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“Inner wisdom” comes to us through the processes of our bodies and through our emotions. So one of the things I’ve done in my books, particularly Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, but also in The Wisdom of Menopause, is that I tell my own story. And how I had to take my own advice.

An example is when I was working eighty-plus hours a week in a standard OB-GYN practice. I developed a breast abscess that was dissecting into my chest wall, because I was trying to nurse my baby exclusively with breast milk. I found that the culture of medicine and surgery was completely different from the needs of motherhood. The breaking point was my own breast, which is the perfect metaphor for giving and receiving. I was giving out too much without replenishing the supply, as it were. So that’s a graphic example.

Two years later, about a year after my second child was born, I stopped that practice, realizing that I could no longer live my life that way. I co-founded the practice Women to Women, the major premise of which was that this was a place where we would honor what it means to be a woman. And what it means to be a woman—for many women—is to wear five different hats and be pulled in five different directions.

All of us, the founders, were interested in creating balance in our own lives, and what we found was that so were our patients. The other thing we discovered was we had created something where we were the ones who were on the line at the bank and paying the mortgage and paying for the renovation of the building.

In other words, we had put our money where our mouth is. And, within three years, we were as exhausted and burnt out as we had been in the old system. Except that now we didn’t have anyone to blame. We did the Pogo thing: We had met the enemy and she was us. And that was certainly disconcerting. So, damn, what do you do when you can’t blame your mother and you can’t blame men? You have to look at yourself. So [laughing] we got into recovery for codependence.

We literally went away, all of us, for ten days, to work with a woman named Anne Wilson Schaef, who wrote Women’s Reality, and so we got real involved in the recovery movement.

The other reason we did this was because we noticed that every woman who had moderate to severe PMS usually came from an alcoholic family system or from a family system in which someone was mentally ill—where there was a lot of stress because of the needs of a family member. The overwhelming needs of a family member, where the person caring for the family member didn’t have her own needs met. In other words, it was involved with some self-sacrificing behavior.

For whatever reason, alcoholism is associated with a difference in one’s ability to metabolize blood sugar. So it isn’t just the behavior, it’s also the metabolic realities of codependence. I don’t know how to say this in any other way except that, if you’ve ever been to an AA meeting or an Al-Anon meeting, what you notice is that the alcoholics are all having a good time. They’re laughing. They’re often thin. The Al-Anon people, the codependents who live with the alcoholic, are fat, and they’re carrying all the weight. So it’s just an interesting dynamic that we notice.

We began to look at ourselves and our behavior. What was it about our own behavior that was causing so much stress and so much burnout? Because, guess what, we weren’t a lot different than our patients.

Then, we would occasionally go to twelve-step meetings ourselves. And we met regularly with a therapist to keep detritus from forming under the carpet. You know, the little resentments and misunderstandings that take place when you’re forming anything new. We were all astounded, actually, by how much misunderstanding and resentment one could build up within two weeks’ time just from not understanding clearly about communications.

I can’t think of an example, but they’re the usual trivial examples that, in a marriage, come down to, “You didn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste.” It’s stupid things, but that’s what life is made up of. The big things we do really well with. 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.

It was those experiences that led me to write Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom in the first place. I began to see that there were all these emotional experiences that women were having that were affecting their physical health—and that I, too, was having, and it was affecting my physical health—and they weren’t being written about in the OB-GYN literature.

So here I was, a board-certified OB-GYN, and I couldn’t help but notice that pelvic pain was related to a history of sexual abuse. PMS was related to a history of being in an alcoholic family system. And my profession at that time flatly denied that a woman’s life had much to do with her body. It was as though they were in separate universes.

I saw that the major wisdom came through the processes of the female body. The menstrual cycle. Conception. Gestation. Labor. Birth. The woman labored as she lived. And the menstrual cycle is a cosmic cycle, a lunar cycle designed as an in-breath and an out-breath, with outward-going activity in the follicular phase, and then an inward rest-and-restore phase in the luteal phase.

But our culture vilifies the menstrual cycle. So now we have Seasonale brand birth control pills, because we’re selling everyone on the idea that we only need to have four chemically induced periods a year. Because the menstrual cycle is so horrible that you can just have four and get rid of the whole inconvenient mess with synthetic hormones. And women buy it, because 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. So now, here I am, at midlife, fifty-four. My children are out of the house. My youngest is just about to complete her final year in college.

I have really, really worked on creating a balanced life. That includes keeping my weight normal, which, I will tell you, is a daily meditation. If I ate everything I wanted all the time, I would be a fireplug. I have that kind of body. I’m one of those people that, if they put me on a desert island and came back in two years and I hadn’t eaten anything, I’d weigh the same. I’ve got the Stone Age metabolism. Made to last.

I exercise every day, and I take multivitamins, pharmaceutical grade. I begin every morning with reading something positive, like the book As a Man Thinketh [by James Allen] or books by the Unity minister Catherine Ponder. Things of that nature. Uplifting inspirational material. So I begin the day with that. And I end the day with that, because most of what you hear in the news and on television is negative—because that’s what grabs people’s attention.

For survival reasons, the brain of a human is very willing to look at the negative. We’re easily frightened. 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. Whereas, if you let the culture decide how you’re going to think and how you’re going to live, you will turn into a fat consumer with diabetes and obesity, because that’s kind of how the system is designed.

Those are some of the things I do. I go to movies that I love. I read books that I love. 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.

[When I was] in Cleveland, it was right during Kent State. It was a really scary time to be there. And there were race riots and people pushing you off the sidewalks and people throwing stones at [police] horses on Euclid Avenue. I just kept my head down and kept going. So it took me a long while to come back and have a normal teenage experience. I will tell you that listening to Bruce Springsteen finally, when he did his second round, was like a religious experience. Or Tina Turner. I saw her live. So life has become far more celebratory than it used to be.

My daughters give me joy. They are all kinds of fun, and I adore being with them and traveling with them and going to New York and seeing plays. I love that.

The most sustained joy is my work. Absolutely. The chance to sit in Yarmouth, Maine, and look out over a tidal river and really think about something.

Right now, I’m thinking about why women are so terrified of becoming like their mothers. You know, when we say, “Oh my God, I’m becoming my mom.” My latest book, which is coming out January 29, is called Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Emotional and Physical Health. I’m investigating why we trash our mothers the way we do—and also why mothers have so much influence on our health, for better or for worse, and how we can optimize that. By now, I trust that from my investigation of that subject in my own life and in the lives of hundreds of women I’ve seen, I now have the infrastructure to disseminate that message all over the world. And that feels like a miracle to me.

My very first editor, Leslie Meredith at Bantam in the nineties, inspired me to write the book. After I wrote Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, she said, “Why don’t you make your next book a mother-daughter book?” And I said, “Why would I ever want to do that?” That’s boring. Yawn. I always go for the usual misogyny that we all have inside us.

Then I thought, “Well, OK, I have two daughters, and I could probably write an owner’s manual for how to raise a healthy daughter.” My daughters were healthy and they never got sick and they didn’t get menstrual cramps. So I was doing something right. So I thought I’d write an owner’s manual for raising a daughter, but, as usual, I can’t write a simple book. I have to deconstruct something and then reconstruct it in a more positive way.

The long and short of it is that I then went through menopause and a divorce, and The Wisdom of Menopause came out of that. And the mother-daughter book got put on the back burner. So when I finally got back to it, I had been through midlife and a complete reevaluation of my relationship with my own mother, and I began to see that 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.

The more I thought about it, the more 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”? How could I tell her that it wasn’t normal? That you didn’t have to get Alzheimer’s, when she’d seen her mother go into dementia at the age of sixty and believed that that’s what happened.

Or how could I convince her that her uterus and her menstrual cycle were connected to her creativity—when she believed that her period was a curse and the worst thing that could ever happen and [you should] just get your uterus out of there as soon as you can?

I thought, OK, I’m going to write a book that’s about the headwaters of a woman’s health. So let’s go back upstream as far as you can. I thought being an OB-GYN was pretty far upstream. Let’s begin in utero. Then I thought, nope. Let’s go back as far as we can. And that’s the maternal legacy, that is the beliefs, the information that you inherit unconsciously from your maternal legacy. And then that gets carried out as advice or behavior that you pick up unconsciously as a daughter.

I’ve learned that the female body is not a lemon and that you can trust it. And, in fact, our biology is completely informed and shaped by our consciousness. And the more light you can bring into your consciousness, the more enlightenment, the more your body responds in a healthy way.

Now, occasionally, having said that, I know that there are those paradoxical times when some very enlightened being gets cancer, and I think that’s for a whole other soul choice. But, by and large, 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. Chronic degenerative diseases like diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer’s, obesity, senile dementia, osteoporosis, arthritis.

My life would be miserable without a sense of spirituality. It’s the only thing that gives meaning—true meaning—to my life.

I have a friend who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, and she told me that many of the people down there, many of her women friends, just shop. Their husbands make a ton of money, and they just shop. And that to me is purgatory. I don’t even understand how you can live that way. Now, I like to shop with the best of them, maybe once a month, max. I don’t like it as a career.

I don’t understand consumerism as an avocation. What I do understand is looking at your life as having meaning and purpose. And that we’re each divinely guided to fulfill a mission that we came here to do. And that when you see your life in that way, it’s full of infinite possibilities for joy and happiness.

And when you have the inevitable periods of despair and darkness, as long as you know that there’s a meaning to that and that the suffering will transform you and will make you a better and more compassionate person, then you can go through anything.

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.

There isn’t any part of my life that I would live over. There isn’t a thing that I would live over, because every single thing has made me who I am. So I can’t even imagine living it over. Because if I look at what most people call the bad parts—like having the breast abscess and the fibroid uterus and going through the divorce; I’m thinking about the really hard parts—I became the person I am today as a result.

There’s only one thing I’d really like to do, just to do it. And that would be to go through pregnancy and birth now, knowing what I know now. That I would do again.

I would go down to the farm run by Ina May Gaskin, who wrote Spiritual Midwifery, where birth is a joyous experience and women often birth in the state of orgasmic ecstasy. And I would go down there to be in that environment—as opposed to the environment in which I trained as a standard OB-GYN—and have the baby loved into being in a completely supportive environment where there’s no fear. To give birth in a setting of complete and utter love and support, where the mother is mothered and where the mother is doted on and adored. I’d love to have that experience.

It’s probably possible [for me to have another baby]. They could whip my eggs into a frenzy with Perganol, but then I’d have another baby. And the way I do motherhood, it’s at least a twenty-year commitment. I mean real commitment, or you’re doing it wrong.

[Among the greatest inspirations in my life is] Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst from Toronto who wrote a book called Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Just an unbelievable book on how women identify with the masculine and therefore sell their souls.

We know of each other. She’s one of those people I love from afar. Now she’s in her, I’d say, late seventies, and friends of mine who see her say that she has light beaming out of her. She had an eating disorder that she talks about in her groups. And the language, the use of language to talk about the feminine—it’s all about the journey of the feminine soul, but it’s written in language that makes you weep. She’s so good. So I love her.

Louise Hay has been very important to me. Louise was sexually abused. She had vaginal cancer. She gave up a baby for adoption. All of the bad things that can possibly happen to a woman. Her husband asked for a divorce after twelve years of marriage; she didn’t want it. And Louise became the founder of Hay House Publications, which is now all over the world. They are a publishing house for inspirational books that teach people that they can be well despite everything. Her seminal book, which she self published, is called You Can Heal Your Life. Simple, powerful ideas. I just love Louise’s work. And Louise is seventy-eight. I love how she took up ballroom dancing last year and painting gigantic paintings—as big as a door—that are spectacular.

In the past, Anne Wilson Schaef and her work and books were very important to me.

Bernie Siegel, certainly—the Yale surgeon who talked to patients when they were asleep. Very, very important to me, as a young physician, to have a role model in someone so rigorously trained who brought spirituality into the operating room in such a practical way. So Bernie was really important to me.

Two other guys who were really important to me—and they’re Case Western Reserve guys: John Kennell and Marshall Klaus.

[Professor of Pediatrics] John Kennell was chief of neonatology. In fact, he founded the specialty of neonatology. And then [former Case medical school faculty member] Marshall Klaus is an OB-GYN physician. The two of them together wrote the first book on mother-infant bonding, and, later, parent-infant bonding [Maternal-Infant Bonding, published in 1976, was revised in 1982, under the title Parent-Infant Bonding]. That was one of the most seminal books of my entire career.

What they found up there at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital is that of all these babies that they had saved in the intensive care unit, who were premature, far too many were coming back to the emergency room battered by their parents. They couldn’t understand why. Here they had used the latest techniques to save the lives of these babies, and yet they were being battered. That inspired them to begin to study what is normal bonding. The result was Maternal-Infant Bonding and Parent-Infant Bonding, and their third book was Mothering the Mother—that was the studies they’ve done on doulas, the presence of a loving woman during labor and how that cuts the C-section rate by fifty percent. Real exciting work. Just wonderful, wonderful work.

Their book talked about the mother-daughter bond in the most positive way, and what I loved about them is that it’s real hard-core research. They took a sort of soft value—the loving presence of a woman—and made it into hard scientific data. I loved that. The sort of bringing together of the right brain and the left brain, the masculine and the feminine. And that kind of data has supported me enormously in saying what I have to say.

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. It’s not either-or. You have to tie those knots right, OK? I want a good plumber. But what I call the “healer quotient” is enormously important to the profession, no matter what your tools are. And what’s so exciting to me is that the healer quotient is still there. It will always be there. 

As told to Ellen Brown