Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom Read Online Free PDF

beyond time and space. The word sanity means the samething as inner peace or serenity. Acknowledging that we have access to guidance from a power greater than our own intellect is a very positive step toward actually accessing that guidance.
    The third step is: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him .” (You can change the word Him to inner guidance or divine wisdom, higher self, or Divine Mother. ) This step bypasses the intellect entirely. It is a leap of faith that acknowledges the fact that all of us have inner guidance available within us and that that guidance has the power to remove our harmful beliefs. The words made a decision are very important. To create health, a woman needs to make a decision to do it. Then she must be willing to stay with the process. Participating in twelve-step meetings and working the steps around a fear, a belief, or even an illness that you’ve found your intellect to be powerless over can be very helpful and practical. I also love the affirming work of Louise Hay, who wrote the classic You Can Heal Your Life (Hay House, 1987).
    For Jean and thousands of women like her, the knowledge that she is not alone in her fears and obsessions is itself very helpful. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t inherit at least some health-destroying beliefs either from her family or from the culture in general. By choosing to move forward into health and joy, we can uncover the deep programming of our bodies and change it to support health. The reason this works is that the very process of deciding to be happier or healthier will automatically bring up the thought patterns that have prevented greater happiness and health in the first place. Many women have been able to change their states of health and their lives once they understand that although their diseases are very real and physical, these diseases are often accompanied and reinforced by unconscious beliefs. Uncovering these and healing from them is a continuous, exciting, and empowering process. It is part of the process of creating health. It requires patience and compassion. And it works.
    Beliefs and memories are actually biological constructs in the body. Think of your mind as an iceberg. The conscious part—the part that thinks it’s in control—is what peaks above the surface. But it amounts to only about 25 percent of the total iceberg. The so-called subcon scious part of your mind is the much larger part—75 percent of it lies below the surface. Our personal histories are stored throughout our bodies, in muscles, organs, and other tissues. This information, like the submerged portion of the iceberg, is not generally recognized by the part of the iceberg on the surface, our conscious intellect. Our cells contain our memory banks—even when the conscious mind is not aware of them and actually battles to deny them.
    Once when I called a bellman to my hotel room to help me with my bags, he noticed a bottle of Chinese cough syrup near the sink. He made a face, held his stomach, and said, “I thought that was castor oil, and I remember that my mother gave it to me often as a child. I used to have stomach pains after taking it. Just looking at the bottle now gives me a stomachache!” This man had no conscious control over his body’s memory of his childhood pain. His body automatically reacted to the sight of a familiar-looking bottle even though the contents were entirely different.
    Once I was hiking with a woman who told me that two weeks before, she had gotten some sunscreen in her eye and her eye had watered all day from the irritation. Several days later, she merely smelled the same sunscreen when someone else was using it, and her eye started to water again. Her biological memory was already encoded in her eye. Her intellect had been bypassed entirely!
    How Beliefs Become Physical
    At any given time, our state of health reflects the sum total of our beliefs since birth. Our