(Part 2)
Justine: When you talk to women, you really
talk to them about taking responsibility for their own health
and well-being. I mean it’s not just following you,
but it’s like empowering women to take back their
own initiative.
Susun: Exactly. And one of the ways that
I do that is by talking about the Three Traditions of Healing.
I think that health care’s very confusing and it’s
confusing for us simply because there’s so many choices.
You know, you have a headache. What do you do? Take an Aspirin.
Call your acupuncturist. Do yoga. Get out the aromatherapy.
You know, so many different possibilities. So to try to
make it easy for myself to figure out what was going on,
I realized that I could broadly lump different modalities
into these three traditions, which I call the Scientific
Tradition, which is linear, measures and then tries to fix
so that we become normal within the limits of those measurements;
the Heroic Tradition, which says that we are responsible
for everything that happens to us, and anything bad that
happens to us is basically the result of toxins, filth and
bad behavior; and the Wise Woman Tradition, whose symbol
is the spiral, who says that while we are responsible, it
is a co-creative universe. So it’s raining today,
and we both got wet.
Justine: Right.
Susun: Right. Not because we did anything
wrong, but because it is raining. So in the Wise Woman Tradition,
we heal by nourishing the wholeness of the individual in
creative concert with the universe.
Justine: So the key word there is looking
at the wholeness of the individual, not just taking out
a specific part and just looking at that.
Susun: Now, I question how we can feel
whole if we are divided into body, mind and spirit.
Justine: Ah! Ah!
Susun: Have you ever thought about something
that had no effect on your body? Everything we think has
an effect on our body, alright? And what we feel and how
we acknowledge and work with the presence of spirit in our
lives, no matter what we call that, all of that has a physical
effect. Anything we do physically -- we talk about like
runner’s high, alright? -- so what we do physically
impacts on mind and our emotions and they’re all interrelated.
And that’s what the Wise Woman Tradition is about.
It says that the sum of the parts is not the whole, but
that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Justine: There’s something that
I do every day. I check in with my mind/body/spirit. So
when I do that, it’s differentiating between like
if my knee is hurting, that’s not all of who I am
so to say, “OK, my knee is in pain. My mind is clear
and curious, and my spirit is soaring” so that we
don’t --
Susun: You’ve divided yourself into
three parts.
Justine: I have divided myself into three
parts.
Susun: And so you’re no longer whole.
Justine: Ah!
Susun: And that’s what I’m
saying.
Justine: Yes.
Susun: As a matter of fact, you’ve
already disintegrated your wholeness by making your knee
different than you. So the wholeness that I am right now,
is experiencing pain in my knee. In what way can I nourish
myself so that this pain in my knee becomes a doorway to
a greater hologram? So I’m not talking about wholeness;
I’m talking about holographic wholeness. And when
we make a hologram the entire hologram shows us a picture.
And if we were to cut it in half we would see the same picture.
Justine: Exactly. It would be like the
whole.
Susun: The whole. Exactly. You can’t
take any one part of a hologram and say it’s just
a knee. Any one part of it reflects all of the wholeness
at any one time. So I would say that if there’s a
pain in your knee, that that is not a pain that is simply
located in your knee, but a pain that is reverberating throughout
all of you, and that then gives you and I, an opportunity
to see where the whole that creates wholeness, health and
wholiness is. And through that whole, nourishment can arrive.
Justine: So it’s a re-reading of
that whole then. Would that be--
Susun: Well the whole itself, the w-h-o-l-e,
the whole of our pain or our problem is the opening for
health.
Justine: OK so we want to go through that
opening?
Susun: Yeah. In other words, in the Wise
Woman Tradition we don’t seek to cure diseases, to
eliminate pain or to solve problems. Because my understanding
is that’s what we’re here for.
Justine: To solve problems?
Susun: To have problems.
Justine: To have problems <laughs>.
Susun: <laughing> To hang out in
that landscape of difficulty huh?
Justine: Let’s talk more about that
landscape of difficulty in just one moment. I’m speaking
with Susun Weed, author of The New Menopausal Years the
Wise Woman Way. My name is Justine Toms, you’re listening
to New Dimensions.
[break]
Justine: I’m here with Susun Weed,
author of New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way –
Alternative Approaches for Women 30 to 90. Now that’s
a new idea, that we think of menopause just as this one
particular point in life and you’re saying that it’s
a long period of time. Tell us about that.
Susun: Well actually what I’m saying
is that taking care of our health is something that we can
do every day. But tell me, was puberty the day that you
found the first drop of blood in your underpants, Justine.
Justine: No, no.
Susun: Well of course, medically menopause
is defined as the last drop of blood that a woman sheds.
But of course, that’s no more menopause to a woman
than puberty is that one day. Puberty was a period of time
during which as I say, you underwent the changes that made
your 15 year old self vastly different than your 8 year
old self, yes?
Justine: That’s right.
Susun: And not just your body huh?
Justine: That’s right.
Susun: But every single part of you.
Justine: The whole kit and kaboodle.
Susun: The whole right. So similarly with
menopause. Menopause is that period of time during which
we change and we become as different after menopause compared
to before menopause as we were after puberty compared to
before puberty. The biggest difference of course, is that
10, 11, 12, 13 whatever age we hit puberty, we didn’t
think we were supposed to be in control. I often say to
people, “What herbs did you take for puberty?”
and they give me this kind of blank expression and then
smile and say, “Well, nothing”. And I say, “What
makes you think that you need to take anything at all for
menopause?” Menopause is puberty prime, alright? One
of the reasons I think that puberty gets a little more respect
is that both men and women go through it. And men don’t
go through menopause. And so in a way it’s a very
special woman’s issue, something that in fact so far
as we know, no other female species on this planet goes
through, is menopause. Now Kristen Hawkes who works at the
University of Utah and studies hunting/gathering cultures,
especially the Hadza, has found that women in their 60s,
70s and 80s are the most productive members of these communities.
I mean, they out-produce the men, the teenagers, and women
of any younger age. I often talk about getting through the
frumpy 50s and into the scintillating 60s. As a matter of
fact Kristin Hawkes goes further. She says that menopause
is as critically important as a big brain and an upright
posture in making us fully human.
Justine: Now you made a statement that
no other species even other mammals go through this.
Susun: So far as we know. No-one else.
No other species goes through menopause. Right.
Justine: So in other words, let’s
say dogs or horses. They can continue to give birth to the
end of their lives.
Susun: Exactly.
Justine: So they don’t have this
pausing in being able to give birth. So you’re saying
--
Susun: Dr Kristin Hawkes is saying is
that this cessation of our birth giving allows women then
to live another 50 years, because the hormone that is responsible
for ovulation is no longer produced, and that hormone unfortunately
is a hormone that cancer cells love. So we’re born,
as women, making 29 out of the 30 estrogens that we can
make. We’re not born without estrogen. If we were
born without estrogen we would’ve been called Dick
or Peter, right? So we got our girl’s names; that
proves we were producing estrogens. In fact, we produced
it in our mom’s uterus. At puberty however, the 30th
estrogen gets turned on. That’s called the stradiol
– or estradiol – and that estrogen is stronger
than all 29 others combined. Now one of the things that
we find in the Scientific Tradition – we talked about
how in the Wise Woman Tradition the whole was greater than
the sum of its parts. In the Heroic Tradition the whole
is the sum of its parts – body, mind and spirit. In
the Scientific Tradition the whole is equal to the most
active part. So even though you and I and every other woman
produce 29 kinds of estrogen every single day of our lives,
we are told that we stop producing estrogen at menopause.
Which is not true.
Justine: So we continue to produce estrogen
even --
Susun: 29 kinds of it.
Justine: In our 70s, 80s, 90s.
Susun: You got it. Right till <inaudible>.
Justine: But there’s just one estrogen
that --
Susun: Powerful one. Turns on puberty
and off at menopause.
Justine: Off at menopause.
Susun: Right? And it is to cancer as kerosene
is to fire. Does kerosene cause fire?
Justine: No.
Susun: No. Kerosene doesn’t cause
fire and estradiol doesn’t cause breast cancer. And
you know, scientists – and I love ‘em for it
– are very specific about words. Ordinary human beings
are not so specific about words. So when they say, “Oh,
chemicals cause cancer” and scientists say, “No
it doesn’t”, well it doesn’t. But estradiol,
and certain chemicals which act like estradiol, can promote
or feed cancer.
WOMEN'S HEALTH:THE WISE AND NATURAL WAY
Audio tape , 1 hr.
Today, Susun Weed is one of America's foremost authorities
on herbal medicine and natural approaches to women's health.
Susun engages in a fascinating, candid and controversial
dialogue about women's health, natural healing and the "wise
woman" tradition. Susun exposes the illusion about
menopause and hormones, addresses the HRT/cancer connection
and shares information about bone density. She reveals her
knowledge about powerful anti-cancer herbs, and how to prepare
herbal infusions with reverence. (Interview hosted by Justine
Toms). Topics explored in this dialogue include: seeing
yourself as a hologram keeps you healthy; herbal infusions,
how they fully nourish your body; and, the six steps to
personal healing.
Susun Weed's complete interview is available from Ash Tree
Publishing
Mail $12 to Susun Weed PO Box 64 Woodstock, NY 12498
or order online at http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/