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Healing & Alternative Health: |
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Eye-Opening Information for Menopausal Women |
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by Susun Weed |
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• Don't take calcium supplements. Calcium makes bones more massive, but more brittle. A stout dry branch breaks easily, while a green one, no matter how thin, won't break at all. Food sources of bone-building minerals (such as yogurt, nettle infusion, dandelion vinegar, and cooked kale) include "flexibility" minerals such as magnesium, boron, and zinc and are a superior way to prevent bone breaks later in life says Weed.
•Gain some weight. Women who gain 10-15 pounds during their menopausal years have fewer hot flashes, stronger bones, and healthier hearts. (And most of them lose the extra weight in the following decade.)
• Try herbal hormones. Many common herbs and foods contain substances that can be used like estrogens by the body. This is much safer than taking estrogen supplements, which are known to promote uterine and breast cancers.
• Be outrageous. The emotional extremes - rage, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts - that give menopausal women the label "hysterical", actually serve important functions in helping women come to terms with aging, death and profound personal growth.
Bursting with tidbits of detailed information such as these, and rich with the forgotten wisdom of ancient times, Menopausal Years The Wise Woman Way is the perfect guide for menopausal women of today.
Blood Mysteries
In the beginning, according to the Wise Woman tradition, everything began, as everything does, at birth. The Great Mother of All gave birth and the earth appeared out of the void. Then the Great Mother of All gave birth again, and again, and again, and people, and animals, and plants appeared on the earth. They were all very hungry. "What shall we eat?" they asked the Great Mother. "Now you eat me," she said, smiling. Soon there were a very great many lives, but the Great Mother of All was enjoying creating and giving birth so much that she didn't want to stop. "Ah," she said smiling, "now I eat you." And so she still does.
We all come from the same mother. She is the wise woman. We all return to her embrace, her bloody-rich womb place, when we die. Every woman is a whole/holy form of her, able to be whole/holy mother of all life, able to be whole/holy destroyer of life. Her power is her blood that flows and flows, her blood which is life and gives life. Every woman's menstrual blood and birth-time blood is a holy mystery.
What are the blood mysteries? Why are they central to the understanding of the Wise Woman tradition?
Blood mysteries teach that menstrual blood and birthing blood are holy blood, power blood, healing blood. The blood mysteries teach us to remember that life and healing come from and return to woman, to the wise woman, to the woman who bleeds and bleeds. And does not die.
Blood mysteries reveal that menstrual (moontime) blood and birth blood are so holy, so full of potential, so full of the void that they are to be used only to heal, to heal by nourishing. Holy woman-blood is nourishing blood, blood of love, blood of abundance, blood that heals the earth.
Blood mysteries recall the immense power of the bleeding woman. Power enough to share in great nourishing give-away from mother to matrix, give-away of nourisher to nourisher. When we bleed into the ground (in reality or fantasy) our power re-grounds as our blood flows through the personal root chakra and into the earth.
Bleeding into the ground, bleeding freely, we know ourselves as women, as nourishers of life, as givers of nourishment to the plants, givers of holy nourishment: our moontime blood.
I am woman giving away nourishment to ensure this planet's life. With my moontime power, my blood, with my birthing power, my blood, I feed the earth who feeds us all. Every month I remember: I am woman. I am earth. I am life. I am nourishment. I am change.
I am woman, blatantly and repeatedly confronted with my changes: hormonal harmonics stirring moon time visions, ovulatory oracles, pre-menstrual crazies, orgasmic knowings, birth ecstasies, breast-feeding bliss, menopausal moods.
I am wholeness. I am woman. I know life, death, pain, and health in my marrow, in my womb. I know the bloody places: the narrow space between life and death, the bloody place of birth, the bloody mess of nourishing life, the bloody flow of letting life go. I am woman. My blood is power. Peaceful power. Peaceful blood.
My blood is holy nourishment. My blood nourishes the growing fetus. My blood becomes milk to nourish the young child. My blood flows into the ground as holy nourishment for the Great Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth.
Gaia, whose ways are bloody. Woman, whose ways are bloody. Blood of nourishment. But bloody. Bloody menstrual blood, bloody birth blood. Blood of peace, nourishing blood. Blood of health/wholeness/holiness, not of sacrifice. The Wise Woman tradition is a bloody-handed woman, a bloody-thighed woman, a woman who gives birth, a woman who sees to the other side of things.
Health/wholeness/holiness is always changing. Life is mysterious, moving in spirals of change. Spirals moving to, through, from the void. Change making the hole so we can see the holy healthy gift of our wholeness.
"Sit, sister, here on the soft green moss, and give your sacred moon blood to the earth, back again to the spiral of life. Let flow your womb's blood red to the green and brown of earth. Sit here. Relax and close your eyes and let the visions come. Rest now and give your moon blood to nourish the mother who nourishes us. Relax and let the visions come."
The time of menstrual bleeding, according to the Wise Woman tradition, is a time of visions. Any woman who pays attention to these visions will find the power of shamans, witch doctors, medicine wo/men.
"Add a bit of red leaf to your herbal mixtures, any red leaf except poison ivy. That will make the medicine strong," says a friend, apprentice to a Native American shaman. And the wise woman inside me whispers: "They do this to evoke the power of menstrual blood."
These are the natural powers of menstruating, menopausal, and post-menopausal women:
• Oneness with the earth as a responsive nurturing presence
•Communication with plants, animals, rocks
•Weather making
•Shape shifting
•Invisibility
• Communication with fairies, devas, elves, dragons, unicorns
• Foreknowledge
• Acutely sensitive senses of smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch
•Healing
The Wise Woman tradition understands healing/wholing as blood mysteries. The blood of birth and death, and the blood of nourishment, these are the natural knowledge of women; these are the things that make us wise.
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Susun Weed,
Healer
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Susun S. Weed has no official diplomas of any kind; she left high school in her junior year to pursue studies in mathematics and artificial intelligence at UCLA and she left college in her junior year to pursue life.
Susun began studying herbal medicine in 1965 when she was living in Manhattan while pregnant with her daughter, Justine Adelaide Swede.
She wrote her first book -- Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year (now in its 29th printing)-- in 1985 and published it as the first title of Ash Tree Publishing in 1986.
It was followed by Healing Wise (1989), Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way (1992), and Breast Cancer? Breast Health! The Wise Woman Way (1996).
In addition to her writing, Ms Weed trains apprentices, oversees the work of more than 300 correspondence course students, coordinates the activities of the Wise Woman Center, and is a High Priestess of Dianic Wicca, a member of the Sisterhood of the Shields, and a Peace Elder.
Susun Weed is a contributor to the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women's Studies, peer- reviewed journals, and popular magazines, including a regular column in Sagewoman.
Her worldwide teaching schedule encompasses herbal medicine, ethnobotany, pharmacognosy, psychology of healing, ecoherbalism, nutrition, and women's health issues and her venues include medical schools, hospital wellness centers, breast cancer centers, midwifery schools, naturopathic colleges, and shamanic training centers, as well as many conferences.
Susun appears on many television and radio shows, including National Public Radio and NBC News.
This article is an excerpt from "Healing Wise" by Susun Weed, who graciously granted us permission to bring you this reprint.
Susun Weed
PO Box 64
Woodstock, NY 12498
Fax: 1-845-246-8081
www.susunweed.com
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