I’ve often said that if you want to know where a woman’s true power lies, look to those primal experiences we’ve been taught to fear—not coincidentally the very same experiences the culture has taught us to distance ourselves from as much as possible, often by medicalizing them so that we are barely conscious of them anymore.
Having a baby is the true “change of life.” Women who go through labor and birth fully supported often emerge from the experience changed forever. One of my patients who had her two children at home told me: “My births were absolute peak experiences of ecstasy and spiritual fulfillment. Nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since has come anywhere close. As a result of my experiences, I now trust my body implicitly.”
Birthing a baby can be an empowering experience when the woman trusts her body, loves and wants her baby, and is comfortable with her sexuality. For many women, having a baby is their first experience of being connected to other women and with their own creativity. One patient said to me that she felt “one with every woman who had ever given birth.” This is the power of birth, even though women have learned collectively—though not necessarily consciously—to fear the birth experience.
Your body forms the very soil in which your child takes form. As any farmer will tell you, the quality of one’s crops is directly related to the quality of the soil. Pregnancy, labor, birth, and the postpartum period are beautiful illustrations of two self-care principles: you reap what you sow, and you can’t give to another what you don’t have yourself, on either the body or the soul level.
The body is doing a lot of inner work to grow a baby. One of the healthiest things to see is a woman pregnant with her first child who takes the time to enjoy the process.
Regardless of what you’ve been told about your fertility, you need to know that your ability to conceive is profoundly influenced by the complex interaction among psychosocial, psychological, and emotional factors, and that you can consciously work with this to enhance your ability to have a baby.
Much of my work is about helping women get in touch with the natural rhythms of their bodies that connect us not only to our deepest selves, but also to the rhythms of the Earth herself.
Almost all women assume that they will be able to have children someday, even if they’re not sure they want to; the potential to have them is important even to women who never intend to use that potential. The ability to conceive and bear children can profoundly affect the way a woman feels about herself on a very deep level. So when a woman finds that she is unable to have a child, she’s often thrown into great despair and feels a sense of injustice: “Why me?” Seeing teenage mothers having no problems getting pregnant becomes almost impossible to bear, unless the woman can find some meaning in the experience and come to terms with it.
The conventional medical mindset is that menopause is an estrogen deficiency disease resulting from ovarian failure. Women have been led to believe that at the slightest symptoms, they should run out and get estrogen replacement. While estrogen levels will decrease during menopause, the truth is, estrogen levels do not fall appreciably until after a woman’s last period.
Our task as women is to learn, minute by minute, to respect ourselves and our bodies—whether we have small breasts or large breasts, implants or mastectomies. When we can appreciate our breasts as potential or actual sources of nourishment and pleasure for both ourselves and others, our breast health begins to improve immediately.
