Women's Intuition: Unlocking the Wisdom of Your Body - Softcover

Reeves PhD, Paula M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573241563 ISBN 13: 9781573241564

Publisher: Conari Press, 1999

Synopsis

Women's Intuition is real, says Paula Reeves. Encoded in a woman's DNA, this subtle yet potent source of knowledge has been doubted and dismissed as an old wives' tale. Because social conditioning and maledominated culture have caused women to feel disconnected from their own bodies, Dr. Reeves believes that most women are unaware of what their intuition is trying to tell them.

In Women's Intuition, Dr. Reeves guides readers to remove the blocks preventing this channel of knowledge from informing and enriching their daily lives. By evoking bodybased intuition, readers can reestablish their bodymind bond and access their intuitive power for healing and insight.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Reeves, Ph.D., is a wellknown workshop leader in the fields og psychology and psychoneuroimmunology, creator of the Spontaneous Contemplative Movement program, and a therapist in private practice. Widely published in academic journals, she lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Women's Intuition

Unlocking the Wisdom of the Body

By Paula M. Reeves

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 1999 Paula M. Reeves
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-156-4

Contents

Foreword by Marion Woodman
Introduction
Chapter One Reconnecting to Our Body Wisdom
Chapter Two Finding a Map to the BodyMind
Chapter Three Spontaneous Contemplative Movement
Chapter Four Soul Talk: Learning the Language of Spontaneous 
Contemplative Movement
Chapter Five Tenuous Beginnings: Soul's First Relationship with Matter
Chapter Six The Self-Betrayal in Disowning Our Mother
Chapter Seven Meeting the Loathly Lady: Coming to Peace with Our Female 
Bodies
Chapter Eight Trusting Intuition to Lead Us
Chapter Nine Rediscovering Your Intuitive Capacity
Chapter Ten Embodied Relationship: Intuition's Role in the Healing of 
Humankind
Afterword by Belleruth Naparstek
Acknowledgments
Music Appendix
Bibliography
Index

CHAPTER 1

Reconnecting to Our Body Wisdom

In 1988, Holgar Kalweit wrote: "Only human beings have come to a point wherethey no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains and they haveforgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams.They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they arenot even aware of this, and so they stumble blindly on the road to nowhere...."

As these words were written, a group of ordinary women were meeting at thebehest of Sharon, a mutual friend. Sharon's daughter, Lila, had prematurelydelivered twin boys, both of whom were gravely ill. Sharon awakened oneafternoon from a nap with the distinct impression that if she gathered togethera circle of her closest female friends they would know how to heal the babies.She spoke to her daughter, asking Lila's permission to follow her inclination.

At her invitation the women met, listened to the grandmother, and decided toform a circle and let intuition be their guide. Before they parted that evening,they knew their contribution was to keep the boys' photos within a symboliccircle of healing energy. Solemnly pledging to do so, they sent for photographs,agreeing to meet again in a few days. After three weeks of meeting for severalhours each week and sharing how their bodies felt as they thought about theboys, one of the women in the circle asked if she were the only one who had anintuition that the continuing deterioration of one of the twins was linked tothe emotional health of the mother. Others agreed; they too had the sameinsight. One women said that when she first became aware of this feeling, shefelt like she had a "band around my heart. I knew that something was causingLila heartache and preventing her from being able to love both boys equally."With her permission, Lila's picture was added to the circle. On the eighthnight, two of the women came in and said they had strong feelings that both boyswere going to be fine. One reported she was taking a shower "when I thought ofthe boys and I wanted to laugh and sing." Six weeks later the pediatricianconfirmed their "remarkable recovery" and the group turned their attentionelsewhere.

I was part of this circle, and the experience only strengthened my convictionthat women are often more far more effective and influential when they trusttheir intuition to guide them in situations when intellect is not enough. Thetwins were under the care of an excellent physician, yet the intuition of thesewomen, myself included, led them to create a healing ritual that complementedwhat was being done.

Finding Our True Home

Each of us has the capacity for intuition—that sudden inexplicable insight thattells us we know something we had no idea we knew. By nature, we women arehighly intuitive. By puberty we are learning how to direct our attention to themyriad of internal signals that are preparing us for menarche and childbirth.For each of us this heightened sensitivity introduces the strong true strain ofintuitive wisdom that reposes within us and is expressed by our bodies as much,if not more, than by our minds. That's because intuition is a gut response—butterfliesin the stomach, a twinge in the solar plexus, a sudden shiver, or aflutter of heartbeats. These are the signs that something is going on beneaththe surface of things—that we are being alerted by signals from an embodiednonverbal wisdom—our intuition.

While it's true that everyone has intuition, not all of us have the samecapacity to use it. There are many women who are highly intuitive and sopracticed at using this function of the bodymind that they take it for granted.Others feel their intuition is a disposable gift, arriving unexpectedly andrather inexplicably, to be accepted, marveled over, and discarded when thenovelty has worn thin. Others treat their intuition with suspicion, avoiding itas they would a threatening mystery. And there are those of us who seldom, ifever, recognize its presence, discounting the multiple ways we all accessintuition daily as habit, lucky guesses, or even coincidence.

In actuality, intuition is a major part of all your decision making and everycreative inspiration. The dictionary defines intuition as an immediatecognition; sharp insight; the act or faculty of knowing without the use ofrational processes. In other words, knowing what, moments before, you didn'tknow you knew. Medical intuitive Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D. says, "If you have abrain and a body, if you have memories, if you sleep at night (or any othertime), then by definition you have to be, you are, intuitive." When you arecooking and you creatively add an unexpected seasoning you just feel will beright, or you get up in the morning and have an inkling that you should changeyour plans and do so, or you follow a hunch about something, you are using yourintuition.

Women have been trusting the wisdom of their bodies and listening to the insightof their dreams and intuitions for centuries, since long before recordedhistory. In the earliest inscribed tale of the feminine, the story of Inanna,Queen of Sumer, and her sister Eriskigel, Inanna's life is dependent upon herreception to an intense keening and wailing from the "Great Below," which shetakes seriously. Inanna's intuition alerts her to respect the summons from herinner self and prepare to do the business of Soul. However, intuition is neitherthe gift of queens nor the folly of innocents. Intuition is the voice ofembodied Soul.

Unfortunately, most of us have become so alienated from our bodies that it isdifficult to access our bodies' wisdom. This is a grave handicap. For bodywisdom contains the essential truths about what matters most to a woman andultimately to the human race as a whole. Body wisdom especially amplifies theinherent sacred relationship between a woman and the deep feminine. If shedoubts this, she has but to turn to the exquisitely sensitive cycles of her bodythat have been teaching her since puberty how intimately she is influenced bythe innate intelligence of her biochemical bodymind.

This relationship is sacred because it has deep and abiding roots in thecollective history of womankind. As the science of psychoneuroimmunology isbeginning to demonstrate, body wisdom is transmitted through the instinctualbiochemical language of tissue and bone, of movement and symptoms, through theebb and flow of hormonal tides, neuropeptide cascades, and the flux and peaks ofenergy knit together by breath, by heartbeat, by touch. It is within thisongoing transmission that intuition is most active.

Unfortunately, we in industrial society have lost much of the understanding ofhow to tap into those signals and to read them. We lack the time and the energyneeded to reflect upon the wisdom of our bodies. We have been taught to live ourdaily lives as if our body is a machine, designed to act, react, interact, asneeded. Meanwhile, each and every cell of our body is profoundly affected by ourenvironment, inner and outer, every moment of the day. Every dream, everyphysical symptom (headache, backache, irritable stomach), every mood, everyaddiction, is a message from our bodymind.

Ignorance or indifference toward the keen intelligence of the matter that housessoul leaves us buffeted by gale-force emotional winds stirred by our neglect.Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, warned that when a culture loses contact withthe divine, the desire to relate to the Ineffable is carried by the body asdisease. The last language left to the ignored body is the physical symptom, andthe final act of defiance may be addiction. Deaf to the invitation to evokeembodied consciousness, we are more likely to proceed mechanically, ignoring ourimages, "curing" the symptoms while dismissing our intuitive messages.Inevitably when we ignore what matters most to us that then becomes the matterwith us.

This, then, is a book about claiming a conscious soulful relationship with yourbody, the only true home you will ever have in this lifetime. Within these pageslies help in learning to listen to and trust the deep spiritual energies thatmanifest as wisdom in every cell of your matter. To do this is to discover yourdestiny and recover your authentic voice in order to speak your truth.

I have been a therapist for many years, helping people decipher the messagesfrom their intuition. The material in this book began to be publicly articulatedyears ago, as a series of lectures. Much to my surprise I found that men andwomen alike, in Australia, Europe, and the United States, were deeply moved bythe invitation to leave the realm of logic and rationality and descend into theintuitive realm of matter. In the body workshops, tears flowed and bellieschurned as person after person fell back into love with their own matter.Through movement, not words, through sensations, not statements, the metaphoricrealm of the feminine came alive as a physical experience. From this and manyother experiences, I began to understand deeply how much intuition is body-based,and how unless we return to the wisdom of the body, we will never befully able to access our inner knowing.

Our Beleaguered Heritage

Unfortunately, in general women have become disconnected from this wisdom, notonly because of personal traumas such as sexual and emotional abuse that mayhave caused us to dissociate, but as inheritors of a centuries-old fear ofwomen's power that is expressed through her intuitive knowing.

Prior to the advent of patriarchy, from conception and incubation to thedelivery of every birth, through the care and nurturance of children, thecultivation, preparation, and the blessing of food, and the gathering and use ofherbs for healing and worship, to the eventual bathing and preparation of thebody for burial, the experiential, embodied knowledge of women was essential,basic to the ongoing stability of the community.

Before the legislation and licensing of medicine and psychotherapy, the care ofthe body rested in the hands of the medicine man or woman, the soothsayer, themidwife, and the herbalist, while the care of the soul rested in the hands ofthe shaman and the priest. Often interchangeable, the role of healer orspiritual guide as intermediary between the known and the unknowable was both asacred duty and a practical necessity. Performing a soul retrieval, the shamanthen might work ceremonially with the physical illness that such a lossengendered. The herbalist's prescription often included a potion for the reliefof physical symptoms in combination with a bundle of herbs to ritualisticallyprotect the wearer from future distress. This sanctified relationship betweenhuman nature and all of nature was an experiential given. Astrology, divination,ritual, herbology—all were treasured resources for wisdom and guidance.Synchronistic events, dreams, spirit animals, totems, even changes in theweather were well noted, reverentially acknowledged as guides, as teachers.

Women and the valued principles of the shamanic feminine were influentialcornerstones in the foundation of the art, science, religion, and law of mostpreindustrial cultures. The culture's sacred rituals depended upon the enduranceof these cornerstones for stability. Earliest evidence of this history layscattered in the Neolithic cave sites where female bear skulls and cave etchingsleave us remnants of the artifacts prehistoric people may have chosen torepresent the potency of the female spirit and the endurance of the feminineprinciple. The transmission of these principles was oral, the apprenticeshipoften not completed until midlife or later.

Informed by nature, those wise clan leaders of the past were, of necessity,steeped in an intimate knowledge of the Earth, of herbs, the mysteries ofchildbirth, and the ecological cycles of renewal. Drawing upon the rituals andlaws of nature, they developed a profound understanding of the soulfulrelationship between the body and the emotional, imaginal realm of Spirit.Secure in this knowledge, they unhesitatingly related the evolution of a humanlife to the evolution of this planet—and beyond—to the heavens above.

As patriarchy took hold in civilization, this essential body-held wisdom beganto be openly attacked. In the 1500s, untold numbers of women, labeled aswitches, died because they freely offered to others the instinctual skills andintuitive knowledge that came naturally to them. The strength and commitmentfrom this bond of sisterhood confused and threatened those who wished to see iteradicated. For the crime of an infinite love for nature, ordinary caring womenwere treated with utter contempt. Mercilessly they were burned at the stake,drowned slowly, horribly tortured, and mutilated in the cultural attempt tofrighten the healing energies of the feminine, with its repository knowledge ofritual and the body, into extinction. Brutal though the method, invariably theseattempts were futile. This energy can't be extinguished. It may retreat and gounderground, yet it waits, to resurface over and again.

Those who have never lost touch with this energy offer powerful examples ofintuitive knowing. I was once a member of a party of three men and four womenwho were making our way deep into the out-back of Australia. The Pitjantjatjaratribe that we were staying with communicate telepathically—a kind of outbackInternet. The messages are felt rather than thought. At the end of my stay Ibecame quite ill. In spite of the fact that all the men of the tribe were faraway on walk-about, the shaman "knew" a European woman was ill and in need ofhealing. He appeared at the flying doctor station shortly after I arrived in aLand Rover. Since he was on foot, that meant he would have had to anticipate mydestination and leave before we had even decided to break camp.

The opportunity to discuss this incident with our guide, Australian tracker andanthropologist Diana James, never presented itself. However, in his book, Tracksin the Wilderness of Dreaming, Robert Bosnak describes his experience with thecommunication style of the Pitjatjanjara: "This is the first time I haveactually heard of a systemic, collective, physical grammar of extrasensoryperception." Dr. Bosnak is referring to the ways in which the Pitjatjanjarainterpret their perceptions depending upon which part of the body is aroused, istwitching or itching, or tingling.

Listening to Our Body's Signals

From this and much other evidence, I am convinced that intuition functionsthrough our often unconscious picking up of not only our own body sensations,but other people's sensations as well. These usually unrecognized sensations areas influential in determining how we feel about ourselves and other people andthe choices we make as those we are aware of. One way or another we alwaysrespond to our gut feelings, making adjustments for what we assume they mean.

Try it yourself. The next time you are with someone and you become aware of aphysical sensation that appears out of nowhere, check and see if you are sensingsomething going on in the person you are with. I remember a client who came tome because he had been down-sized in a company merger and felt depressed at hisinability to find another job. He reported that he'd had several promisinginterviews, but when the suggestion was made that he was overqualified, heinvariably lost his temper and the job. He wanted to solve the problem of hisdefensive response. During the second interview I begin to have distinct pain inthe area of my heart. When I turned part of my attention toward my body, Irealized my heart felt fine, I didn't have indigestion, or cramps. I asked myclient, who said he felt fine also. The next week I had the same experience, soI told him and asked if any of the metaphors of heartache, such as "heavyheart", would describe his experience, but he said no. I only saw him once,briefly, after that. His temper was in check and he was still unemployed.Several years later I heard from his former employer that he had died "of aheart attack. His heart was never in his unemployment, it was more than he couldtake." If I'd been a Pitjatjanjara I might have said something like, "Thatfella, he heart just don't take it, this doin' nothing all the day, he break."

Sometimes the messages are more global—less specifically personal and more abouta culture or a community or the underlying attitude of the group you're with.During that same visit to Australia I unexpectedly met a representative of theircollective unconscious. Offered a painting by a Pitjatjanjara artist of Manu-Manu,a toothy underground member of the sisterhood of the repressed feminine, Ideclined. As our group walked away from this encounter, our demeanor shiftedsubtly. I later remembered that we made small joking references to the "potency"this mythological Aboriginal figure represented. We used our humor to shake thepervasive feeling that we had misstepped some-how—brushing aside a principleforeign to us but significant to our hosts. That night I was taught a lessonabout the humility of acceptance. Within twenty-four hours Manu-Manu visited mein a series of dreams, each highlighting a specifically moving experience of thetrip. At the end of each dream she said, "Now pack and go home!!" I lingered,trying to figure this mystery out, and fell violently ill. I was fortunate toget out, scathed but intact. One of the cardinal principles of embodiedintuition is humility—the willingness to listen to, quietly observe, and learnfrom body wisdom even when the intellect can't figure things out.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Women's Intuition by Paula M. Reeves. Copyright © 1999 Paula M. Reeves. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Conari Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573241563
• ISBN 13: 9781573241564
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252