Speaking our truth

Christiane Northup's book “Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom” was one of the most important books to help me start my healing process a few years ago, it was, in fact, THE book with which I started that path, without realizing the impact and consequences it would have on my life after reading it.

This book helped me to reconnect with my feminine side, to know that I had a right to my emotions, to become aware of the consequences of patriarchy and masculinity, and it was the beginning of my opening up to the world of spirituality. It also helped me to become aware of the toxicity in my relationships, both love, friendship, and family relationships.

I hope that with these short texts about this book, I can help inspire someone to make changes in their own lives, just as I started that process six years ago. A process, I later discovered, that never ends, only when we die.

As the book covers many topics, I've decided to divide the posts by each chapter of the book, making things, I hope, more digestible.

The book begins by talking about the importance of speaking our truth, we spend so much of our lives hiding who we are, what we think and feel, afraid of what others will think and/or say, only to realize, in the end, that no one is concerned with what we do or don't do, everyone is concerned with the same thing we are, themselves! Says the author “... I had learned a lesson about self-conviction, accepting that everyone around me would be interested in what I would say or do when, in fact, everyone had their own life to worry about. My biggest lesson was learning that my fear was just that... a problem that only concerned me and that it was time to let it go.”

Speaking our truth has a healing effect on our lives, it helps us free ourselves from the bonds of society, and our conditioning and to live by being ourselves without fear of other people's judgments.

How many of us dare to speak our truth? To act according to who you are and not according to the expectations you think others have of you?

For most of my life I've lived with the need to give the image of being “good”, the good girl, the good daughter, the good friend, the good partner, if I wasn't “good” then what could I be? I thought being the good “everything” was the only way to ensure that everyone liked me and I needed that like someone who needs air to breathe! But the funniest thing was that I later discovered that when we are ourselves, and when we live and speak our truth, we keep those who really like us in our lives and drive away those who are just taking advantage of our goodness (because we are no longer useful in their lives), and better still, we become happier.

Once we learn to live our truth, we realize that every action we take affects our health, both mental and physical, meaning that, if all our actions are aimed at taking care of others and never ourselves, our bodies will complain, our bodies will give us all the signals we need to listen to it. What we need is to learn to listen to and respect the messages that our bodies are constantly sending us and to realize that the more we ignore these messages, the louder and more serious they will become, to the point where it will be impossible to ignore them.

The author had the following to say about this: “... in my eagerness to take care of others, I had left myself behind. However, my body hadn't let me neglect it any longer and it had taught me an important lesson: our body's symptoms have meanings that go beyond the immediate health problem they are warning us about. Carl Jung said that we can benefit emotionally, physically, and spiritually if we pay attention to our body's messages.”

The author goes on to say: “... I have observed many women whose illnesses cannot simply be attributed to what they eat and cannot be cured by drugs or surgeries alone. Going on a specific diet or running four kilometers a day won't make a woman feel healthy if she continues to live with an active alcoholic or workaholic, or if she has been the victim of incest and can't feel the emotions that are often associated with that story. However, trying to make dietary changes and creating alternatives to medication and surgeries can be the first steps in helping a woman look at her health differently. With a new way of looking at their bodies and themselves, they often begin to heal not only mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, but also physically. ... In the stories of these women, we can look at illnesses as signs to wake up... Although these experiences were painful for the women involved, it was as if they gave their bodies back to them, allowing a new awareness of what is important in life. My illness showed me that my health is a process of balance and that, after having ignored my body and my inner identity for so many years, I had to look inward to find the answers to the questions raised by the health problems and challenges faced by myself and other women.”

In my personal experience, by wanting to be a “good girl” I spent a lot of time looking after others and very little time looking after myself, it was almost as if I hated myself to a degree that I punished myself with a lack of self-care actions. Of course, this led to a series of health problems, one after the other, each one more serious than the last. It seemed that as soon as I was out of one, I was in another, with hardly any time to breathe. It was my body asking me to please take care of myself, to look at myself and see what I was causing myself, “please look at yourself, take care of yourself, look inside yourself, and see that you have everything you need to be healthy and happy”. But I didn't listen, I couldn't. In one of my health problems I almost died, and I still didn't change my behavior. The next time, I finally decided to change my diet. I thought it was going to be the cure-all in my life, but it wasn't, although it was at least a first step in that direction. It was only much later that I truly understood Carl Jung's message, that healing involves treating all levels, the physical, the mental, and the spiritual, and that the power to achieve this balance lies within us.

“...it doesn't require perfection. It requires each of us to do our best, remembering that no one can determine our lives for us. Only we can do things for ourselves, and we need to make a conscious effort to do so. I'm not trying to say that this is easy. Each of us needs support and guidance”. This reminds us, that perfection doesn't exist and we can kill ourselves trying to achieve it. The only thing we can do is try to be a better version of ourselves today than we were yesterday; if we focus on this, life will become much easier and healthier. And try to create a support network around us, because although we were taught that to be truly independent we had to do everything on our own, the truth is that with support we get much further and less exhausted.

I end this first article of this book with the goal that the author wants to achieve with this book: “I want to wake up this small, wise, and intuitive voice that we all have, the voice of our bodies that we have been forced to ignore through the illness, misinformation and dysfunction of our culture. And I want to give you the courage to listen to this voice and act on it. ... to trust what we already know inside of us: that our bodies are an ally and will always be pointing us in the direction we need to go next.”

In conclusion, trust yourself, your intuition and your body, no one else will guide you better than yourselves.