by Karen Bouris: Dr. Christiane Northrup, the author of groundbreaking books including the best-selling Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, and The Wisdom of Menopause, spent decades as a physician in the field of obstetrics and gynecology before her writing on women’s health made her one of the country’s leading voices on how women can empower themselves to take charge of their own bodies—and happiness.
Releasing her first book for children, Beautiful Girl, earlier this year, Dr. Northrup has also written and spoken candidly on her own journey through motherhood, divorce, and menopause and on how she has pursued and found joy through passions like the Argentine tango.
She spoke with S&H editor in chief Karen Bouris.
I see a lot of women in their 70s and 80s dealing with depression as they get older. Where does that come from?
First, let me just say that what I’ve witnessed in my own mother is exactly the opposite. She’s 87, and her best friend is 90. And they are having the time of their lives—planning to drive my mom’s RV to Alaska this summer. This is possible because neither is afraid of death, and both know how life-giving it is to pursue their passions.
But my response to your question is that we live in a culture where for the last 5,000 years there’s been a patriarchy, where everything male is more welcome than anything female. This isn’t, you know, men against women—it’s the masculine yang versus the feminine yin. So within that mind-set, we’re all drenched with the idea that as a woman, the only time you’re truly valuable is between the ages of 18 and 25, maybe 30. In fact, my daughters have friends who are terrified of turning 30.
So if you’re terrified of turning 30, then you’re really terrified of turning 40. Fifty is even worse. Sixty you don’t want to talk about, and from then on in our culture it’s pretty much downhill.
OK, now you’re 75 or 80. These are the last remaining women of the World War II generation. They missed this incredible shift that happened in the ’60s—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, gay liberation. They still thought that the deal was, you get married, and you have children, and a man will take care of you the rest of your life. And then they found that that’s not true. They bought the myth, and they sacrificed their own happiness for their children, for their men, for their sons, and then at the end of the day they were left with nothing. So that depression is actually anger turned inward.
Then here’s what they do: They become a burden for you, the daughter, so that your job is to make them happy and take care of them, and then the mother-daughter chain of pain continues. So the key is to understand that every woman has the keys to the kingdom inside herself, and those keys are found in doing those things that she loves to do.
You’ve talked before about this pervasive belief that the female body is flawed and that we’re always at war with our bodies. What is that about?
You have a cycle where you bleed in tune with the moon. It is the cycle responsible for all human life on earth. It is the cycle that connects you to your creativity and to the very essence of the tide coming in, the tide going out, the seasons, the sap going into the roots and then rising up, and we have been taught for 5,000 years to be ashamed of that cycle. Wow. People ask me, How is this connected to health? I can’t separate it out. It’s all about health.
What our culture does is make people think, I’m a sitting duck for cancer. My female organs are precancerous lesions in my body. It’s only a matter of time. That’s what we’re all taught. The whole discussion about women’s health in our culture is just disease screening, right? Get your boobs crushed, get a Pap smear—there’s not one thing that’s actually helping you get healthy.
Can you reframe this for women by talking about what is right about our bodies?
Well, let’s start with the most fun we can have, which is the female erotic anatomy. This is our inner guidance system. Did you know that we have as much erectile tissue inside our pelvis as men have? Only, theirs is on the outside. What we have is the clitoris, which is the only organ in the human body whose sole function is pleasure. And the clitoris has two roots deeper into the pelvis that are connected to the periurethral sponge, the perianal sponge, and erectile tissue in both of the major lips, and then of course there’s the G-spot. So what happens is, when you’re really integrated as a woman and you’re turned on to what brings the most life force into your body, you will feel it in your pelvis.
We have been taught to be afraid of it, or to funnel all of that energy into one exclusive sexual relationship. So women have this guidance system, but many are cut off from it. They live from the waist up, so to speak. But if God created us as women so that we have this anatomy that gets turned on by things that are helpful and inspiring and pleasurable, then that says something to me about what we’re meant to do here on earth.
What about the menstrual cycle?
It’s so sacred. Several days before and then into your period, the right hemisphere of the brain gets activated, and this hemisphere has more connection with the physical body. That means if there’s any part of your life that’s out of balance, you will know about it. We call that PMS. However, let’s say that your life is pretty balanced. Everything that moves you emotionally, everything that touches your soul—you have much deeper access to that part of yourself just before and during your period. So people will also often get their best ideas during this time of the month.
Now, when you start your period, you need to have a day or two of rest. My daughter was asking me about this because she has so much trouble with the idea of resting. I said, “Honey, it’s really simple. Remember when you were in high school and your whole class was going to climb a mountain, and it was cold, and you just started your period? And I said, ‘You don’t need to go. You don’t need to prove anything—just don’t go.’”
The first and second day of your period for many women, every cell in your body wants to turn inward, take a bath, dream, recreate, rest, and restore. It gives you this incredible monthly cycle to tap into, but what do we do? We fight it because we’re told this is a sign of weakness.
What happens when we fight it?
Right. So what are we doing with medicine? We say, “Let’s put you on birth control pills. We’ll, quote, ‘regulate your cycle.’” What’s that mean? That’s like putting duct tape over the indicator light on your dashboard and then saying, “Well,
we fixed it.”
Can you give us a new story to tell ourselves about menopause? A lot of women dread this stage of our lives.
Well, menopause is when you really move into your goddess energy in a big way. You’re no longer losing your blood, so you move into this phase now where your FSH and LH hormones in the pituitary gland are at the same levels as when you’re ovulating. And for many women that is their peak time of sexual desire, but it’s also when they become maximally receptive to the input of others.
So now, as you begin to go through perimenopause, you begin to skip ovulation. Many women get estrogen dominance for a while, and the hormones of the change will actually activate old memories in the amygdala, which is the place in the brain that stores strong emotions. Now is the time in your life when you have enough ego strength to finally deal with this stuff, so I like to call it PMS on steroids.
But remember, your FSH and LH hormones are now permanently at the level at which they were when you were ovulating, and for the rest of your life they stay up there. That’s one reason a lot of women in their 60s and 70s are having the best sex of their lives.
I love how you focus on how our bodies can give us important information about ourselves. What kind of information are you getting from your body these days?
For about two years I had a frozen shoulder on the left—excruciating pain, where I couldn’t even put my arm behind my back. I worked with the chiropractor, worked with my Pilates teacher, but I actually knew the whole time that it was emotional.
Once you realized that the source of your pain was motional, what did you do about it?
The first thing to do, which I did, is just acknowledge that there’s an emotional aspect to the pain. Then I went to Pilates regularly to move the joint and open my chest and heart area. My Pilates teacher and I both learned some shamanic imprint-removal techniques, and we started to work with the emotional energy of the shoulder. Lots of past-life stuff came up, and also some heartbreak in this life. And I discovered that what this all was about was the need to open my heart to my deep grief about being single.
What we women are sure of is that there’s a man out There who will complete us. That’s what every movie tells us. But what it’s really about is doing that inner work of completing oneself. I had to go through tremendous, yearning, longing grief, giving it to the earth and using tango, which I love to do as a spiritual practice, to come into my own, to stand in my space.
Peter Calhoun, the shaman, said we transform ourselves through primal experiences of ecstasy in the body. It ain’t intellectual from therapy, folks. It’s the primal experience of ecstasy in the body.
So dancing is the cure.
I just knew that I wanted to dance that way. What I didn’t realize is how life-changing that would be for me.
You know, I didn’t set out to write the definitive guide to midlife for women. But my approach has always been to share my personal journey as the most authentic expression of my teaching, so I really believe that I chose this life, this situation, this everything, so that I could feel every bit of what I was teaching.
Dr. Christiane Northrup answers your health Questions
I’d like your advice about how a patient can be proactive about their health care. I am the daughter of a breast cancer Survivor, and all of the women on my dad’s side of the family have had breast cancer. I am researching genetic testing, but I am pretty sure just getting the test will be an uphill battle, let alone what I would do with any information I get. How do I best advocate for myself? —Erin
Let’s start with a genetics lesson. Just having a genetic tendency toward a disease doesn’t mean that you are destined to get that disease—and for the record, most women who get breast cancer have no genetic tendencies toward it. But even if a person has a genetic tendency, whether or not that tendency becomes a disease is greatly dependent on controllable factors like diet, stress levels, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, vitamin D levels, etc. In other words, we are not sitting ducks for the vast majority of diseases that “run in our families.”
Unfortunately, modern medicine—which focuses mainly on drugs and surgery—is not very good at counseling people about how to deal with the results of genetic testing if they show a risk. So let’s say that you get the genetic test and it shows an increased risk for breast cancer. How are you going to use that information? Will it improve your quality of life or take away from it? Do you know how you can change your gene expression proactively? Or are you likely to get prophylactic mastectomies at an early age—just in case?
So if I were a woman with any kind of family history of anything, I would do two things. One, I would say, “How can I live the healthiest and most joyful life possible—no matter what?” Number two, I’d get my vitamin D level checked.
I would also be getting regular thermography tests—a type of test that determines heat patterns in the body. Abnormal heat patterns are associated with cellular inflammation—the root cause of nearly all cancers. And the good news is that cellular inflammation can be addressed, monitored, and healed with lifestyle changes such as diet, supplements, exercise, and living wholeheartedly.
I deal with major anxiety and sleeping problems, and it seems like so many women I know have the same issue. What’s happening with us women in our 30s and 40s? —Karen
What’s happening is that your feminine essence is crying out for you to listen and for you to sink into deep, deep rest. I’ll tell you where I would start with that, and that is I would make sure that I was getting enough magnesium, maybe 500, 800 milligrams a day, and I would take magnesium baths or use magnesium lotion.
You also need to make sure the room where you sleep is really dark, with no computers or gadgets. One of the biggest contributors to adrenal fatigue is being wired on Facebook or e-mail just before you go to bed, so you’ve got to have a going-to-bed routine.
One other thing that helps this enormously is standing on the earth for 15 to 20 minutes a day barefoot. It actually decreases cellular inflammation, and you’re able to sleep better.
Finally, for many women, drinking coffee anytime after noon can be a sleep problem, even iced tea sometimes. You get increasingly sensitive to these things, the older you get.
If you could recommend one daily or weekly practice, what would you have me do for maximum health benefit? —Courtney
I would take you over to your mirror. I would look in your mirror with your eyes, and I would say, “I love you. I really love you.” And by day 21, I would wait to see your inner self gazing back at you through those eyes, and then I would do what she tells me to do. Because if you’re trying to goose yourself into health out of fear, you’re never going to be healthy. If you run, if you eat, just because you’re trying to prevent something, then that energy pervades the activity. If on the other hand, the activity is imbued with the joy, the pleasure, the wonder of being in a physical body, that’s a real different thing.