Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (4 page)

Here’s another example of research that supports an ageless mind-set. The famous University of Minnesota longitudinal study of nuns, which began in 1986 and continues today, looked at women who entered the cloistered life in their early 20s to determine what distinguished the women who developed Alzheimer’s in their 80s from those who maintained healthy brain function. Each nun had written an autobiographical essay upon entering the monastic life in her early 20s. Only 10 percent of those whose essays were rich with linguistic flourishes, energetic descriptions, and complex language structures went on to develop Alzheimer’s disease, whereas 80 percent of those who wrote plain essays did develop it. This study suggests that being vivacious and fully engaged by our experiences and enjoying our creativity protects our brain health.
¹⁰
It’s marvelous that we have so much control over our health and well-being! And now for some really unexpected news out of that study: autopsies showed that the nuns who relished life and showed no signs of dementia had just as many plaques in their brains as the less vivacious nuns whose dementia was apparent before they died. Please reread that last sentence. It is proof that a healthy mind and spirit can exist in a body that is less than perfect.
That
is the power of an ageless attitude.

BELIEFS AND BIOLOGY

The most important thing you need to know about your health is that the health of your body and its organs does not
exist separate from your emotional well-being, your thoughts, your cultural programming, and your spiritual outlook.
Your thoughts and beliefs are the single most important indicator of your state of health.
That is amazingly good news because your thoughts and beliefs can be brought under your conscious control and, when necessary, surrendered to the healing power of Spirit (much more on that later). This is the part of health that Western medicine always leaves out, but trust me, it’s where your real power resides, with no exceptions. Your beliefs and thoughts are wired into your biology. They become your cells, tissues, and organs. There’s no supplement, no diet, no medicine, and no exercise regimen that can compare with the power of your thoughts and beliefs. That’s the very first place you need to look when anything goes wrong with your body.

Let me be clear here. 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 to
repair 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 appreciating
your 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. At the same time, you can decrease cellular inflammation, which, as I’ve said, is the root cause of all chronic degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes. All wellness and vitality come first via your connection with your spirit. Let the program in this book serve as your template for vitality.

In the Introduction, I explained Dr. Mario Martinez’s model of cultural portals, or expectations that we internalize about what different stages of life mean. Cultural portals can also work in positive ways. A patient of mine went to China and said her hip pain, which she associated with growing older, vanished while she was there. She believes that’s because elders are so respected in China that while she was there, her perspective on herself changed and so did her biochemistry. And Dr. Martinez gives the example of menopausal hot flashes in Peru versus in Japan. In Peru, the term for hot flashes means “shame,” whereas in Japan, hot flashes and menopause are considered signs of a second spring when a woman goes deeper into wisdom. The inflammation Peruvian women experience with hot flashes is higher than it is for Japanese women because of the negative association. Similarly, in the !Kung tribe in Africa, there’s no word for hot flash. A woman’s status in the tribe increases as she enters menopause. In the West, we need to recontextualize the experience of menopause so that we see it as positive instead of a portal into decline.
¹¹

ALPHA GODDESSES

We are in the era of the Alpha Goddess, the perimenopausal or postmenopausal woman who has come into her own. Advertisers are beginning to realize that women in their 50s and 60s are spending their money on themselves and the people they love, without apologies, embarrassment, or hesitation. Women over 50 were the first adopters of e-readers, changing the face of book publishing, and they continue to be the number-one group of
book buyers. They know what they want, they’re open to trying something new, and their buying power has a major effect on the economy.
¹²
In a recent editorial entitled “The Smart Money Is on the 50+ Crowd,” Robert Love, editor-in-chief of
AARP: The Magazine,
wrote, “We the people over the age of 50 are 100 million strong. We will soon control more than 70 percent of the disposable income in this country. We buy two-thirds of all the new cars, half of all the computers and a third of all movie tickets. We spend $7 billion a year shopping online. Travel? More than 80 percent of all the premium-travel dollars flow from our credit cards. Add it all up … and U.S. adults who are over 50 ka-ching as the third largest economy in the world, trailing only the gross national product of the United States and China.”
¹³

Women who aren’t as well off financially are not necessarily plunking down money for a tablet or a designer perfume, but they don’t hesitate to nurture themselves, either. Self-care and self-development become priorities when a woman has entered her second spring. At wellness expos, crowds of women are exploring all the many ways they can increase their well-being. They are getting massages and acupuncture and becoming massage therapists and acupuncturists. They and their girlfriends are off to the meditation center on Sunday mornings or to a condominium in a resort area for a weekend of talking, hiking, and wine tasting. Alpha Goddesses are finding their tribes. They know that if they don’t have anything in common with the other women they see each day at the local pool, they can simply enjoy having someone to chat with in the locker room, and they can expand their tribe of friends outward by meeting up with people in any number of ways. As the old summer camp song goes, Alpha Goddesses know how to “make new friends but keep the old”—but they only hang on to those longstanding friendships if they’re vitalizing instead of draining. Alpha goddesses are
ageless
goddesses.

And Alpha Goddesses feel that “this is my time.” They’re realizing that they need to give to the world without squelching their own needs, and express themselves without being afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. Their desires and passions are calling to them. They know their strength because they have experienced significant loss and come through it. The fear that they
can’t depend on themselves disappeared along with the first husband or the first job they were fired from. They know their weaknesses and have come to peace with them, having figured out ways to work around their ADHD, their impatience, their shyness, their disdain for small talk, or whatever it is that they were told in their teens would hold them back from being well-liked and accepted and catching a man. As one woman put it, “I found out that even cranky women get laid.”

Some Alpha Goddesses are facing serious financial issues they will have to address, but they are feeling more encouraged than ever about their ability to take care of themselves. They may look around at women who have more financial security and realize that even though it would be nice to have the mortgage-free home, paid-off cars, and retirement fund, they feel more independent, smart, and capable than they ever have. Creating what they need and want doesn’t feel like an impossible dream. They’re coming into their own power, and realizing they don’t need to achieve success according to someone else’s definition in order to feel good about themselves and their lives. Often, they find that the opportunities that passed them by and the losses that seemed huge at the time prove not to have been quite so devastating in retrospect. The cheating lover moved on to a younger woman who is now reminding him to test his blood sugar and dealing with his irritability and demands for attention. Our second spring brings a reframing of the past—and the present and future.

Alpha Goddesses are able to put matters in perspective, whether it’s a car that’s been totaled or stolen, or another encounter with that one person in every workplace or family who has to stir up a conflict to draw attention her way. The things that used to make them pick up the phone and vent to their friends or write furiously in their journal no longer faze them. Their attitude is “Oh well, that’s life” or “This too shall pass”—or my personal favorite, an old Polish proverb: “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” Many years ago, I lost my sister in an accident. Ever since, when someone calls with bad news, my attitude is “Hey, a family member didn’t die. This isn’t so bad.” When we’re over
50, we have enough life experience to instantly recognize what is small stuff and what isn’t.

Over the years, we develop a finely calibrated BS detector. We recognize that some people are not being honest with themselves about what they are doing to create their own problems. If they pressure us to rescue them, or try to make us feel guilty for not changing our plans to accommodate their latest crisis, we find it’s easier than ever before not to give into their emotional threats. Alpha Goddesses recognize that “No” is a complete sentence. How liberating!

I see this a lot in women with aging mothers or fathers who have placed far too many unreasonable demands on them. This is the time when you learn that being a good daughter doesn’t mean letting yourself become depleted by your parents. They brought you into this world and took care of you, but making your life about their needs is not necessary or healthy for you
or them.
Very often, what older parents really want is to feel independent and useful. When you say no and you ask them to help you out in some way, however small, you restore balance in the relationship. It’s a gift to realize you truly are on a journey separate from your parents’. Your paths intersect, but you can’t be responsible for their lives. The same is true for your adult children.

Alpha Goddesses recognize their value in the “tribe.” Although our culture is less ageist than it was a generation or two ago, there’s still too much power in the old message that a woman’s value decreases when she enters menopause because she’s no longer physically fertile. That message has been drilled into us often over our lifetimes and is rooted in the belief that a woman is like an empty vessel, designed solely for the purpose of incubating and nurturing the next generation. Once we can no longer do that, what’s our purpose? Most of us don’t actually think we have no more value once our eggs dry up, but many of us do internalize the message that our value is in what we can produce for others. Consequently, we start feeling guilty that we aren’t spending more time, energy, and money on our adult children who are struggling with their bills, or our teenagers who are having trouble navigating the choppy emotional waters
of middle school. Other people’s problems keep creeping up to the top of our To Do lists because we are trying to prove our worth to ourselves and others. Without the balance that comes from rest and receiving help from others, we burn ourselves out. There’s no better way to suck up your vital energy than to try to prove to everyone that you are a good mother, good neighbor, good daughter, and so on. As Tosha Silver, the author of
Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead,
says, “Accept yourself absolutely and unconditionally. It’s one of the most radical acts you can do in an insane culture that actually profits from your self-loathing.”
¹⁴