Women’s Health: How Empowerment is Prevention
Empowerment is prevention. From a health perspective, empowering ourselves to express what’s on our minds, take responsibility for our happiness and inner peace, and operate from a place of true freedom is truly the best prevention for disease, for men and women alike.
2017 was a historical year for women’s empowerment. This huge shift in the female collective consciousness is not just a reaction the recent political and cultural events, but is also partly due to a growing appreciation of the mind-body-spirit connection in disease prevention: that emotional health is essential for physical health.
When you think about it, this makes complete sense. Repressed feelings and memories, the inability to move on past a trauma, harboring resentments that eat away at you year after year, enduring oppressive and damaging circumstances without having an outlet or resolution -- these are constant, chronic emotional stresses. Good health depends on the free flow of energy throughout your body, to paraphrase a well-known Chinese medicine proverb. Negative feelings and chronic stress leads to chronically blocked energy, predisposing one to many symptoms and illnesses.
Emotional health is especially key for women’s health not only because women historically have been more oppressed and silenced than men, but also because stress actually specifically and profoundly affects women’s health conditions. The major organs energetically responsible for processing chronic emotional stress are also the ones, incidentally, that play a major role in regulating female hormones and the reproductive cycle. So when these organs are pulling more than their fair share of managing and helping one’s body recover from stress, they have less energy to spare for their other important job of ensuring that everything is running smoothly in the area of reproductive and hormonal health.
Here’s a thought-provoking, even more empowering perspective on the mind-body-spirit connection and the spiritual purpose of disease: women’s health issues are on the rise precisely to increase awareness for our need for agency, to feel heard, to feel empowered. From the spiritual perspective, your body creates disease not because of poor emotional health but to inspire you to seek better emotional health and true fulfillment in life. Your body never lies when it comes to the state of your happiness and freedom. Your mind, subject to the influence of societal conditioning, might try to fool you, but your body will always tell you, via uncomfortable ailments, when and if you can do more to empower yourself to be true to yourself and your desires, for deep inner peace and contentment.
That’s the real purpose of disease: to let us know that we are at dis-ease, and to motivate us to seek ease, by any means necessary. Once you figure out what you need to change and take action, that’s when your physical symptoms, even serious conditions, will miraculously disappear. So if you suffer from health issues, either recent or lifelong, consider this: it’s a positive message from your body that you’re ready for empowerment, to completely change your life because you are worth it, that you deserve to pursue the amazing journey of freedom, enjoyment, and creativity that you were born to have in this reality, this time and place.
