Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup Read Free Book Online Page A

to death, having lived through the deaths of two of her children and her husband—two of these in the space of one year. Her fear of her own death, which she told me followed her to bed at night and confronted her in the morning, was accompanied by vague left-sided upper abdominal pains, which she at first misinterpreted as being related to taking penicillin for a dental infection. Her terror was so awful that she couldn’t really talk about it for quite some time.
    As her terror and the stomach pain became worse, her intuition suggested that she should drive across the country from New England to Taos, New Mexico, where one of her daughters lived. She wanted to be alone, and she felt that driving a long distance would be the right thing. I had never heard her so upset, but I was not worried. I trusted that she had something to work through and that I would hear from her afterward, when she was ready to talk to me. Several days later she called, still quite shaky. “It all started out on the prairie,” she said. “For a couple hundred miles I drove, and then I felt this enormous emotional and physical pain. I was driving past the stockyards. There were all these cattle up to their bellies in the excrement. It hit me how we all live in all this crap and then gloss it over with scented toilet paper. I felt such sadness for the state of the world, for all the environmental problems. I thought of all the fear we always have. I found myself trudging across the prairie as a pioneer woman. I ‘saw’ thousands and thousands of women, of all races, all ages, trudging across the prairie, holding up the world through their labors. I felt the fear and the pain of all those women, the endless work.” As these images were washing over her, she said, her stomach pain was getting worse and worse, and she had to stop the car and pull her legs up to her chest. She tasted blood in her mouth, but when she spat into a tissue, nothing was there.
    “Then the flash came. I was a Viking, a male Viking. I had a huge sword. I killed a woman about to have a child. I killed them both with this sword. It was so awful to think of that. I just kept driving with tears and agony. To think that I was capable of doing such a thing! I felt such compassion for men because they were trained to do this. This pain in my stomach, the tears, the agony—this went on for about four hours. When I went over the mountain pass in the Rockies, the sun came out and I thought the pain would go away. But the horror still came. It was like some horrible dream that was real, but it wasn’t.
    “I needed to do this alone in an environment that wasn’t ‘home.’ All night Friday on the day I left, the pain was on the left and seemed to be leaving. But on Saturday as I continued my trip, I’d get these waves of dread in the left side of my abdomen. That’s exactly where I [the Viking] put the sword.
    “When I got to Taos, I had a session with Mary, a gifted intuitive. She did a reading and felt it was not necessary for me to go any farther. This vision of the pioneer women and me as a Viking killing a pregnant woman has helped me to release my fear of death.
    “I know I need to put a closure on this, I need to acknowledge it and close it. Perhaps it was necessary for the female to be killed. It was the worst thing I have ever done, the thing that I have tried to hide from God and from myself. The other thing I realized is that all of mankind has done this. We have all killed and murdered. I feel as though I have just died from another lifetime. Now I’m giving birth to myself. I can never go back to what I was before, because too much has happened to me. I can’t be what I was before.
    “I haven’t felt my full physical energy for some time. I’ve always been at a physical high pitch. This experience helped me in a realization of my own death. The environment, the earth, and what we’ve done to it is very deep in me. I think that now I have also successfully