I believe we are dealing with a crisis of the feminine.
Virtually every day I hear from a woman struggling with serious problems in her female body — and with doctors who offer bandaid solutions that don’t even try to address the cause of her symptoms.
A dear friend’s daughter has been on the pill since she was 16 because of debilitating periods. Now she’s 28, wants to have a baby next year, and has gone off the pill. The debilitating periods are back. The pill didn’t address the problem — it just put it on pause. And now she has no knowledge of her natural cycle, no idea how to deal with her terrible period pain, and no clue how hard or easy it’s going to be to get pregnant.
My neighbour suffers from constant bleeding, and her condition gives her a one in four chance of developing cancer. Her doctor wants to remove her uterus. She’s having to fight to get him to look at other options, because removing this vital part of her feminine essence is his first — and only — line of defense. (To which I say, are they telling men “You might develop cancer, we need to remove your testicles”??)
So many of my clients with endometriosis had it for years before their doctors were able to diagnose it.
The same with PCOS — if you don’t have the obvious symptoms, it can take years to get a diagnosis.
None of these are an appropriate response to a woman’s health and wellbeing.
The good news is that more and more women are waking up — and waking up earlier in life, too.
They’re doing their own research, refusing to suppress their periods, looking for alternative and deeper solutions. They’re becoming their own experts on their own bodies.
And the wake-up call, very frequently, is infertility.
Many women who come to me after an infertility diagnosis lived with underlying issues for 10 or 15 years…and then, when they reached the point in their lives where they wanted to start a family, infertility became the diagnosis instead of the underlying hormonal health issue.
Which gives us a huge all-encompassing label of infertility, when — if the underlying hormonal issue had been addressed in the first place — it would have made a big difference in their overall health and the future of their fertility…and may have prevented them ending up with the infertility diagnosis at all.
It’s heart-breaking to witness, but here’s the next bit of good news:
I believe infertility is a wake-up call from the Divine Feminine.
Infertility is forcing us as women to dig deeper, inquire further, ask bigger questions, and open to a part of ourselves that we’d locked away or never even knew was there.
Infertility is forcing a return to the feminine.
Because it’s not just the bandaid medical solutions, the pumping our bodies full of synthetic hormones, the suppression of our periods or erasing them altogether.
That’s really just a symptom of a wider systemic problem: the devaluing of the feminine in patriarchal society.
Most women are out of touch with what the feminine feels like.
We have no sense of a Feminine Divine.
We live from the masculine: doing, producing, accomplishing, analyzing, trying, going, going, going.
The devaluing of the feminine is in the air we breathe from birth. Unless you’re very lucky, it’s likely your feminine nature has been injured, damaged, or abused from the time you were a little girl.
Ready for good news item #3?
Healing the wounded feminine and opening to her spacious, warm, receptive energy changes everything.
I’m convinced it is THE path to physical, emotional and spiritual healing for women.
Whether or not you’re trying to conceive.
Look out for a really special invitation next week to join me in a journey deep inside your beautiful feminine essence…and begin your own path to healing.
In the meantime, come tell me in the Yoga Goddess Support Circle: what physical, emotional, or spiritual pain is waking YOU up to your feminine essence?