masculinity depends upon being able to bring home the bacon and make the major financial decisions in a relationship. We’re now at a historic crossroads as men and women learn how to renegotiate these inherited (and often obsolete) partnership and intimacy beliefs and behaviors.

High Heart and Low Heart Yin/Yang Balance

My colleague Saida Désilets, Ph.D., founder of the Désilets Method (a form of
chi kung
or
qi gong;
for more information, visit
www.thedesilets method.com
) and author of
Emergence of the Sensual Woman: Awakening
Our Erotic Innocence
(Jade Goddess, 2006), has articulated a very useful way to think about the energy difference between men and women. Men have genitalia on the outside and visible erections when aroused. Their genitalia are dominant, yang, and active. Hence, they are comfortable going out in the world of money, sex, and power to pursue what they want. Men’s hearts, on the other hand, are yin, hidden, and difficult to access directly. In women, it’s the other way around. A woman tends to lead with her heart— which is very yang. It’s far easier for most women to express their feelings openly than it is for most men. Women freely cry, hug, and emote in public. Evidence of a yang fourth chakra is the fact that a woman’s breasts protrude from her chest. Her genitalia, on the other hand, are inside and hidden. They are yin. To get a woman to open to a man sexually, he must use a slow yin approach that involves tenderness, earning trust, and praise. A woman gets into a man’s heart in the same way.

Though it’s clear that men rape women with their genitals, it’s equally true that women abuse men (or boys) with their yang hearts—by being cold, withholding, critical, or impossible to please. Boys and men feel very, very deeply, though they often won’t talk about it. And the wounds they suffer at the hands of women can last a lifetime. When a woman becomes conscious of her power within a relationship and takes steps to heal herself, the men in her life do much better as a result.

Energy dysfunctions often arise when a woman is confused about how to use both her loving (fourth chakra) and her creative power drive (second chakra) energies optimally. The major conflict within women is that most of us have been taught that in order to be loved, to receive love, and to guarantee that someone will be there for us, we must care for our loved ones’ external physical needs—usually at the expense of our own, which we deny. But such love relationships, dependent upon ties of family obligations and tribal tradition, are recognized as relationship addictions once a woman begins to individuate and become con scious of her patterns. Energy dysfunctions that arise in the second-and fourth-chakra areas at the same time are very common in our culture. They often result when women unconsciously participate simultane ously in both the rape archetype and the mother archetype.

Sally, a twenty-six-year-old waitress, had very-early-stage cervical cancer (second chakra) and multiple breast cysts (fourth chakra). When she was a girl, her father had been both emotionally and physically distant. In her early teenage years, to fill up this emptiness, she had multiple sexual partners, boys whom she neither loved nor respected. This addictive pattern of behavior (the rape and prostitute archetypes) dis rupted the energetic patterns of her second-chakra area, depressing her immunity. She suffered from very painful and frequent herpes outbreaks in her vagina. She also had recurrent genital warts.

Like Sally’s distant father, Sally’s mother took care of neither her own nor her daughter’s physical or emotional needs. Sally never learned how to care for her own emotional needs, in that no one ever demonstrated this behavior to her. Both Sally and her mother had energy disruptions in their fourth-chakra areas related to lack of self-respect and self-nurturance. Both mother and daughter had breast problems. Sally’s mother had already had breast cancer, and Sally had had two breast biopsies for benign lumps.

Neither Sally nor her mother is unique in our culture. I’ve seen many women like them. When a woman neglects her own inner needs, when she addictively cooks, cleans, and cares for the physical needs of her family to earn love, when she works obsessively at her job to prove her self-worth, and when she provides sex on demand because of feelings of obligation or guilt, she becomes susceptible to disease in both her second and fourth chakras. Quelling her insecurities about abandonment or about being good enough, about self-esteem, uses up her emotional energy. Her life force gets drained by her fear of abandonment and her belief that she’s not good enough.

Supporting these theories of energy system dysfunctions, research has shown that the personality patterns of women who have disease only in the second chakra differ from those of women with disease only in the fourth chakra. (An extensive literature search reveals no studies on the personality patterns of women who have malignancy in
both
the second-and fourth-chakra areas.)

Patients with malignant tumors in the breast (the high heart) have different personality patterns from those with cancer of the cervix (the lower heart). In one study, 50 percent of patients with cervical cancer (a second-chakra disease) had physically lost their fathers due to death or desertion during their early years (a second-chakra-related emotion). In contrast, in the homes of those with breast cancer (a fourth-chakra disease), the father was emotionally distant (a fourth-chakra-related pattern).
¹⁴
Other studies have shown that significantly more cervical cancer patients have behaviors that suggest a second-chakra energy imbalance: They had married multiple times, had a high incidence of sexual activity with partners whom they neither loved nor respected, and were very concerned with body shape and size. They also had a feeling that they had been neglected as children. In contrast, studies of breast cancer patients suggest behavior patterns associated with fourth-chakra dysfunction: They had a greater tendency to stay in a loveless marriage, had a relatively high likelihood of carrying a heavy load of responsibility for younger siblings during childhood, and had a greater chance of denying themselves medical care and physical nurturance.
¹⁵

My observations further substantiate the research above. In general, medical intuitives such as Caroline Myss and Mona Lisa Schulz find that emotions that are of the raging variety hit below the belt. Sadness that cannot be expressed, on the other hand, is associated with disease above the belt. I will be covering this in more detail in chapters 5 through 10.

How to Heal Lower-Chakra Wounding

Lower-chakra wounds
don’t heal until they’re witnessed
. Someone has to say, “Yes, this happened to you.” One of the functions of this book is this witnessing process. As a physician, I represent an authority figure. When I or another person validates a woman’s woundings, she can use that as a very powerful catalyst for healing. But it is even more important that the
woman
herself
acknowledge her wounding and need for healing. As long as a woman is stuck in denial (“It wasn’t really all that bad, he never hit me” or “My family loved me very much—my father would never have done that”), she won’t be able to tell the truth to herself. Her secrets will remain locked in her cells, unavailable for witnessing and healing.