Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being Read Free Page A

If something has shown up in your body as a health concern, you most likely aren’t consciously aware of why it is there. If you had been conscious of the issue or emotion, it would not have had to show up physically because you would already have addressed it. Please try your best not to resist this truth. Have the courage to go deep within and ask yourself the following: “What is going on in my life, and my thoughts and beliefs, that I can learn from through this situation? What is the soul lesson for me here? How can I grow from this?”
    Ayurvedic and Eastern medicine practitioners are well aware of the energetic connections between various systems in the body, but Western medical practitioners tend to look at one system in isolation. In fact, this mind/body split is built right into the fabric of our society. No podiatrist is likely to look at how you bear weight on your feet and ask you about whether you have any unprocessed emotions or stressful situations causing you sadness, anger, or grief. If he or she did, you’d probably recoil and feel defensive and blamed, thus blocking off access to that line of inquiry. Yet even if you’re having hand problems that you can relate to not having an ergonomic workstation, or if you’ve injured your hand in an accident, getting in touch with unprocessed emotions that you may be holding in the tissues in your arm and hand might alleviate the pain and allow this part of your body torepair itself. And remember that you probably won’t know what the lesson really is until after it has been resolved.
    Over the years, my most profound soul lessons—the ones that really have brought in the light and, eventually, the joy—have come in several ways. I once had a huge breast abscess dissecting into my chest wall, which pretty much liquefied the lower half of my right breast, requiring emergency surgery. That taught me a lesson in self-care and self-nurture while trying to nurse a baby and work 80 hours a week. At one point, I developed a fibroid tumor in my uterus the size of a soccer ball, which had to be removed surgically. That woke me up to the fact that I had been shunting my creative energy into a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship. I also once had a rare infection in my left cornea that nearly blinded me. According to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the eye is in the liver meridian (a meridian is an energy channel through which the life force flows), and that’s the meridian associated with anger. The condition developed while I was processing childhood anger regarding my mother. These memories arose when I was starting the writing process for Mother-Daughter Wisdom (Bantam, 2005), and medical treatment at a major eye hospital was unsuccessful. The infection went away only after I began taking high doses of vitamin C, or as I like to say, vitamin See . I was so angry at my mother for childhood things I had deep-sixed that I literally “couldn’t see straight.”
    Because our bodies have interconnected systems that balance each other, it doesn’t make sense to focus on this problem or that problem as if it exists in a vacuum, outside of your emotions, or to look for a miracle cure or intervention. We’ve been taught to worry about this disease or that one according to our genetics, but that’s an outdated way of thinking about health that is based on outmoded science as well. It’s crucial to know that our immunity and resilience are boosted by the exalted emotions of compassion, love, and honor, all of which render us far more capable of fighting germs and viruses. But righteous anger and standing up for yourself are also associated with health! When you build your overall health and wellness through appreciatingyour power to feel your emotions and to change your thoughts, beliefs, and, finally, your actions, you’ll find you can enhance your health and immunity through experiencing emotions such as joy, elation, compassion, pleasure, and righteous anger.