Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (26 page)

The other reason TCM teaches that women are more susceptible to cold invasion during their periods is that a woman’s blood and heat levels are relatively drained away from the body at this time. As Dr. Maciocia describes, “During the period, the uterus is in a vulnerable state because it is more open; moreover the loss of blood induces a state of relative blood deficiency and therefore any aetiological factor at this time easily influences blood, causing a deficiency or stagnation.”
²⁵
This in turn causes a tendency to be fatigued and is the reason many Chinese women take extra care of themselves at the onset of their menses by resting more, avoiding cold food and drinks, and eating nourishing meat broths and stews and special rice porridges supplemented with foods that warm and benefit the blood and
qi
(such as
gou qi
berries, cinnamon, and Chinese red dates).

The basis for the Victorian theory that bathing, shampooing, and swimming can “back up” or obstruct proper menstrual flow can also be found in Chinese medical theory. During the Victorian age, before the invention of modern heating systems and hair dryers, taking a bath or washing the hair was likely to leave the body susceptible to cold, and it most likely took menstruating women’s bodies longer to recover the lost heat. In fact, wet hair in cold environments is considered almost dangerous in Chinese medicine, because it’s thought to cause not only colds and flu but even disorders such as Bell’s palsy, where excess cold enters the head and neck and obstructs circulation around the nerves of the head and face. (A Chinese woman in those days would wait a month before bathing or washing her hair after childbirth.)

Even so, unlike Western women, Chinese women are generally not afraid of their physical body and its processes, including menstruation. Rather, they have a naturalistic understanding of their bodies during this time and use this information to take better care of themselves. In this way, TCM’s knowledge can help empower women to be kinder, gentler, and more nurturing to themselves during this most yin—most feminine—time of their cycles.

—Sandra Chiu, L.Ac.

(250 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10001;

212-365-4628; [email protected])

If we are to reclaim and embrace our menstrual wisdom and honor our cyclic natures, we must at the same time acknowledge the negative attitudes that most of us have internalized concerning our menstrual cycles. We must acknowledge the pain and discomfort that many women experience monthly. Our cyclic nature has borne the brunt of all kinds of jokes about being “on the rag” or having “the curse.” Puberty and the first menstruation for many women have been saturated with shame and humiliation. Nothing in our society—with the exception of violence and fear—has been more effective in keeping women “in their place” than the degradation of the menstrual cycle. It’s gratifying to see that this attitude is now changing as our culture realizes that the first menses is an important rite of passage.

Replacing the harmful inherited myths about our menstrual cycles with accurate information is part of women’s healing. After menarche (the first menstruation), which in this society generally occurs around the age of twelve, give or take a couple of years, a young woman reaches sexual maturity— though it’s likely to be many years before she attains the emotional and psychological maturity necessary to truly embrace her sexuality as a source of power, joy, and renewal. A certain body composition is required for the onset of menarche. Usually the body mass must be about 17 percent fat for a young woman to start having periods. Studies have indicated that a body fat level averaging about 22 percent is necessary for sustained ovulatory cycles in most females.
²⁶
The obesity rate in children is one of the factors that has caused earlier puberty—with first signs of puberty beginning as early as age eight or even younger—in so many young girls. On the other side of the coin, anorexic young women and female dancers and athletes who have very little body fat don’t have regular periods, though emotional factors that affect the hypothalamus of the brain also play a key role in these situations. Though a young woman’s first cycles are usually not ovulatory, she gradually becomes fertile over the next several years, producing an egg each month from her ovaries. If the monthly egg is not fertilized at midcycle, this results in a menstrual period about fourteen days after ovulation. In the flow, the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) is shed. Each month, the lining, or endometrium, builds up and is shed cyclically, stimulated by a complex and amazing interaction between hormones produced by the ovaries, the pituitary gland, and the hypothalamus. (see
figure 5
, page 119.) Because of the complexity of this hormonal interaction, many areas of a woman’s life affect the menstrual cycle. The cycle in turn affects many areas of a woman’s life.

Most girls learn about the menstrual cycle in a sterile, clinical way, without respect for their female bodies and their own sexuality. How their bodies and sexuality are linked to the menstrual cycle is rarely dis cussed. In the past, very few girls were introduced to menstruation as a positive rite of passage. My mother told me the “facts of life” and explained eggs and sperm. I recall being very upset by this information. I was in the fourth grade. My sister, eleven months younger than I, had said earlier that day, “Mom, I know where babies come from, but how do they get there?” My mother took us into her bedroom and read us a book that said that girls get a menstrual period around the age of twelve, and that after they get their period they could have a baby if they had sex.

I was not happy with this information. I continued to hope that women could get pregnant by kissing rather than by the disgusting act my mother described. Why I found the whole thing so disgusting might have had something to do with my own mother’s initiation into puberty. She was not concerned with the meaning of the menstrual cycle and the sacredness of the female body, though she was and is a woman who is truly wise and ahead of her time. My mother had learned that once she got her period, somehow she could no longer en joy herself in the same way. Her favorite girlhood activities had been playing baseball and climbing trees with the boys. But once she “became a woman,” she was no longer allowed to play with the boys. Years later, she told me that she begged her mother to take her to the hospital to “get her fixed” so that she wouldn’t have periods anymore and could go back to baseball. Because my mother didn’t completely resolve her adolescent feelings about her menstrual cycle until she was in her sixties, I absorbed many of her unconscious feelings around menstruation, even though she presented it to me as a normal part of life. Like thousands of baby boomer mothers, I attempted to pass a more positive message on to my daughters. But to do that effectively, I first had to acknowledge the depth of my own pain around the menstrual cycle.

Instead of celebrating our cyclic nature as a positive aspect of our female being, up until very recently we’ve been taught that we shouldn’t acknowledge our periods at all, lest we neglect the needs of our spouses and children. Consider this excerpt from a 1963 insert inside a tampon box:

WHEN YOU’RE A WIFE

Don’t take advantage of your husband. That’s an old rule of good marriage behavior that’s just as sensible now as it ever was. Of course, you’ll not try to take advantage, but sometimes ways of taking advantage aren’t obvious.

You wouldn’t connect it with menstruation, for instance. Yet, if you neglect the simple rules that make menstruation a normal time of month, and retire for a few days each month, as though you were ill, you’re taking advantage of your husband’s good nature. He married a full-time wife, not a part-time one. So you should be active, peppy, and cheerful every day.
²⁷

Always cheery—just like June Cleaver in those old
Leave It to Beaver
reruns. No wonder so many women have PMS! When I think of the indoctrination represented by that 1963 insert, from the year I got my first period, I marvel at how far we’ve come in such a short time. But I’m constantly amused at how market forces continue to shape our experience of our cycles, for better or for worse. At a 2009 conference of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research in Spokane, Washington, David Linton, Ph.D., gave a keynote address entitled “The Rise of the Happy Period: From Shame to Humor in Mediated Menses.” He pointed out that advertising has led to decreasing shame around monthly bleeding. This more upbeat approach to a woman’s period has been driven, in part, by the pad and tampon industry, which, in the face of so many women taking menstrual suppression birth control pills (such as Seasonale; see below), wants to keep women bleeding!
²⁸

The Menstrual Cycle, Birth Control Pills,
and Women’s Intuition

Our intuition works differently during the various phases of our menstrual cycle. It changes again after menopause. One of my col leagues, an osteopathic physician, noticed this connection between in tuition and the menstrual cycle when he referred a patient to me for a change in birth control method. She had been on the pill for a number of years, but he felt that continued use of the pill was interfering with her ability to know what her next steps in life should be. The referral note to me read: “Birth control pills are interfering with intuitive function. Suggest alternatives.” This was one of my all-time favorite referrals from a very insightful man.

In an age in which millions of women’s bodies, due to the use of birth control pills, are more in tune with pharmaceutical companies than with the moon, it is no small task to rethink a medication that has offered so many women such highly touted advantages. After all, the pill provides women with periods that need never ruin their weekends, it often decreases menstrual cramps, and it is associated with a decreased risk of ovarian and endometrial cancer. Women are now being sold on the benefits of Seasonale, a birth control pill that results in only four periods per year. One for each season! But no one is sure whether the pill increases the risk of breast cancer, although studies have shown that it can increase the risk of cervical cancer. (It’s also possible to suppress menses entirely using many other brands of birth control pills. Doctors have been prescribing them in this way for years. For more information on this approach, visit
www.noperiod.com
.)

Laurie, one of my colleagues in ob-gyn, was on the pill for over nine years before she changed her mind about its advantages. She had routinely pushed the pill as a panacea for all her patients, using her own experience as coercion. When she lectured them on why they should all be on the pill, she always ended her talk with the statement “They’ll never get my pills away from me.” Only after Laurie began to see her own illnesses as physical manifestations of the diseases in her spirit was she able to reevaluate her position on the pill. The breakthrough for her happened in part because her relationship with her hus band had begun to deteriorate. They were having frequent arguments around the subject of sex. “It drove me crazy,” she said, “that he seemed to separate it completely from everything else that was going on in our relationship. At the same time, my own confusion about my body, my feelings of discomfort with its size and shape, my inhibitions about noise and awkwardness during sex, and mixed messages from my childhood about sex and seduction made sex something fraught with negative connotation and sometimes insurmountable obstacles.”

Laurie was learning about how different parts of our bodies talk to us through symptoms as part of our inner guidance system. As she did, she realized that remaining on birth control pills might prevent her female organs from optimally communicating with her, especially in a personal crisis around her own sexuality. She began to awaken to how she had inadvertently become separated from her body by following the dictates of the culture instead of her inner guidance. This awakening was accompanied by an interest in feminism for the first time in her life. Up until then, she had considered herself highly successful and functional, which is how she seems on the surface. Yet she had had a benign ovarian cyst, operated on several years before, and during her ob-gyn residency she had been operated on for thyroid cancer. Her emerging inner wisdom showed her that these conditions had been her body’s way of trying to get her attention and let her know that something was out of balance in her life. Now she was willing and eager to pay attention to what her body was saying.

“I felt sadness,” Laurie says, “that I had taken for granted, drugged away, or labeled a ‘curse’ all the wondrous workings of my brain, my hormones, my uterus, and my ovaries. No one ever celebrated my first period. No one had helped me connect the power of giving birth to my sexuality. I longed to recapture some of that lost magic and mystery. But it took me almost two years of pulling down the curtains of my life and dusting away the cobwebs before I felt that I could tentatively trust my body.”

After these two years of personal struggle, Laurie decided to take a year off from her busy obstetrical practice in a large city. She was exhausted from the demands of three children, her practice, and a marriage that was now ending. She knew that she needed to reflect on her life and explore some new directions. She said that when she finally got around to doing it, going off the pill was “something of an act of celebration and rebellion.” It was clear to her that a divorce was imminent. “Since I did not need contraception anymore,” she observed, “it occurred to me that now might be the time to allow myself the luxury of my hormones. So I threw away the last dial-pack and waited. I was pretty sure that after nine years of instruction from Ortho Pharmaceutical, my ovaries would be totally confused, so I was willing to be patient. I was prepared for swelling, irritability, wild emotions, and confusion. I was not prepared for what happened.”