Free Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup

“Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?” Too many of us have heard “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back” when we have done a job we’re proud of or have given ourselves credit for something that we loved to do, just for us. All of our lives, this kind of statement has stopped us dead in our tracks. We are accused of being selfish when we’ve given our own lives and interests priority. We have been brought up to avoid being seen as selfish at all costs. We learn to earn love and acceptance through self-sacrifice because we don’t feel worthy of the best that life has to offer.
    In general, women in our culture have a difficult time going after what they personally want and need in an atmosphere in which it is assumed that they will perform and be responsible for all of the tasks of daily living such as child rearing and housekeeping. On the other hand, if these activities are precisely what a woman wants to do the most, she may find that these activities are undervalued and underpaid. However, nothing will change in a woman’s outer circumstances until she learns to value her own life and her own gifts as much as she has been taught to value and nurture the lives of others. As a friend of mine says, “If you want to be one of the chosen, all you have to do is choose yourself!”
    Nearly every woman I know has been socialized to believe that put ting everyone else before herself is the right thing to do. Just the oppo site is true— we can’t really be there for others unless we’re there for ourselves first.
    I love the way entrepreneur Danielle LaPorte puts it on her website, White Hot Truth ( www.whitehottruth.com ). She says:
I notice this in myself, I see it in other people: the happiness muffle. We feel the sparkle, really we do. We feel rich with gratitude, we’re keenly aware of a true smile curled in our cells. We tend to live on the light side of things. But we don’t pronounce it. As a new friend just put it, “We butt back the joy because . . . happiness is a form of power.”
Is that any way to treat happiness?
Happiness is power. Happiness is carbonated consciousness. It wants to spill out and radiate and be articulated. And every time we downplay our joy we confuse our synapses. Our brain is firing smiley neurons and our mouth is short-circuiting them. Repeated happiness muffling numbs our senses. If you keep it under the surface too long, it just might stay there—a light under a bushel.
So do us all a favour. No matter what the weather, the odds, the circumstances, the company, if you’re happy and you know it, by all means, say so!
    I couldn’t agree more. As a physician, I can assure you that happiness is also healing. Here’s an example.
    Dana Johnson, a researcher friend of mine and a registered nurse, recovered from Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS) by learning the power of love and happiness. After she had had the disease for some years, she began to lose control over her breathing muscles as well as the rest of her body. Her breathing difficulties made her think she was going to die. But she decided at that point that she wanted to experience unconditional love for herself at least once before dying. Describing herself as a “bowl of Jell-O in a wheelchair,” she sat every day for fifteen minutes in front of a mirror and chose different parts of herself to love. She started with her hands because at that time they were the only parts of herself that she could appreciate unconditionally. Each day she went on to other body parts. Day by day, her physical body began to get better as she learned to appreciate it. She also wrote in a journal about insights she had during this process, and she came to see that since childhood she had believed that in order to be of service, acceptable to others, and worthy, she had to sacrifice her own needs. It took a life-threatening disease for her to learn that service through self-sacrifice is a