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Table of Contents |
Bringing medicine up to dateThe
Wisdom of Menopause
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"Our central mission was to help women appreciate the unity of mind, body, and spirit, to enable them to see the connection between their emotional health and their physical well-being. I wanted to empower women, to give them a safe place in which to tell their personal stories so that they could discover new, more health-enhancing ways of living their lives." |
"The goddess is alive and magic is afoot" -- you can see Her spirit at work in a myriad of surprising places in the world today if you are looking for Her. Surprise transforms into delight when She reveals herself in the medical world, so long dominated by a male elite paradigm which can offer only male knowledge of women's bodies. In her second book on women's health, The Wisdom of Menopause, Dr. Christiane Northrup finds the root of women's wisdom in medicine. I found her first book, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, to be very supportive of the way of thinking I had begun to explore in my mid-forties -- that of a woman centered theasophy and lifestyle. Slowly I began to trust what my own body was "saying" to me, a body that had borne and raised four children, a body that I had taken for granted and assumed would always work in familiar patterns. As I began to have more time to pay attention to my own needs, I also felt my interests and priorities in life undergoing change. What is particularly reassuring is that Northrup begins her book by telling her own story, that of a successful, professional woman, married for many years to another doctor, juggling her time between career and children. With the approach of menopause, she found that her role as the indispensable wife and mother was becoming less attractive as an outlet for her creative and emotional energy. "As my cyclic nature rewired itself, I put all my significant relationships under a microscope, began to heal the unfinished business from my past, experienced the first pangs of the empty nest, and established an entirely new and exciting relationship with my creativity and vocation." Her description resonates with my own experience and is one that many women I know can relate to. Underlying Northrup's personal story is her belief in the power of women's wisdom. She draws on her own research and over twenty years of medical practice with women patients, as well as establishing a healthcare center in 1985 called Women to Women, run by women for women, a concept that has begun to take hold more and more in our society. Personally I have preferred female doctors over the years, if they are available, especially when I visit them for "female" problems. Northrup expresses her belief in women's abilities to heal themselves: "Our central mission was to help women appreciate the unity of mind, body, and spirit, to enable them to see the connection between their emotional health and their physical well-being. I wanted to empower women, to give them a safe place in which to tell their personal stories so that they could discover new, more health-enhancing ways of living their lives." Northrup sees menopause as a time when our hormones are effectively "re-wiring" our brains. Although the experience of uncomfortable bodily and emotional changes is common at this time of life, and one that spurs many women to accept hormone replacement therapy (HRT) willingly from doctors who still look at the aging process as a problem that has to be fixed, these signifiers of change can be most effectively handled through less invasive means. In the second chapter of The Wisdom of Menopause, "The Brain Catches Fire at Menopause," the author debunks some of the inherited information women carry in their unconscious about hormones and how they affect emotional and physical well-being (or lack thereof). She then describes in detail how hormonal change operates at menopause and how hormones link to the brain's memory centers. "Despite what we learn daily about healthy exercise practices, healthy diets, and good medical care, the bottom line is that the most significant way of contributing to our own good health is through the quality of our thought processes. This power is a valuable gift, in light of the absolute lack of control we have over other aspects of life." She suggests that compassion for oneself is the key to healing, an idea she explores more fully later in a chapter entitled, "Coming Home to Yourself." Throughout this chapter, she lets a variety of women speak for themselves regarding their "coming home" experiences. They recall personal crises they faced and resolved and how they began to realize the reserve of power and strength they had at their disposal. The bulk of the text addresses the particulars of bodily care during menopause, including exercise, diet, and supplements, that help to offset some of the natural consequences of aging. She also discusses mental health in "Nurturing Your Brain: Sleep Depression, and Memory," a section I found particularly reassuring in that it resonated with my own experience. Because I had decided to complete my university education in my late forties, I wondered if menopause and aging would affect my ability to be a good student. To my great surprise, I found that I was an even better student than I'd been in my youth, my thought processes were sharper, and my memory was intact. Together with her first book, Wisdom of Menopause is an important contribution to women's knowledge about the interconnectedness of their bodies and their mental and emotional states. Her approach is holistic in all respects, an approach that I have begun to see is the only way that will serve to let us heal our own bodies and relationships with family, friends and community. In a particularly rousing statement she makes about women's power, the author introduces a ray of hope: "Think about it: forty million women, all undergoing the same sort of circuitry update at the same time. By virtue of our sheer numbers, as well as our social and economic influence, we are powerful &endash; and potentially dangerous to any institution built upon the status quo. It's a safe bet the world is going to change, willingly or otherwise, right along with us. And it's likely to change for the better."
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