Passages into Womanhood by Pamela Chubbuck, Ph.D.

YOUR BODY IS YOUR UNCONCIOUS MIND: The Interrelatedness of Psychology and Medicine

Modern science is beginning to get excited about what ancient Greeks practiced in Athens and Crete , and indigenous people all over the world have known for thousands of years. Science is proving that mind and body are clearly not only interrelated, they are one. We are bodymind.

Candace Pert, Ph.D., an internationally known and highly respected neuro-biologist has proven that emotion is not generated in the brain; it is generated in the cells themselves -- all over the body. Therefore our bodies are truly our subconscious minds. Dr. Pert, author of "Molecules of Emotion", with her husband Dr. Michael Ruff, were the first to begin study in what is now well known as psychoneuroimmunology. Pert says that emotions are chemically instigated at the cellular level, which is where unexpressed emotions are stored.

This overwhelmingly indicates that mental, emotional and physical trauma, and shock, when not expressed at the time the event occurs, creates energetic blocks which lead to later problems.

We now know that what Sigmund Freud termed the "subconscious mind" is actually a measurable physical process. Freud explored awareness outside consciousness and showed that when we banish traumatic experiences to our subconscious mind, they later emerge as physical and mental ailments. Our suppressed emotional events influence our physical well-being.

On the cellular level, emotions are literally created chemically. As we store unexpressed emotions on a cellular level, illness can be caused by this stored and trapped information. Therefore, it stands to reason that to heal from our ills, we must express the information accumulated in our bodyminds.

Wilhelm Reich, MD, a student of Freud, is world renowned for his innovative therapy which treats human beings as living, moving entities full of the life energy, that he called orgone. Reich stated that when life energy is blocked due to emotional distress, illness is produced.

Dr. John Pierrakos, a student of Reich, creator of Core Energetics, has studied the interface between held emotions and illness, for over 40 years, and has taught that specific developmental wounding creates specific disease processes. Dr Pierrakos' book Core Energetics: Developing the Capacity to Love and Heal , explains how Core Energetics combines psychology, new physics, spirituality, and energy field and charka system theory. Once considered to be only in the realm of the spiritual and metaphysical, Dr. Candace Pert's research is now revealing the scientific underpinnings of the charka system. Pert says that charkas are "minibrains": points of electrical and chemical activity that receive, process, and distribute information from and to the rest of the body.

Alexander Lowen, MD, also a student of Reich, co-creator of Bioenergetic Analysis, with John Pierrakos, MD, writes extensively on the interface and impact of the emotions on the body. In his book, Love, Sex and Your Heart , Lowen explains that difficult childhood experiences impact the human body and particularly the human heart.

Many people in our culture suffer heart disease. Certainly diet and modern day stresses contribute to failing hearts. Most importantly, says Lowen, children who suffer lack or loss of love in childhood suffer heartbreak. To survive they suppress their pain by rigidifying the chest wall, which limits breathing, movement and feeling, therefore creating a continuous stress on the body. Dr Lowen says, "It is the existence of this kind of stress, in my opinion, that predisposes so many people to heart disease." He goes on to state clearly that "Only a person who is not afraid to love can be reasonably secure that his heart will remain healthy."

It is well known that people with "type A" behavior are statistically 7 times more likely to have heart disease and heart attacks. People with "type A" behavior have tight mouths and jaws, tense bodies and body postures, rapid finger tapping, are competitive, compulsive, etc. People who exhibit these behaviors are defending themselves from painful childhood histories or current emotional stressors and can help heal themselves by expressing held emotions which will soften and relax their entire bodies, making them less likely to be physically and mentally ill.

Examples of bodymind influence from my own practice are numerable. Two representative cases are: a 40 year old man, who presented with serious long term irritable bowel syndrome/colitis, was able to express his unresolved childhood pain of his mother's death, and his physical symptoms resolved in just a few months. A thirty five year old woman, who for years, had daily severe migraines, was able to release the energy that was blocking her emotions, rage at an abusive father, and her headaches soon vanished.

Physical symptoms of dis-ease are clearly emotionally connected. Working energetically with the deep emotional and spiritual issues can move and transform the stuck energy that creates dis-ease such as, fibromyalgia, ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, some types of chronic pain, migraines, sexual dysfunction, and TMJ among others. Working with the Body and its energy also helps to heal the issues we commonly consider psychological, such as, panic attacks, depression, anxiety etc. People who work with all aspects of themselves, report feeling more alive, having more sexual feeling, singing better, and being more spontaneous and joyful.

What can assist you in your quest for healing your bodymind? Many modalities assist the bodymind healing. Bioenergetic Analysis, massage, Rolfing, osteopathic and chiropractic are among them. Healing modalities that work the emotional, mental and spiritual levels of existence are Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Core Energetics. Among them, Core Energetics uniquely addresses the psychological, emotional, and spiritual directly through work with the bodymind.

MENARCHE: A Perfect Time to Empower Girls to Change their World

The nature of puberty – physically created by the Life Force, expanding toward maturity and assisted by zooming hormones, results in the amazing body changes we all can plainly see in a young woman. These same forces open a girl to new concepts, new ways of thinking and perceiving. Puberty is a time when many beliefs are formed or hardened. Therefore, this time in a girl's life provides the perfect opportunity to infuse positive thoughts and images into her awakening mature body/mind system, rather than our society’s all-too-commonly negating and stifling messages about what it means to be female. We must support girls and young women to see themselves for what they truly are – beings possessing unlimited creative potential.

Consider what would happen if we positively prepared girls for womanhood and practiced ceremony around the time of menarche – First Blood. What if a girl were acknowledged, even celebrated in some small way, each time she had her Bleeding Time? What if she were treated with respect and special kindness during her period, and shown that she is extraordinary? Over 300 women I interviewed for my doctoral research all said they felt that being celebrated would have changed their whole life for the better. Among these women, those who were given positive messages, or at least were given benign messages about menstruation, reported that they felt better about their bodies and their sexuality than those women who were given negative messages about their periods.

Girls who are free thinking and deeply connected to their own inner being become women who have powerful, positive, healthy impacts on the world. But - It is difficult to be a girl or a woman in the United States today, and girls need help to grow into strong women. One reason it is difficult to be a strong, powerful girl today is that there is a powerful movement in the United States which supports fundamentalist beliefs that if women are “good”, “love god”, and follow god’s rules (as interpreted by the male dominated church) they must have a particular role in society. (Since these teachings and beliefs about god are fear- based and therefore distorted, I use the small g in the word god. I believe that God, big G, is all loving and does not judge, punish nor favor one religion [or gender] over another.)

In this current upsurge of a very vocal, though minority, fundamentalist religious ideology, a woman is taught her role is to work in a religious church-related context – for example, to marry a minister or choir director, teach in a Christian school or college, and do missionary work based on converting as many people to the fundamentalist way of thinking as possible.

It seems to me that this thinking is profoundly influencing our society in general. We can observe it spilling over into our government, threatening the very fiber of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Women and girls are especially threatened, as they are taught by this system to live in a way that does not support their being in touch with their true deep selves; nor does it teach them how to search inside themselves to find, and then to serve, their own highest good.

Most current organized religion appears to subscribe to a paternalistic view of god. This conjures up the image of a “white man with a beard who lives somewhere in a heaven that is - up there”. This god is often perceived to watch over everything we do and judge us as either good or bad. The apparent teaching is that if we do not adhere to certain strict rules, this god will judge and then punish us. These religious teachings also tell us that god is jealous of our loyalties, and to be feared. The more rigid sects teach girls that only men can be ministers. Does this tell girls that only men can talk to god? Or only men can interpret god’s word? Does it teach that boys are smarter, more worthy? Does it tell girls that god likes boys better than girls? I think it certainly does do all of the above.

In the alternative viewpoint that I subscribe to, the highest good is to become as conscious and expansive in thinking/being as possible. I tell women (and men), “God wants you to be the best you possible!” I use their name…”God wants you to be the best Susan possible, the best uniquely you on the face of this earth and beyond!” I believe that God’s job is to create and keep creating, and that’s why we call God “The Creator”. I believe that God is everywhere, in everyone and everything; therefore God must rejoice in our differences. God has created everyone uniquely; therefore you honor Spirit by being you. Conversely, you do not honor Life by being your pretend self, your false self, your mask self, the false image of what you hope people will think you are. You honor Life by being your deepest real, undefended, most transparent self.

When you earnestly search inside, over a period of time, to find and live through your deepest self, you become enlightened. Miriam Webster’s Dictionary tells us that to be enlightened means to be “full of light, illuminated; full of knowledge and spiritual insight; full of the truth; having a clear conscience”. I add that being enlightened means being full of love because light and love are synonymous. When we fill up with enough light/love, we then have enough love to share with others.

In my opinion, people who are taught and believe rigid rules, follow them out of fear. They cannot be enlightened because the nature of fear is that it distorts truth. The minority (but strong) faction of the above fundamentalist teaching indicates that god is a loving god, but also a god who must be feared. The perception that god both loves us and is fearsome has far reaching psycho-social effects. If we described a human father as having the qualities of a severely judging, punishing god (what is more severe than spending eternity in hell just because you were born into a religion other than the one the father wants you to be – or punishes you because you want to be an artist instead of the lawyer your father wants you to be?), who teaches that his is the only way to think and behave, who sends scourges and pestilence to his enemies, and does this because he says he loves his child, most of us would say that this parent was dysfunctional at best. And we would (rightfully) be concerned for the emotional well-being of his children.

When unenlightened men interpret the bible, what they preach is fear-based: punishing, jealous, judgmental, rigid and frightening. What then happens in world politics is another story, but you can imagine that it is not about actions that are full of love and light.

Within these dogmatic, fear-based, rigid belief systems, a woman is taught to allow her husband to rule the family een if she herself is smarter or more capable. A woman is taught to believe that "Eve's sin" will be taken out on her in punishment through painful childbirth. She is taught that this pain is her plight in life for being born a woman. I suggest that these biblical teachings overflow, creating painful menstrual periods for women, since a girl's anatomy for bleeding, birthing and sex are all the same, and one distorted teaching about that part of the body cannot help but become confused and distorted in her body/mind about all her genital functions.

In addition, a girl is taught to hold her tongue, not to talk back, not to get angry, and to believe the distortions she is fed. The dire threat, if she questions her male teachers, is that she will burn in hell for eternity. This is the ultimate, powerful, fear producing menace, designed to control her freedom to think for herself. This controlling threat is one that women usually must have outside energy to overcome.

As a former childbirth educator and midwife, this way of thinking is maddeningly impossible for me to swallow. I spent 40 years working to assist women to overcome these and other societal beliefs and learned behaviors. Now, with the upsurge of control-based religious teaching, women are losing their innate knowledge. I currently see a woman in therapy, whom I’ll call Josie, who actually experienced no pain in childbirth due to learning psychoprophylaxis – positive learning and conditioning – and who years later fell into a fundamentalist Christian group that is very cult-like. She then sadly passed the group’s negative beliefs on to her daughters. All three of her daughters are exhibiting psychosomatic symptoms that are clearly due to repressive teaching. Her eldest daughter, age 19, has painful periods, emotional acting out, PMS and headaches. The middle daughter age 16, has many headaches and thinks of her period as gross and disgusting. The youngest, age 14 seems to have come out the healthiest so far but believes that women are destined to live with the “shame of Eve’s sin.” This belief will create mental-physical difficulties unless there is an intervention soon.

I have seen many people over the years who have had to work hard to overcome negative messages that their church, religious group, or their strict religious parents taught them. People who get away from these rigid teachings call themselves recovering Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, and every other religion that teaches a very rigid dogma. Now that I live in the south, I have many clients who call themselves ‘recovering fundamentalists’.

Worldwide, many women are taught to serve in a way that always puts others before themselves, therefore they become silently angry, physically contracted and outwardly co-dependant. Being contracted is the source of most of women’s mental and physical ailments including dysmenorrhea, (painful periods) headaches, migraines, and PMS (pre menstrual syndrome). Presently, it is well known in medicine and psychology that holding in the essence of who you are, not speaking your mind and not allowing your body pleasure, contributes to depression, anxiety, loss of sleep and many other body-mind ailments. (You may go to www.core-energetics-south.com or www.passagesintowomanhood.com and read my article: Your Body is Your Unconscious Mind, for more information on body/mind connection.)

In the greater society, many women are socialized to be docile. In Raising Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls, Mary Piper, PhD, tells us that girls are pretty clear and outspoken, real and energetic up until the age of around 10 – 12. After that, they become more contracted, more controlled, holding their bodies in a rigid state. When they hold their bodies rigid, their emotions and thoughts become rigid as well. They become compliant. This socialized compliance coincides with the onset of a girl’s menstrual period.

Thankfully, today some girls are raised to be assertive, and to think for themselves. But many girls, who have poor role models, are acting out their frustrations in unsafe and disempowering ways. Girls are having more sex, having unprotected sex (which puts them at risk for STDs and unwanted pregnancy) and having emotionally disconnected sexual contact, sometimes with boys that they hardly know or don’t know at all. Later in life, these girls carry grief, sorrow and shame in their body/minds. Again this unresolved pain causes dis-ease processes to occur. Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Mother and Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Emotional and Physical Health, and Women’s bodies Women’s Wisdom, both brilliant books that I highly recommend, tells how disease is created by emotional imbalance, and how we can create health in our daughters through positive mentoring and honoring them as girls.

Good things do happen during puberty. Important work is to be done by the girl at this age. The adult basis for her belief systems – beliefs about herself, which are very much integrated into her physical reality, and her understanding of the world around her, are solidified at this age. Puberty creates a malleable energy system, making it a perfect time for a mentor to have a positive influence. A girl desperately needs this assistance from a mentor to empower her to find and come from her strength, to think and act for herself, to be someone who can influence positive change, and to be a creative force for herself and the world.

A girl needs to be taught she is awesome! Beautiful! Powerful! And free to be herself! Young women must be taught and mentored to be proud that they are female. It is clear that for a girl to find and experience who she is, is a process – a becoming – that the girl must search for and grow into. I and most of the women I know are still searching and changing, no matter how old we are in years lived. Continuing emotional and spiritual growth is paramount to life.

Who can teach girls that they are awesome and to fiercely protect their individuality and Life itself? Good role models for girls are women who have found their own power and essence. Good role models are women who tell the truth about life and who they are, who are not afraid to speak out against injustice, and although they may feel fear, they do not let fear stop them from living an expanded life. The best role model is a woman that a girl respects for her clarity about the essential necessity to be who she is, not who someone else wants her to be. This is a role model that a girl wants to emulate.

Empowering girls throughout their lives to be themselves will bring out the creative best in them. Puberty, especially at Menarche, is a perfect time to lay the foundation that teaches girls what they need to live the rest of their lives as women. An empowered girl will become a woman who is not afraid to speak out, who loves life and is able to love humanity. She will be able to find her life work and bring that work into service to the world. She will love who she wants and embrace the differences among people. Such a girl will become a woman who will make the world a better place.

Interview: Aquarius Magazine and Pam Chubbuck 2002

Woman Spirit: Celebrating Menarche

Aquarius: I’ll never forget how I learned about menstruation. We’d gathered for our usual Girl Scout meeting, but our leaders seemed tense and stressed out. They whispered to each other and they looked very, very serious. And they’d brought a guest speaker who was unfamiliar to us. They shushed us and made us sit theatre style before a movie screen and showed us a dreadful little film full of diagrams of body parts we’d never before dreamed we possessed. And they told us that soon we’d start bleeding every month. Horrors!

My mother’s contribution was to prepare me by explaining how to use the (thankfully, mercifully) now out-dated supplies and her main focus seemed to be that I should hide any evidence from my father’s notice. I got the impression that this was all very shameful, just as I had when I sprouted breasts at eleven and Mother couldn’t buy my training bra fast enough to suit her.

Girls today may be lucky enough to have a much more positive experience. They may have enlightened parents who have learned how easily a girl’s self-esteem can be crushed around the time of puberty. Parents may have learned from feminism and goddess worship how to celebrate their daughter’s menarche. And now, Dr. Pamela Chubbuck has offered a wonderful new gift for mothers and grandmothers (AUNTS, FATHERS AND FRIENDS ) to share with young girls.

Woman Spirit: A Menarche Myth is a beautiful story, told in Chubbuck’s dulcet tones, of a young girl’s journey into womanhood. Accompanied by Native American style flute and drum –by Ellen Edwards and Bob Edwards—Chubbuck tells the story of Susan and her best friend, Margaret, and how they learned about menarche, the beginning of menstruation. Margaret and her grandmother were Native Americans, and Margaret’s grandmother teaches the girls about celebrating their womanhood.

Dr. Pamela Chubbuck’s name will be familiar to long-time Aquarius readers. She maintains a practice in Atlanta. She is uniquely qualified to share these teachings.

Aquarius: Pam, what was your own introduction to menarche like?

Pam: I was 14 when I got my first blood. I was eagerly awaiting the event since most of my friends already had gotten their periods. I remember telling my mother and father who both said, “oh, now you are a woman”. I was still 14! I didn’t feel any different than I had the day before and I was supposed to know how to be a woman now? I didn’t even like women since I did not want to be like my mother. I was confused. I was running and playing with our dog. My father commented, “Isn’t it wonderful you can just behave like it was any other day”. I got emotional reward for that attitude. Months later I began to have horrible cramps, dysmenorrheal. I discovered in my later studies that they were due to my zooming hormones and parallel intense repression of my sexual urges- which I had to pretend, even to myself, did not exist.

What happens to us at Menarche is not a solitary event but a culmination of all we have learned about being female. So some history is important to tell.

My father grew up on a dairy farm and I also grew up around animals where sex and bodily functions were part of life. That part of me thought birth and all life was natural. My mother, however, did not have that experience. Mom’s own mother was naive and shy about her body and my grandmother passed that attitude on to my mother. Mom would not talk about her body or her emotions. I am a product of the best and worst of both my parents, as are we all. My brother and I found and read my parents sex manual, but that said very little about menstruation. I learned about menstruation from my father who basically gave me some pamphlets written by Kotex Inc. Same folks that probably made that film you mentioned. We all saw that. It was so impersonal!

Aquarius: How did this affect your decision to write and record Woman Spirit?

Pam: I think that my experience affected choices I made my whole life. First, I had to heal from my lack of mothering. I taught myself and then began to help other women. I breastfed my sons and gave birth naturally. I became a childbirth educator, La Leche League Leader, taught Lamaze Instructors, and then became a Midwife. I studied Body Centered Psychology. I was blessed to be present at the birth of my first grand daughter, who turns 13 in May. This was one of the most profound and spiritual experiences of my life. My daughter-in-law gave birth at home. My grand daughter, Alanna, was birthed into my son’s loving, strong hands. Later when I held this beautiful child on my chest my heart burst with love and the deep knowing of our spiritual connection. What could I give this child, I thought through tears of joy? The answer came…Only the gift of myself. Only the gift of my own experience of being a woman would do. Woman Spirit was written for my grand daughter and for all grand daughters everywhere. For inspiration, I taped a picture of Alanna’s smiling face to my reading stand while I recorded Woman Spirit.

Aquarius: You use a Native American framework for teaching about the moontime (menstrual cycle). Are you aware of other positive cultural teachings about menarche? Why did you decide to use Native American teachings?

Pam: I am very connected to Native American spirituality. Native American traditional spirituality holds all of life as sacred. Women need to know that their bodies are sacred and menstruation is natural. Bleeding Time is a good thing. In Native tradition, bleeding- time- women are seers, wise women, for their people. They are honored. In the Passamaquoddy culture that I have studied intimately, girls begin to do ritual a full year before they bleed. Most indigenous cultures hold Menarche to be of great importance. Girls go through ritual ceremony and then move into the role of woman. The Jewish tradition has Bot Mitzvah for it’s coming of age girls. We live in a culture that generally does not know how to support girls (and boys) in becoming adults. Ceremony and ritual helps greatly.

Aquarius: Tell us about "pleasure" and how it figures in the story.

Pam: In Woman Spirit, Susan and Margaret are preteens waiting for their first blood. They are taught by Margaret’s Native American, wise–woman grandmother. Pleasure is a gift from Great Spirit that makes life fun and is part of the connection with All of Life, grandmother teaches. Sexuality is part of Great Spirit’s gift to us. Feeling the wind in your hair, the taste of red raspberries on your tongue and your breasts as they grow from tiny buds into their fullness, are all pleasurable parts of being human. Blood flowing from the womb can be pleasurable. Our culture brainwashes us against the pleasure of menstruation. In fact our culture thinks of it as almost pathological. We give girls double messages: “Periods are natural… Take Midol.” PMS abounds. PMS is unheard of in cultures that celebrate the life cycle as normal. We need to give our girls more positive information about menstruation, their bodies, and themselves as women.

Aquarius: Could you explain why this time in a young girl’s life is a time for celebration?

Pam: In preparing to write my Doctoral dissertation, I interviewed hundreds of women about menarche. All of them remember their first blood. It is a momentous occasion. The oldest woman I spoke to was 90. She recounted her experience as though it was yesterday. Because it is so important, it is an event that shapes a woman’s total life. Potentially this is a time when we adults can particularly influence our girls. I want that influence to be the best, most loving support for their entire lives. Celebrating coming of age and particularly First Blood, is one of the most helpful things we can do to support girl’s health.

Aquarius: What would a moontime celebration include?

Pam: I’d want the girl to help create her own unique ceremony. Girls are individuals and we must honor that. One girl may want a small private ceremony with just her special girl friends. Another girl may want to invite her whole extended family. My eldest granddaughter had a ceremony with many women with dancing and gifts. Her younger sister was so shy (and only 11) that she allowed me to give her a special gift but did not want a ceremony. She may change her mind when she is older. If a girl is into it, I’d help her design what she wanted. A friends’ daughter performed on the trampoline for her family at her ceremony. Doing ceremony at full moon may be meaningful. Periods are cyclical, similar to the moon’s cycle and Native people call their periods their Moon Time. It would be good to somehow ritually welcome the girl into the circle of women. In Woman Spirit, Susan’s mother gave her a ring that had belonged to her grandmother and Margaret’s grandmother said an ancient prayer which evoked all her female ancestors. Later their friends told their own stories. I like participants to share stories of their first blood and talk about their own experiences of being women. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO SOMEHOW HELP THE YOUNG WOMAN FEEL THE POWER AND SACREDNESS INSIDE HERSELF. Meaningful music, dancing, special clothing, flowers, food, blessings and gifts from the participants are all ways to support and celebrate a girl’s growth along her way to becoming a woman.

Aquarius: How do you think it would change girls’ lives if they were taught about menarche and their bodies in this positive, loving way?

Pam: For the better… there is no doubt about that. Learning to love themselves and their bodies more fully will have profound affect throughout their whole lives. My doctoral research showed that women who were celebrated at menarche, are physically healthier, like themselves better, have a better more intimate sex life with their partners, are more open and spontaneous, and generally more fully alive. This is powerful indeed! To assist girls become healthy adults we must use a whole new paradigm for menstrual education. One which teaches them on all levels of their being: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.