Copyright 2006 Pauline Houle
It appears in many articles I have read and from many discussions I have had with different colleagues in the health and therapeutic fields, that women want a cure for their monthly curse. They do not care where it comes from or why they got it worse this past month! Nor do they care that it only started to show up in their life after their 5th wedding anniversary or why they’ve had PMS from the very first cycle of their menses…
So many women do not mind taking a pill to smooth their biochemical mechanism, which apparently leads their hormones to dance all night when all they want to do is sleep! Their choice of cures ranges from vitamins and alternative approaches to pharmaceutical anti-depressant pills when it is not a needle helping them suppress their menses for three months at a time. In a nutshell, they appear to think that a PMS cure happens from something outside themselves! Why is that so?
I have reflected on the myriad of influences, with which women of our era have been bombarded, and I have a possible conclusion: women have been told so often — and it goes back to our own mothers — that they have to keep it quiet or else get out of the kitchen! Well, many of us have left the kitchen but I am not sure it was in our best interest.
As a dear male friend of mine, himself in the medical field, relayed to me: “Women have been told to take their Motrin and shut up!” And apparently we have complied. It reminds me of the old saying that when a man is angry, he asserts himself; when a woman is angry, she is hysteric! By the way, the word “hysteric” is in direct connection with “hysterectomy” or the removal of the uterus! Hum… something to reflect upon. Another conclusion I came to, was that we have for so long relinquished our power to medical science (for they know so much we don’t), hardly anyone dares argue with them.
Two clans have developed since women entered the scientific world; one side embraces every thought the male world has and tries to become like men while the other side fights hard to bring an intuitive sense to it all, oftentimes fighting a losing battle.
I truly believe both genders have important qualities and are compatible; but this is where the recipe got lost. Men, coupled with the reality that we exist in a patriarchal society, have far too long led science by themselves. No matter what science dictates, more and more people have added alternative approaches to their lifestyle – and for the better, I feel. The medical field can perform tasks short of miracles, but so can alternative approaches when all else fails. But still for others, alternative approaches are still considered “old wives’ tales.” And oftentimes, proponents of scientific medicine refuse to see the proven results of alternative therapies, no matter how many times they see it.
If you will read Molecules of Emotion by Candace B. Pert, you will understand how her path to seek the truth was met with incomprehension and objections from the predominantly male/scientific world. It seems that even pure science has difficulty looking emotions straight in the eye. No matter how many proofs Pert could bring about, men just did not give credibility to her findings, possibly because they did not want to observe a certain reality themselves. Some fundamental neuro-cognitive research by Paul McLean reveals how our frontal lobe is of a more “feminine” nature as it serves us with vision, which cannot be seen under microscope from a scientific standpoint.
If you read a Woman’s Book of Life by Joan Borysenko, you will discover a physician who decided to activate her inner wisdom and approach illness from an “inner eye.” She will help you understand that human beings are much more than physical in nature.
The medical intuitive Caroline Myss is another example that is very provoking for the scientific world. Her adult years awoke in her the realization that she was able to detect illnesses in someone she had not met, even from a distance, and be proven accurate by medical science. We may choose to doubt but somewhere deep down within, we have no choice but to realize that such a reality, even if totally invisible to the majority of us, exists. Dr. Gladys McGarey, who is well in her seventies, has for so many decades brought her patients in touch with their emotions and feelings.
These women have all finally listened to, and understood, their inner voice and have gifted science with such an important component, that is: the mind-body connection. I feel akin to these researchers of truth for they all bring in such a vital and undeniable component. As Wayne Dyer often says: “We are spiritual beings going through a human experience.” How true!
I can only hope for the women who let me know in no uncertain terms that pharmaceuticals are their “soup du jour” to take care of their PMS, that they find moments in their days to reflect on their wholeness and the many realities of which they are composed, and at least orient their openness to look at what else within themselves can be done to heal.
Women have fought so hard to come out of the closet and be acknowledged as equals that maybe we have gone overboard. We have lost our true femininity, our intuitive gifts, our resonance with nature, and most of all our inner calling to listen to our healer within. But we still have the power to recover. I will grant that it might take a different frame of mind to undertake a path less traveled and strive to find out one’s truth. The reality is that each person is unique, which makes it very difficult, or virtually impossible, to invent a “one pill fits all.”
Every woman I have helped with her PMS has a very unique history, a very intimate relationship with her symptoms, and also a very limiting belief system. Many feared becoming different because change is scary. But guess what? If you do not change, you will remain the same. If you want to achieve a different result you cannot continue to repeat the same old losing behavior. If you remain the same, you become static and regress; that is a law of nature. Although truth does not have to be shocking, many times: Truth shall set you free but first it is going to piss you off!
Every action and every thought creates a reaction. We have been so brainwashed to become busy and unconscious about our daily routine, we do not know how to mind our inner medicine woman, this intimate healer within.
It has become so much easier to relinquish the decision to the “Big Medical Guru” that we really have lost how we can even think for ourselves. So many women have lost their true identity for the sake of a career, for the sake of being recognized as a worthy piece of society. We keep focusing outside ourselves, for this is what we have come to know best. Cancer is one of the leading causes in our list of severe illnesses and I find it so revealing that women’s breast cancer is on the rise. Doesn’t that ring a bell to many of you out there?
How many lives will we allow to be taken before we wake up and realize we are trying to do too much? Women have become workaholics for their job, at home, with the kids, and then top it off with volunteer work for their church or community. Maybe we should start labeling cancer as the “Saint’s disease!” Dr. Bernie Siegel routinely asks his patients what emotional trauma they went through before developing cancer, and Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer from Germany has shown that in many thousand cases every patient diagnosed with cancer experienced a traumatic moment in the months or years before the illness showed up. Herein follows Dr. Hamer’s quote: “Through the millennia, humanity has more or less consciously known that all diseases ultimately have a psychic origin and it became a “scientific” asset firmly anchored in the inheritance of universal knowledge; it is only modern medicine that has turned our animated beings into a bag full of chemical formulas.”
As I conclude this article, I really urge you all, dear women of this planet, to look deep and hard at the limiting beliefs you have had all along. Start imagining what life you should have that would be best for you. Every action has a cost!
I wish for you to find out how much it would be worth to experience a passing suffering that would ensure a long term pleasure – compared to a momentary painless cure that insidiously ensures long term suffering. Let me know how you are doing with your PMS. Blessings to you all!
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