Conversations with my Womb

When different places within us are in pain, we should extend the care of deep friendship towards them. We should not leave them isolated under siege in pain. A friend of mine went to hospital to have a hysterectomy. A priest friend came to visit her on the evening before her operation. She was anxious and vulnerable. He sat down and they began to talk. He suggestd to her that she have a conversation with her womb. To talk to her womb as a friend. She could thank her womb for making her a mother. To thank it for all her different children and who had begun there. The body, mind and spirit of each child had been tenderly formed in that kind darkness.

She could remember the different times in her life when she was acutely aware of her own presence, power and vulnerability as a mother. To thank her womb for the gifts and the difficulties. To explain to it how it had become ill and that it was necessary for her continuing life as a mother to have it removed. She was to undertake this intimate ritual with tenderness and warmth of heart.

The operation was a great success. Her conversation with her womb changed the whole experience. The power was not with the doctors or the hospital. The experience did not have the clinical, short-circuit edge of so much mechanical and anonymous hospital efficiency. The experience became totally her own, the leave-taking of her own womb.

When a part of your body is ill, it must be a lonely experience for it.

~ John O'Donohue on befriending the places of pain from Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Hunger to Belong, 1998

Befriending the Garden of the Soul

In mid-2010 when I began to experience savagely intense panic attacks after 18 years of being blessedly free from their demoralising occurences, for a short time I was unaware that the natural transition of perimenopause had cranked up the fight-flight-freeze cycle again.  An insightful discussion with a nurse from The Jean Hailles Foundation for Women gave me comfort: my physical and emotional symptons were within the range of normal perimenopause. I wasn't going crazy yet the nurse encouraged me, with my history of Panic-Anxiety Disorder, to explore any residual issues at the root of my anxiety.

At the time of the New and Full Moons in June 2010, I experienced two intensely terrifying panic storms, that raged for 6-10 hours, leaving me exhausting, covering in sweat and seriously scared of my body and distrustful of what it was going to do next. I recall during the first storm that I was assailed by a multitude of fears: fears of having a heart attack, a cerebral hemorrhage, an insulin crisis, a bowel torsion, and on and on. As I struggled to raise myself out of the pit of fear through a meditation technique, I became aware that these fear thoughts weren't mine.  I recalled that my parents had died from heart attacks, a grandfather from a cerebral hemorrhage, a grandmother from a diabetic crisis, another grandfather from bowel cancer. As I began to tick off where the fear thought originated, the inherited fear thoughts: I felt the cold hard grip of fear loosen until it finally released me and I drifted into an exhausted sleep.

Befriending Woman

I can tell you, I om mani padme hummed as though my life depended on it. I certainly felt that my sanity did!  When I awoke, I went to my collection of Flower Essences and made up a super-duper combination of essences that I intuitively selected, but the core essences were that of the Australian Bush Flowers Woman blend, specific to harmonising any imbalances during menstruation and menopause.  To the essences of the Woman blend Billy Goat Plum, Bottlebrush, Bush Fuchsia, Crowea, Five Corners, Mulla Mulla, Old Man Banksia, Peach-flowered Tea-tree and She Oak, I added quite a few more specific for fear and anxiety.

Reading the profiles for each essence, I began to develop a sense of being disconnected from my own femaleness and then the truly shocking realisation dawned: I had never been connected to my own femaleness in the first place, my feminine principle was MIA!  How could this be?  How could I be all of 48 years old and not connected to my sense of womanhood, my feminine self? 

The answer, my friend, was blowing in the winds of my womb and so began a series of conversations with my womb and the forging of a deep befriending of this flesh-and-blood vehicle that has been my constant companion and which, as I learned, had been dreadfully lonesome for me.

The Orange Book

In December of 2004, I had purchased John O'Donohue's Eternal Echoes from a pre-loved bookshop, yet had never read it. Sure, I had dipped into its pages from time to time, yet the circumstances of my life from December 2004 had tipped me into an excruciating cycle of poverty, near-homelessness, survival issues, a crushingly severe iron-deficiency anaemia, and I was besieged on all fronts. There was no time for reading and I was leaking energy all over the place and mired in Survival Mode. Not only had the rug been pulled out from underneath me, the floor had collapsed as well and the walls of the house had crashed in over the top of me.

Astrologically, this birth-death-rebirth cycle kicked off with Saturn opposing Saturn and Neptune square Neptune. Jupiter trine Jupiter at the very least promised I'd survive.  But I didn't know anything about astrology then. Not one iota. I've understood the events of 2004 retrospectively. In 2010, I began to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back home and in doing so gained a deep understanding and gratitude for that Wise Woman in me that knew what it was doing all the time.  I have learned to trust her. I had to meet her first.

When part of your body is ill, it must be a lonely experience for it.

This profound observation of John O'Donohue's totally and irrevocably shifted me into a new relationship, a deep communion with my own body. When I read his words late one night whilst reading in bed, they burrowed into the core of my womb and I felt so sad, so inexpressibly sad when I remembered the times my body had been ill and I had been so......callous and discompassionate towards myself.

Rock of Ages, made by me

When reading the ritual of leave-taking the priest had suggested, I remembered a similar ritual of leave-taking I had engaged in before losing my gall-bladder back in 1994.  For three years I had been suffering with random attacks of biliary colic, the first attack woke me from a deep sleep and I instinctively knew "gall-stones" and being somewhat versed in homeopathic and naturopathic treatments, I prepared a hot-water bottle and laid it on my body. The warmth helping the bile duct to expand and release it's grip on the gall-stone. I adjusted my diet (three years without chocolate) and consulted a homeopath and did all I could to avoid surgery.  At the time I was still agoraphobic and I greatly feared I wouldn't be able to cope with the whole hospitalization process, I was buying myself time until I had broken the hold of agoraphobia. This turned out to be wiser than I knew. I have since read that there is a greater risk of complications from surgery if you are in a state of intense fear - which I was.

As it turned out, there were complications during surgery. The key-hole procedure almost turned into an open cholecystectomy and for months afterwards I felt very bruised inside, like somebody had put a metal rod in my abdomen and swished it around violently. Which wasn't too far from what actually did happen. I suppose that imagery came to me as a way of my body giving me a metaphor to work with.

I am getting ahead of my story though. 

My Misremembered Self: Bitter Rage

The process of leave-taking for my gallbladder came naturally and it seemed strange at the time. I drew a picture of my gallbladder and with coloured pencils filled with with turquoise and gold, like a beautiful opal. I then wrote a letter apologising for not taking better care of it, admitting my failures in not being able to heal it naturopathically (there are limits to naturopathic medicine). Knowing that three years previously I didn't have gallstones at all, I remembered the intense work I had been doing on a transpersonal level, and apologised for all the feelings of bitterness, hatred and resentment I had been fondling as I worked through my issues. I had written an essay from a self I called Bitter Rage, told a story that she had created marbles to play with and those marbles of hatred were the gallstones. I apologised to my gallbladder for giving it so much toxic poison and making it sick.  Then I folded up the picture and forgot about it - until I read about the leave-taking of the woman's womb in Eternal Echoes.  Then I thought:  Dayum, that's what I did! How about that?

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

In 2000, a couple of months before my 40th birthday, I had bent down in the shower to pick up the bar of soap I had dropped and I felt a twinge in my back.  I went to work but after a couple of hours, felt my back tightening up and made an appointment to receive a massage from a remedial massage therapist I knew well and trusted.  This therapist was actually my Teacher in massage. I had just completed my training as a Massage Therapist. He agreed to see me straightaway. As I lay face down on the table, he gave me a forceful and heavy massage. When he finished, I couldn't get off the table: my back was completely locked and I was in a world of pain like I  had never experienced before.

I remember berating my body, don't do THIS to me! don't DO this to me! don't do this to ME! I didn't know that my body was protecting me, the muscles had locked up to prevent my spinal cord from being severed. I was angry with my body for letting me down, for placing me in the humiliating position of being carried out by two paramedics, for stopping me in my tracks, for giving me my first ambulance ride (that hit every pothole on the way to hospital), for an embarrasing rectal examination to check the extent of the damage to my spinal nerves.  I came within a whisker of ending up a paraplegic. Of living the rest of my life in a wheel-chair and I was angry at my body without knowing how hard it was trying to save me from that fate.

Such a fool I have been.  John's gently Irish-lilting words helped me to see clearly what had been obscured to my view before: I had not befriended my body. In its times of pain, it was intensely lonely and I always responded with anger, with negligence, with ambivalence, with ignorance, with a laissez-faire approach of taking it for granted.

In Oriental Medicine the body is considered the garden of the soul. When I read those words, I was filled with an ecstatic joy: my soul has a body, my soul  has a body, my soul has a body!

The Soul of my Anatomy

I then began to draw pictures of my organs, very anatomically correct and informed by my studies in anatomy and physiology. I bought a set of 36 artist pencils and gave my creative spirit free right. When I drew my heart, the image of an Elf appeared; when I drew my womb and ovaries, the image of a Goddess appeared, the fallopian tubes her arms holding the pearls of my ovaries. I became aware that each of my organs had it's own Spirit and consciousness and I turned to another book I had purchased a long time ago (and never read), Guarding the Three Treasures by Daniel Reid, learning about the Five Elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The planetary correspondences, the Eight Extraordinary Channels, and I started to work consciously with these principles. Each day to check in with Jupiter-Wood-Liver; Mars-Heart-Fire; Saturn-Earth-Spleen; Venus-Metal-Lungs and Mercury-Water-Kidney.

Venus had a lot to say and in the saying I learned that my Panic-Anxiety Disorder was really Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that I needed to work deeply with Metal and converse with my Large Intestine. I was inspired to overlay a diagram of my Large Intestine over the 12 Houses of the Zodiac and visit each house from the perspective of my Ileo-caecal valve, my appendix, my ascending colon, my hepatic flexure, my descending colon, my sigmoid colon and finally, my anus.  My anus had a lot to say as well!

The Great Awakener - UR-anus.

Slowly and surely my Soul became more embodied within it's Garden and we walked together through the fields, the groves, the orchards, the flower beds, the herbs, the mosaic paths of cells, the fireflies of neuron synapses, the rivers of blood and lymph.  I came to understand that my gall-bladder had sacrificed itself for the health of the others: had taken one for the team.  Had agreed to quarantine the extreme toxicity of my emotions and transmute them into gallstones rather than cancer. It had agreed to leave so that everybody else could live.

I still have a gallbladder in my etheric body. Every now and then it give me ghost tickle under the ribs and I tickle it back.

In 1994 after my surgery, I had a follow-up consultant with the surgeon and he told me about how beautiful my gallbladder was, the internal surface he said, was like an opal - green and gold. Just like the colours I had used in my leave-taking.  I thought it odd, at the time, that this Man of Science had an artist's appreciation of this piece of flesh, yet I know now that the very best surgeons, the very best healers view the body as a work of art, are constantly awed by its architecture, it's intelligent design, and the weird and wonderful things that it can do.

The Mystery in the Mundane

As a child I would read the Reader's Digest and was always fascinated by the monthly series called "I Am Joe's Body".  I am Joe's ear, I am Joe's eye, I am Joe's heart, I am Joe's spine.  That's when it all began....that's when I started my training as a Medical Intuitive, as a practioner in the healing arts, as a soul-centered counsellor, as a Soul Gardener.

In making my journey through the wilderness of utter ignorance, confusion and deep fear, I have learned something that, perhaps, I might not have done if I had sat at the feet of a Guru, or been engaged in more formal and structured spiritual practices. I have made my journey backwards: stumbling through the experiences then coming across a book that explains You were there.  At the beginning of a new experience I have always acquired a book, or undertaken a workshop that planted seeds that only trial and tribulation would nourish. Most times I was given tools that I didn't use or didn't know how to use effectively and that, too, was part of my journey.

Someone once said that wisdom is the accumulation of our ignorance. Spiritual teachers often write about their wisdom, what they have learned: I think it more useful to write about my ignorance and the mistakes that I have made, the signposts that I missed, the symbols that I misinterpreted, the dots I failed to connect.  In writing about such things, perhaps the reader can detect between the lines, the presence of the Great Spirit behind every misstep I made.

Perhaps the experienced journeyer will get a good laugh and then think about having a conversation with their testicles or left elbow and find out that there are many wild things that dwell in the bottom of the Garden of the Soul that desire to be met and befriended.

Blow Gabriel Blow

In her book Defy Gravity, Caroline Myss wrote:

After working in the field of health and healing for more than two decades, I have come to believe that we as a society have not fully animated the body-mind-spirit trinity that is the foundation of this approach to health, for a simple reason: we are still enamored of the more familiar power of the mind and intimidated by the less familiar, the mystical and transformational regions of the soul.

I read this paragraph and it resounded in me like a trumpet call. The familiar power of the mind - the bodymind. That's the missing understanding in society when it comes to the body-mind-spirit paradigm. Always within the articulation of the problem, you will find the seed for the solution. What if the holistic health paradigm isn't a trinity after all?  And the belief that it is a trinity is the problem? It's a cherished belief that has long been enshrined on the mantle in the Temples of Healing. Perhaps it is that belief, that familiar belief, that needs to be released to fully activate the energies of multidimensional healing.

Just a thought.