A loving, nurturing mother tends to become the very center of her family’s health and happiness. She is like the family umbilical cord that everyone taps into for sustenance at all levels: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. This nurturing role can be enormously fulfilling. It can also deteriorate into martyrdom if a mother gives her children and spouse the love and care she doesn’t feel that she herself is worthy of receiving.

The energy of giving and nurturing others unconditionally draws on all the organs of the fourth chakra, or energy center: the breasts, heart, lungs, upper spine, and shoulders. But the love that makes maternal nurturance so life-affirming must be replenished regularly—otherwise it leads to health problems in those same organs. When a woman puts her own personal and emotional needs on the back burner—or forgets entirely that she has them—the energy of her fourth chakra inevitably becomes diminished by resentment, anger, grief, longing, pining for contact, and pure fatigue. This is the energy pattern that invites breast, shoulder, heart, and lung problems. And diseases in those areas cause the majority of deaths and disabilities in women.

You can’t legislate caring and compassion. But the minute a woman decides that she is worthy of love and care, things begin to change. A woman who has the courage to break the martyrdom cycle will be ensuring her own health and helping her daughter or other loved ones do the same. The only way to teach your daughter how to recognize and state her emotional needs is to do so yourself. And when your daughter witnesses this, she will be less likely to carry the mother burden on into her own life.

My wish for every woman (and man) is that she (or he) live a heart-felt and balanced, healthy life.