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

entire society functions under many shared and sometimes harmful beliefs. (One that I hear regularly is, “Well, now that I’m thirty [or forty, or fifty], I suppose it’s normal to have aches and pains.”) All living things respond physically to the way they think reality is. Deepak Chopra, M.D., an authority on consciousness and medicine, uses the example of flies placed in a jar with a lid on top. Once the lid is removed, they will not leave the jar, except for a few brave pi oneers. The rest of the flies have made a “commitment in their body-minds” that they are trapped. It has been shown that in aquariums if two schools of fish are separated with a glass partition for a certain amount of time, the fish will not swim into each other’s space even after the partition is removed.
    So it is that we can be sure the events of our childhood set the stage for our beliefs about ourselves and therefore our experience, including our health. For a woman to change or improve her reality and her state of health, she first has to change her beliefs about what is possible. This is a simple enough process. But it requires discipline and persistence.
    That we have the wherewithal to overcome our destructive and unconscious patterns is a truth that I see proved daily. This power has also been documented experimentally in a study of the effects of beliefs on the aging process. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., studied a group of male volunteers over the age of seventy at a retreat center for five days. They all had to agree that they would live in the present as though it were 1959. Dr. Langer told them, “We are not asking you to ‘act as if it were 1959’ but to let yourself be just who you were in 1959.” They had to dress as they had then, watch TV shows from 1959, read newspapers and magazines from that time, and talk as if 1959 were right now. They also brought pictures of themselves from that year and put them around the center. Dr. Langer then measured many of the parameters that often deteriorate with aging (but don’t need to), such as physical strength, perception, cognition, taste, and hearing. The pa rameters reflected biological markers that experts in geriatric medicine often cite. Over the course of the five days, many of the chosen parameters actually improved. Serial photographs showed that the men looked about five years younger as well. Their hearing and memory improved. As they changed their mind-sets about aging, their physical bodies changed as well.
    In another of Dr. Langer’s studies, hotel room attendants in seven different hotels were divided into two groups. In the informed group, room attendants were made aware that their housekeeping duties satisfied the CDC’s recommendation for optimal exercise. The control group did not receive any information about their work constituting healthy exercise. All participants were told that the experimenters were studying ways to improve the health and happiness of women in the hotel workplace. So everyone was weighed and had their percentage of body fat calculated and their blood pressure taken. Four weeks later, in a follow-up questionnaire, the perception of the amount of exercise they were doing had increased among the informed group while remaining the same among the control group, even though the level of exercise had not changed for either group. But the informed group’s perception had changed, and that shift in perception showed remarkable improvements in health. After only one month, the group that was told that their job was good exercise had lost an average of two pounds each and had significantly reduced their percentage of body fat. The control group actually gained weight and fat over the same month. The informed group also showed significant drops in their blood pressure. 19 This is powerful evidence about how changing our minds changes our bodies.
    Yale researcher Becca Levy, Ph.D., a former student of Langer’s, has also documented the profound effect