~ Know that it’s part of the Great Mystery why some people open their hearts to themselves and do the work of healing and others do not. Still, maintain hope and compassion, no matter how dim they may seem.
~ Rather than take on the impossible burden of thinking it is our job to fix others, we must also remember that the biggest gift we can give to another is a healed, joyful, and compassionate heart. And that is, and always will be, an inside job.
Whether or not you get a new pet, a new job, or a new mate, midlife is a time of rebirth. The newly opening midlife heart is tender, green, and new. Don’t allow it to be stepped on. Learn how to protect yourself; ask for help and allow yourself to receive it. Take heart. Have heart. Open your heart and let its wisdom lead you home.
EPILOGUE
The Calm After the Storm
One day during the winter after my divorce, I awoke at six to go to my regular morning exercise class in Portland. Though the weather report said it was raining, I opened the door and walked out into a snowstorm that was dumping about two inches an hour all around me. Nevertheless, I set out. After all, I’m a veteran of snowbelt winters in western New York. As I headed south, however, I could scarcely see, and I briefly considered turning around. But in my characteristically stoic fashion I continued, certain that the weather would lighten up momentarily. Suddenly my car started fishtailing. I was spinning in a circle, wildly out of control and heading for the guardrails. I braced myself for the crash, wondering simultaneously whether I would survive being broadsided by the oncoming traffic. After my car slammed to a halt against guardrails cushioned by snow, I braced for further collisions. Miraculously, the cars behind me were able to stop in time. Not sure what to do next, I hesitantly put my car into gear. I was able to pull out onto the highway, and I slowly continued my drive into Portland. As I entered the city the weather did indeed clear, and I ended up going to my class. Though I was shaken, the damage to my car was mostly cosmetic—I had shattered my left rear bumper, nothing else. I felt very lucky. I knew that I could have been killed.
My accident seemed like a swift energetic reenactment of my perimenopause, complete with the shattering of my marriage and of the parts of my personality that now needed to die if I was to stay healthy and grow. The accident happened almost one year to the day from the time when my husband and I had separated and started divorce proceedings. For the past year my old life and personality had, like my vehicle on that icy road, been seized by a force beyond my control. Despite my worst fears, I had ended up able to move forward under my own power. And though at the time the impact of the breakup had felt as though it might destroy some essential part of me, the damage, like the damage to my car, turned out to be largely cosmetic. My life no longer looked as picture-perfect as it once had. Yet I discovered that the only thing of true significance that had been shattered was the closely guarded and comforting illusion that something or someone outside of myself could and should save me from living the life that I was destined to live. After twenty-four years of marriage, I had managed to spend a year without a man. I had survived a great deal of grief and pain, found that I was able to support my children and myself, and, though shaken, had emerged more fearless than ever before.
FROM KARMA INTO GRACE
As I write this now, it has been twelve years since my divorce. If you had asked me a year ago if I was over the breakup of my marriage, I’d have replied with a resounding yes. I had met a wonderful man several years before and had moved on in so many ways. On the night that I taped my latest PBS show, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, I was entertaining a houseful of women ranging in age from twenty-seven to sixty. As we were digesting the eventful evening of making a TV show, one of the women asked to see a picture of my former husband. I retrieved from a drawer one in which my husband was sailing and looked particularly handsome and daring—shirtless, to reveal his six-pack abs, his glorious hair blowing, taking a godlike stance at the helm. One of the women said, “Oh my goodness!” I said, “Yeah, I didn’t stand a chance.” And then, rather than simply taking in the compliments about how good he had looked, I felt compelled to drag out the parts of the divorce story that painted me as the victim and him as the perpetrator.
The next morning, my friend Lori Sutherland (www.damelori.com) told me that she had been unable to sleep the night before, and that she had decided to take a big risk and tell me how much anger she felt in me around my former husband. “If you ever expect to be truly happy with a man,” she said, “you’re going to have to find the perfection in how your marriage ended.”
I knew in a heartbeat that she was absolutely correct. I had thought that my anger was a thing of the past. Yet it had arisen, unbidden, as I had run for the victim position in talking about him, wanting to justify how I had been wronged. Lori suggested that I write him a letter outlining the perfection of the entire relationship, including its ending—and then read the letter out loud. So that very night, on the full Wolf Moon of January, I sat down with Amy Sky’s song “Love Never Fails” playing, propped up my husband’s beefcake picture in front of me, lit a candle, and started to write him a love letter.
I wrote about how swept away I had been by him, the handsome surgical intern I’d met when I was finishing medical school. How supportive he had been about me going into OB-GYN. How he’d taught me to tie surgical knots on my big toe. I waxed eloquent about how romantic and magical our courtship in the hospital had been, how wonderful it had felt to enter my internship happily married to someone I adored coming home to at night, and how he had made a home possible because he had enough money for a down payment.
And as I continuing writing, the most amazing thing happened. All the love that I had ever felt for this man came roaring back. To my amazement, it was all still there. It hadn’t gone anywhere! What a revelation! As I kept writing, I realized with great clarity that his behavior toward me had, in fact, been perfect. It was this behavior that had freed me to become the happy, healthy, successful woman I am now. I knew, deep inside, that if he had behaved any other way, I never would have had the courage or impetus to learn about business, finance, and truly taking care of myself in the world. There are no mistakes. The health of the second chakra is secured by our relationship to money, sex, and power, and I’d had some big lessons to learn about money. He had helped me learn them.
When I was finished with the letter and had cried myself out, I called Lori. She suggested that I read the letter out loud to my daughters and to the same women who had been at my house the evening before. I arranged a conference call, lit a candle, and read the letter. I was in tears the whole time. And so was everyone else on the call, including my daughters. They had never heard the entire story of our courtship before—something that surprised me. And hearing about it in detail healed something deep within them. They realized that they had been conceived and brought up with love—that their mom and dad’s relationship was not a mistake, and neither were they. My deep forgiveness of and love for their father—all expressed in that letter—gave them their father back completely.
Then Lori suggested, “How about you take it even higher? Read it to him.”
I gulped, but then I thought, Well, why not? I had nothing to lose. So I emailed him (he was living in London with his wife and young child) and requested that he allow me to read him a letter. It took him a while to respond. When he did, he asked me to give him some details. I told him that I had realized that I was still holding some anger about the divorce and had written a letter to him to help me forgive and release. I said that it would be an honor for me if he’d allow me to read the letter to him. He agreed, and we set up a time.
There I was, sitting in Maine in the candlelight, while he was in London, sitting comfortably in a chair, undisturbed and willing to receive what I had to say. I read him the letter, tears flowing. And when I was finished, I started to get off the phone. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t go.” And then he said, “I know that you believe in parallel universes
more than I do. But I believe that there’s a place in the universe where we’re still going on.” And then he told me that he hoped with all his heart that I would find someone who truly deserved me. We talked about our daughters for a bit, then parted. The sweetness of that moment brings me to tears once again as I write this.
A couple of days later, he sent me an email, thanking me for his early Valentine’s Day present. We haven’t spoken since. We don’t need to. My divorce is truly final. I have finally moved on. And there’s not a cell in my body that feels anything but happiness and completion when I think of him.
I was relating this story to a good friend, also a doctor, who is in her eighties. She herself went through an awful divorce when she was seventy and found out that her husband had been having an affair with the office manager. I won’t go into the details except to say that I had always thought she and her husband had the ideal marriage. They had traveled together, practiced medicine together, and had six wonderful children—many of whom also became doctors. And so her divorce was a true shock to me. That was many years ago, and he has since died.
But when I told her my story, she shared the following: “One morning I awakened and felt Jim with me. And for one year, we were together again. I relived all the wonderful adventures we had had—climbing the pyramids, skiing, traveling around the world, playing with our children. It was wonderful. And then, on what would have been our sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, he left and went back into spirit. I feel complete and at peace around the whole thing. We have moved from karma into grace.”
As we round the corner into midlife, we can be sure that with each ensuing year our unfinished business will keep rearing its head until we deal with it once and for all. By dealing with the final pieces of anger and resentment against my former husband, I changed both my daughters’ and my own legacy around men. So did my old friend. She, too, told me that her children (midlife individuals themselves) were similarly healed by what happened between their parents. It is never too late.
AWAKENING TO OUR POWER, AWAKENING TO
BEAUTY AND PLEASURE
We’re waking up together, you and I. Don’t let anyone tell you that the passions that are now shaking you to the core are simply a hormonal storm. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re asking too much or that you should be more “realistic.” Your passions are real, and they are calling out to you to be acted upon. But don’t panic if you feel some pain. Whenever we give birth to anything important, like the new relationship with our souls that is possible at midlife, there are going to be labor pains. You don’t have to make this transition overnight. You have months, even years.
Never forget that the big wisdom of life comes at menopause. There is enormous power here. Though the mainstream media has tried to make midlife women all but invisible, we’re at a turning point. There is a critical mass of us, and we’re beginning to know our own power. No one yet suspects how much we can accomplish when we go into our businesses, churches, clubs, and families and, quietly and peacefully, like the stealth missiles we are, set about changing everything for the better.
What happens when each of us, in her own unique way, starts refusing to say the lines that have been handed to us, refuses to play the roles that we’ve inherited from the women before us—women who did the best they could but whose roles are now as obsolete as the role I chose to play in my marriage back in the 1970s?
By the year 2008, women between the ages of fifty and sixty-five had become the largest demographic group in the United States. And for the first time in recorded history, the money we have and use is money we have earned ourselves. This changes everything! What happens when we wake up to the power that had always been there but that our mothers and grandmothers had been talked out of? What happens when, because of our sheer numbers and the circumstances of our formative years, we wake up and realize that the people we’ve been waiting for are us? As we flex our economic, mental, physical, and, yes, romantic, muscles and put our resources where our ideals are, the world begins to change in ways that reflect our inherent women’s wisdom, wisdom that has the potential to benefit every woman, man, child, and living being on this planet.
Let me end on a provocative note. We midlife women are rapidly changing the outdated archetype of the crone who lives alone in the woods. We are sexier, happier, and healthier than ever. In fact, I am enjoying more male attention than I ever have before. But to get to this place of truly enjoying and co-creating with men, I first had to make the sacred marriage within myself—the wedding of the inner masculine and feminine. I had to become the man I always wanted to marry. This wasn’t easy, and I resisted at every turn. But I have done it, and nothing is more empowering. I will never again need to ask permission to spend money, nor do I need a man to provide it for me. This is true not only for me, but for millions of other women.
This fact frees us to have real relationships and full lives that are authentically our own, crafted by the dictates of our souls. This includes relationships based not on control and economic need, but instead on pleasure, freedom, beauty, joy, uplifting service, co-creation, and companionship. In every cell of my body, I know that the best is yet to come and that everything that has happened up until this point has been but a preview of the productive and delightful years ahead. Trust me—it gets better. And it will all work out just fine.
Resources
Note: The phone numbers and websites listed in this section were current as of the publication date of the book.
General Resources
Women’s Health Resources from Christiane Northrup, M.D.
Christiane Northrup, M.D., F.A.C.O.G., P.O. Box 199, Yarmouth, ME 04096; www.drnorthrup.com.
Dr. Northrup’s interactive website (www.drnorthrup.com) and Facebook page (listed under Dr. Christiane Northrup) are the best places to find regularly updated information on her lectures and other resources. Answers to many of her readers’ most frequently asked questions can be found on her website, www.drnorthrup.com. (See below.)
Flourish! With Dr. Christiane Northrup
This series of conversations between Dr. Northrup and a number of extraordinary minds (including Dr. Wayne Dyer, Cheryl Richardson, Dr. Bruce Lipton, and others) airs every Wednesday from 11:00 a.m. to noon, Eastern time, on Hay House Radio (www.hayhouseradio.com). The show offers insights and inspiration for creating a vibrant, healthy, pleasurable life, as opposed to simply avoiding disease. To read about upcoming guests and to listen to previous shows from the archives, go to www.hayhouseradio.com, click on the “Show Hosts” link on the left-hand side, and then click on “Dr. Christiane Northrup.”
E-LETTER
Women’s Health Wisdom Monthly E-Letter
Through her monthly e-letter, Dr. Northrup provides a forum for discussing safe, effective, and natural approaches to flourishing in a female body at any age. With her characteristic compassion, she presents the most up-to-date information on topics from help for hot flashes to choosing the best foods for your body. E-letter subscribers also have access to a wide range of products and services designed to help women live their lives more fully and healthfully. Available at www.drnorthrup.com.
HEALING CARDS AND HEALING CARDS APP
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom Healing Cards, a Fifty-Card Deck
and Guidebook
The Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom Healing Cards were created by Christiane Northrup, M.D., to help women reach clarity, fulfillment, and success in each of five major life areas: fertility and creativity, partnership, nurturance and self-care, self-expression, and the development of an enlightened heart and mind. The deck comes with a seventy-two-page instruction booklet that offers a variety of practical ways to access intuitive, grounded information on a number of issues. Available from Hay House, Inc. (800-654-5126 or 760-431-7695; www.hayhouse.com) or www.drnorthrup.com. Also available as an app for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad at www.hayhouse.com, at www.drnorthrup.com, or through iTunes.
; BOOKS
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional
Health and Healing (Bantam, 2010)
This groundbreaking book is now completely revised and transformed into the ultimate manual for how to flourish in a female body. It addresses the entire range of women’s health concerns and how to transform them.
With more than 1.9 million copies now in print, sold in twenty countries, Dr. Northrup’s first book has been described as contemporary medicine at its best, combining new technologies with natural remedies and the miraculous healing powers within the body, mind, and spirit themselves.
The Secret Pleasures of Menopause (Hay House, 2008)
Dr. Northrup’s latest major book delivers a breakthrough message that will help perimenopausal and menopausal women understand that at menopause, life has just begun. This is the beginning of a very exciting and fulfilling time, full of pleasure beyond your wildest dreams!
The Secret Pleasures of Menopause Playbook (Hay House, 2009)
This companion volume to The Secret Pleasures of Menopause serves as a personal guide to the territory of life-giving pleasure, with space provided to write down and commit to your own personal pleasure plan.
Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Understanding the Crucial Link Between
Mothers, Daughters, and Health (Bantam, 2005)
Dr. Northrup’s third book explains how the mother-daughter relationship sets the stage for our state of health and well-being for our entire lives. Because our mothers are our first and most powerful female role models, our most deeply ingrained beliefs about ourselves as women come from them. And our behavior in relationships—with food, with our children, with our mates, and with ourselves—is a reflection of those beliefs. The latest science on prenatal influences also documents that what happens in utero may affect us for our entire lives. In this book, Dr. Northrup shows how once we understand our mother-daughter bonds, we can rebuild our own health, whatever our age, and create a lasting positive legacy for the next generation.
The Wisdom of Menopause Page 77
