|
CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP
Internationally renowned for her pioneering work that empowers women to create healthy and balanced lives, Christiane Northrup strongly believes in the mind-body connection and in the crucial role that the human spirit plays in the healing process. The key to health and healing, insists the 1971 graduate of Flora Stone Mather College, is in listening to, and heeding, the wisdom of our bodies. Dr. Northrup, who has been in private practice as an obstetrician-gynecologist for more than twenty years, co-founded Women to Women, a healthcare clinic in Yarmouth, Maine. The 2004 recipient of the American Heart Association’s Learn and Live Gold Heart Award is the author of the bestselling books The Wisdom of Menopause and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. She is at work on another volume, Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Emotional and Physical Health, which explores how the mother-daughter bond sets the stage for a woman’s health throughout her life.
One of the things I’ve done in my books is tell my own story. And how I had to take my own advice.
What it means to be a woman—for many women—is to wear five different hats and be pulled in five different directions.
When there’s a 9-11, everyone becomes a saint. People move into their highest expression of humanity. But when it comes to losing your bags at the airport, people disintegrate pretty quickly.
My profession flatly denied that a woman’s life had much to do with her body. It was as though they were in separate universes.
Our culture vilifies the menstrual cycle. We’ve been brainwashed into believing that the cycle that is responsible for all of life on the planet is the most inconvenient, disgusting thing in our bodies.
I have created a life that is organized around health and balance, bit by bit.
It takes actual conscious effort to concentrate on what is positive and what is working in your life, and when you do that, you attract more of the same.
When I turned fifty, I saw my first rock concert, because, back in the sixties and seventies, when everyone was smoking dope and sleeping with multiple partners, I was pre-med. What can I tell you? I was very serious, and I just put my head down and kept going.
My daughters give me joy. They are all kinds of fun, and I adore being with them.
The legacy of self-sacrifice and martyrdom in a mother’s own life gets passed on to her daughter unconsciously. And our mothers are our most potent role models. I realized that my influence as a physician paled in comparison to the influence of a woman’s mother. And that no matter what I said or did as a doctor came close to getting at that legacy. How could I talk a woman into a joyous birth experience if she’d been taught by her mother, “Now you’ll see how I suffered with you”?
I’ve learned that the female body is not a lemon and that you can trust it.
The more light and enlightenment in your consciousness, the more your physical body responds. And what that means for me is that the chronic degenerative diseases that are now crushing our healthcare system are neither natural nor inevitable.
My life would be miserable without a sense of spirituality. It’s the only thing that gives meaning—true meaning—to my life.
My words of wisdom to medical students today would be this: Don’t ever forget the power you have vested in you by virtue of the cloak of the healer being placed on your shoulders. Symbolically, it’s the white coat and the stethoscope in our culture. But don’t forget that you’ve been invested with the role of the shaman, and your very presence is as important to healing your patients as the prescriptions you write and the quality of the surgery you do.
There isn’t a thing that I would live over, because every single thing has made me who I am.
I met a woman over the weekend at the Yarmouth Clam Festival, and she was training a guide dog. And so it’s this wonderful, attentive Labrador retriever who’s got his little jacket on, and he’s staring at her. She told me that, in about six months, the dog was going to go to somebody who is in a wheelchair. So we said to her, “How can you train these dogs from a puppy and then give them away? How do you do that?” She said, “Every time, it breaks my heart. And, every time, my heart grows larger from the experience.” There it is. 
As told to Ellen Brown
Photograph by Barbara Peacock. Shown with Dr. Northrup is her daughter Kate.
|
