Transcription of Wisdom #17
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine and broadcast on 1310 AM Portland streaming live each week at 11AM at WLOBradio.com and available via podcast on Doctorlisa.org. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the generous support of the following sponsors: Maine Magazine; Tom Shepard of Hersey, Gardner, Shepard & Eaton; Robin Hodgskin at Morgan, Stanley, Smith, Barney; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine; Pierce Atwood UNE, the University of New England; and Akari.
Dr. Lisa: Hello, this is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast for January 8, 2012. The theme of today’s show which is Show #17 is wisdom.
We are pleased today to offer a Mainer who has gone beyond the borders of our state and done things nationally and internationally as an author and a physician. Dr. Christiane Northrup spent a significant amount of time visiting with us in her Yarmouth, Maine office, and I’m not sure we’ve quite enjoyed an interview as much as we enjoyed that one, which I hate to say because we have many, many, wonderful guests in studio, but this was a very special wisdom-oriented interview. It wasn’t wisdom in the classical sense where you think of sitting at the foot of a sage. It was the wisdom of a woman who has lived her life passionately and joyfully and authentically. This is a woman who knew what she needed to do in order to change her own life and begin changing the lives of women, truly, around the world, and she went forward with courage and really has achieved things that many people from Maine are not certain they can ever achieve. It was a privilege to be with this irreverent and quirky and funny tango-dancing doctor from Yarmouth. I think it’s something I aspire to myself someday, perhaps; to be a tango-dancing doctor from Yarmouth.
In addition, we spoke to several representatives from the community school at Opportunity Farm up the coast in Camden who spoke about an entirely different sort of wisdom, or maybe not entirely different, but the type of wisdom that comes from learning one’s self at an earlier age, maybe learning one’s self as a parent, and the type of wisdom that one is able to offer people around one’s self. It’s an interesting interview. Both interviews were very interesting and we’re pleased to be able to offer them this new year, 2012, because we at the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast know that wisdom is an integral part of health and wellness. We hope that you enjoy our show. Thank you for joining us.
For our listeners who are looking for a New Year’s inspiration, we encourage you to buy the book, Our Daily Tread, which benefits the organization Safe Passage. The quote from Our Daily Tread today is from William James, “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” For more quotes like this, buy the book, Our Daily Tread, at islandportpress.com.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast each week features a segment sponsored by The University of New England called Wellness Innovations. This week’s segment is about Dr. Christiane Northrup who we consider to be a wellness innovator in the field. Dr. Christiane Northrup’s #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Wisdom of Menopause, has inspired more than a million women with a dramatically new vision of mid-life and will continue to do so for generations to come. As Dr. Northrup has championed, the change is not simply a collection of physical symptoms to be fixed, but a mind/body revolution that brings the greatest opportunity for growth since adolescence. The choices a woman makes now from the quality of her relationships to the quality of her diet have the power to secure vibrant health and well-being for the rest of her life.
We’re pleased to have Dr.Northrup on the show and we are pleased to have The University of New England sponsor our show and this segment, Wellness Innovations. For more information on The University of New England, visit UNE.edu.
Speaker 1: Support for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour comes from The University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the #1 educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about The University of New England at UNE.edu.
Dr. Lisa: We invite you now to listen to our extended interview, the one that Genevieve Morgan, my co-host and I did with Dr. Christiane Northrup in her Yarmouth office. Internationally known for her empowering approach to women’s health and wellness, Dr. Northrup is a leading proponent for medicine and healing that acknowledges the unity of the mind and body as well as the powerful role of the human spirit in creating health. Following a career as a practicing physician in obstetrics and gynecology for over 25 years, Dr. Northrup has dedicated her lifework to helping women and the men who love them learn how to flourish on all levels by creating health, prosperity, and pleasure in their lives.
Dr. Lisa: Genevieve Morgan and I have the great pleasure today to be speaking with Dr. Christiane Northrup who is, like myself, a long-time Yarmouth physician and resident. She’s also been a mentor of mine for quite awhile although she probably doesn’t realize it. The reason that we’re especially interested today is that you are re-releasing one of your books.
Dr. Northrup: Yes, I am. I’m re-releasing The Wisdom of Menopause, 3rd edition. It is about 20 to 30% new material and what I love about this edition is it really is a brand new book because if you think about what happened, 1st edition was 2001. In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative, this huge government sponsored trial of hormone replacement was stopped abruptly. I was in the middle of a whale watch in Cape Cod Bay and got called from one of the newspapers, Wall Street Journal. Could I please talk about this because I had said in ’94 in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom that this study was using the wrong hormones at the wrong doses and therefore they were not going to find out what they wanted to find out. Because of that, 2002, from that moment on, women have been thrown into a turmoil of, “What should I do? Are all hormones dangerous?” That’s one separate conversation. The real conversation of The Wisdom of Menopause is that peri-menopause, a 6 to 13 year period, is a developmental stage in a woman’s life. It is not a disease and it is not a hormone deficiency even though 1 in 3 women in this culture will have her ovaries out and she well may need a little dusting of hormones. I say in this book the kind she needs and what dosages and all the rest, and why the Women’s Health Initiative was not the right thing to be doing, but the main thing is, and by the way I said I’d never write a menopause book … Way back in the late 90’s I thought there were too many books out on menopause. I thought there were too many. This book started out as a little question and answer pamphlet because I’d done a PBS special called The Wisdom of Menopause. I’d go around to all the stations in the country raising money for PBS and I’d take live call-ins, Denver, California, Tennessee, and the call-ins were all about, “What should I do with this hormone, that hormone?” All of that misses the point, and the point is that this is a crossroads stage in your life where you come to a crossroad and one fork says, “grow” and the other says, “die”. We know the beginning of chronic degenerative disease in women makes itself known at about the age of 50. Believe me, it’s been cooking since you were 20, maybe even earlier. As you know the Bogalusa Heart Study shows that kids start to get heart disease by the age of 8. They’ve already got fatty streaks in their arteries. What happens is, things pick up steam in your 40’s. They pick up steam in that little voice, your inner wisdom, saying, “Wait a minute. This doesn’t feel so good.” You watch women now, I know you’ve seen them. They get to about 45 or 50, and they either start getting better than they’ve ever been or they start to get shorter, sadder, more depressed. What I wanted to do, because when I first wrote the book I was going through a divorce and coming out on the other side, and I refused to believe that this was the end of my life. I just refused to believe it.
Genevieve: Can I interject for one second, “How old were you then?
Dr. Northrup: 49.
Genevieve: 49. So you were absolutely …
Dr. Northrup: Right in the thick of it. It happened, interestingly enough, my first Oprah appearance was January 1999, and the marriage ended the next day.
Genevieve: Did you know when you went on Oprah?
Dr. Northrup: No. I absolutely did not know, and it was a Maine winter January, when everything feels so dead and that year we had a lot of snow. So the snow is 2/3 of the way up my window and my kids have gone now. One went to Chewonki, one was in college, and another person who lived with us, a nanny/helper person had left. I went from a household of 5 to just me in one year. I remember it because you know how dark it gets and there’s the snow and your utterly alone. I was in the crucible of, “Whoa, is this it? Is this all there is?” I went to visit my mother on Y2K, you know it was going to be 2000 and we didn’t know if the lights were going to come back on. I’m there with my kids and we’re having a big New Year’s Eve party and again, I’m alone. Everyone’s dancing with her. Everyone’s ignoring me. My brothers went out with their wives and their friends and I was alone and I thought, “This is it. Now I’m the family spinster. I’m going to be my mother’s date for the rest of my life.” Wrong, but I had no idea how I was going to change that. No idea. I want to really say to any woman who’s going through this, who’s so afraid of change, there’s so much life after this, but you have to go through this dark night of the soul in order to reinvent yourself. Every time cells divide and every time we become someone new, something has to die. Having a baby, you’re maidenhood dies. Your freedom dies. My daughter’s in a new relationship and she’s starting to grieve her single life in New York City. She was so shocked by this. It’s a developmental stage and menopause is the big wake up call developmental stage. The message I’d like to get to women, and again this is sort of breaking trail in that regard, was that everything has the possibility to get better. You can get taller. Through Pilates I’m taller and you can get more flexible. I’m more flexible. You can wake up your erotic anatomy. Women think after menopause, no more sex drive. What I say … the number one predictor of a good sex drive after menopause is a new partner. Now, what I tell women is you don’t need a new partner most of the time. You need to become a new partner.
Dr. Lisa: Which you said in the Maine Magazine article that Genevieve interviewed you for.
Dr. Northrup: That’s right. We had fun.
Dr. Lisa: It was a great article. When did that come out?
Genevieve: That came out in May of last year and it’s available actually on-line.
Dr. Northrup: I love Maine Magazine. Can I just say this is not a paid… We love the magazine and my daughter gets it and it’s gorgeous. Love it!
Genevieve: I think what it does is, what you’ve done from the very beginning which is … there’s a lot of stuff happening in Maine, some really unique individual trail-blazing ideas and entrepreneurs and they’re all here and at Maine Magazine we try to turn the focus on them. You’ve been doing that now for …breaking trail for a long time..
Dr. Northrup: Long time …This is a very good place to do it. First of all because it’s peaceful here. It’s calm. We get all upset if there’s four cars at a light. We call it rush hour. It’s a very high quality of life. When you’re going through something like the death of an old self, this is a really good place to heal. You’ll notice Maine has more really solid holistic healers than any place I’ve ever been. Really amazing people and for our population, that shouldn’t be happening. What I want everyone in New York City to know is if they get a cheap ticket on Jet Blue, they can save money by getting their health care here.
Genevieve: Which is a good thing for you to be talking about because you were doing Women to Women work for such a long time here in Yarmouth and I do think there is something even specific to Yarmouth. There’s an interesting energy that people can feel. We have a lot of artists. We have a lot writers. We have a lot of health care providers who have been doing interesting things for a long time.
Dr. Northrup: Absolutely, and there’s Bethany Hayes down at True North. You know it’s interesting to me that when I have to write down on a form, an insurance form or something, who my doctor is, I have a team. I have Fern Tsao at the end of the street, acupuncture. I’ve got my massage therapist, Julie. A doctor-doctor, like a standard western doctor, I don’t do that unless I have to have an insurance form filled out because I actually have found that most of what happens to you that a western doctor would have to fix, other than a broken bone or a hip replacement or something, you can prevent by your own lifestyle and by your thoughts and so on. Again, that’s what I put in the books which is really an owners manual for the midlife body and beyond. I also, let me be clear, I have a mother who went to Everest Space Camp at age 85 and you could say, because people do, well that’s your genes. It’s not my genes. Her mother died at age 68 of heart disease.
Dr. Lisa: It’s a combination of what you have and what you do with it.
Dr. Northrup: We need to understand post RNA transcriptase in a cell. We need to understand that the environment in which they find themselves is what turns on a gene or turns off a gene. It’s interesting to me that our bone marrow makes stem cells our whole lives and the stem cell goes right out of your bone marrow and it goes into the organ that needs to be repaired; however, it will repair it according to the script you’re giving it and if it you’re giving it a “die” script, guess what? You’re going to start getting cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes. All the stuff that clearly the state of Maine is in, a big crisis now around Medicaid. If you look at what is the single biggest bang for the buck in terms of health care, 30 minutes a day of exercise. It decreases Alzheimer’s incidents 45%, osteoporosis 60%, depression, mood swings 50%. I mean, come on. What if we just had those blue zones where we had the walking school bus and everyone just walks the kids to school for 30 minutes and everyone does it together? How much fun would that be? There you have it. Of course there’s nobody who’s going to make a buck on everyone going out and exercising 30 minutes a day.
Genevieve: And I also think people are resistant to change and there is a change that happens physiologically during menopause, but Lisa and I spoke, I think it was 2 shows ago, about the kidneys being the source of fear and wisdom in Chinese medicine which …
Dr. Northrup: … and cold.
Genevieve: I’m interested to go back to what you were saying about when you were in the crucible and how you broke open through fear and this terribly dark period of your life. You had to go through that to be open to love, and you speak in your book about the energy of thanatos and eros. I love that. I was wondering if you could speak to our listeners a little bit more.
Dr. Northrup: It has to do with faith in something more. I think you don’t really get through life without a philosophy that works for you. When I was 11, 12, 13 I read everything by Edgar Casey, The Sleeping Prophet, Many Mansions, and I also read books by Flower Newhouse who was a Christian mystic who saw angels. When I read that book, I was so excited and I went to my mother and I said, “Oh my God. Everything that I always thought was true is true. Look at these angels. This woman draws pictures of them.” There was an angel of birth, angel of fire, all these nature spirits and so my whole life I’ve known that there’s something more. I’ve even known that there isn’t any death. I mean I had to put my cat to sleep about a month ago and my Pilates teacher came to the house. She said, “I thought I was going to miss him, really miss him,” he was very special, “except that he’s right here.” He’s right there. He comes in every time I have a massage. She feels him. It helps enormously when you understand that there is no death. Now, the body is … I have a good friend, Gladys McGarey, who’s a family physician sees kids, and she was giving a talk. She said, “Anti-aging medicine,” at the time she was 88, she goes, “Anti-aging. What are you supposed to do?” I love that because we are all going to shed the shell of this body, but I think the whole trick is to die young as late as possible.
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Dr. Northrup: So my mother goes to Everest Base Camp and is, I think, the oldest person to make it up there. It’s 17,000 feet. There’s half the air and it’s 100 miles pretty much straight up. That’s how she gets her kicks, always has. I can’t stand that stuff. You have to find … How do you do this? You have to find what you truly, truly love. What is the dream that you had when you 9, 10, 11? That comes roaring back. That’s your life force. The only way you’re going to find out what it is, you can ask your mother. If she isn’t around or if she doesn’t have the ability to see that part of you … It’s like Daniel Giamario Shamanic Astrology, he says, “What if you’re purple, but you grew up in a family where they only recognized green?” Then it’s going to be very hard for you to know what that thing is, but I will give you a hint. It’s that thing that feels too good to be true. It’s too much fun to be true.
In my case that’s Argentine tango at the moment. I mean, it’s like I go in there to Portland and I go, “How is it that I’m doing this?” that we’ve got this eclectic community of doctors, lawyers, carpenters, engineers, computer geeks, guitar players and everyone is dancing in close embrace for 3 1/2 minutes where we’re totally with the music and in love with life for 3 1/2 minutes. Nobody drinks. We do eat some chocolate. It’s this community of people because we’re all drawn to this thing.
Now, it would be the same … I was interviewed by a general surgeon once, I loved her show … breast surgeon. She said, “I always wanted to keep bees, and so when I was 56 my first beehive arrived.” They arrived in a box, and she says, “The box was humming, and it was like Reiki on steroids.” That’s what you want to find because you have this vocational arousal that happens around menopause.
The other thing that I did was that I was updating Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and that was in about 2004, 2005 and there was a book on my shelf. I’ve got massive numbers of books, and it was called ESO, Extended Sexual Orgasm and I went onto Amazon to see if there was anything updated. Like most physicians, I did research in my head. God forbid, you would never actually do that research but you could read about it. I go on Amazon to see what’s new. Did this guy have anything new? No, he did not, but what I found was The Illustrated Guide to Extended Massive Orgasm. Let’s talk good marketing, right?
Dr. Lisa: I have this book by the way.
Dr. Northrup: You’ve got it, by Vera and Steve Bodansky
Dr. Lisa: Believe it or not.
Female: I don’t have this book. I need this book.
Dr. Lisa: I think you do need this book.
Dr. Northrup: There’s a way better one. It’s called Women’s Anatomy of Arousal, Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure by Sherri Winston who’s a midwife.
Dr. Lisa: Genevieve’s writing this down.
Dr. Northrup: She should. Sherri was just up at Leaping Lizards. I did the whole day orgasmic abundance class. It was hilarious. It was really, really fun, but I digress because we had to start somewhere and I’m cutting to the chase here with massive amounts of nitric oxide soaring through the body.
Genevieve: Explain to the listeners about that because this is very interesting.
Dr. Northrup: It is.
Genevieve: It brings the story home.
Dr. Northrup: This is the story that lead to this. I get the Illustrated Guide to Extended Massive Orgasm and it held water as a biofeedback mechanism which is, the more … So I knew the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings. Their only purpose is pleasure. From that book then it said people who ordered this book ordered this book. You know how Amazon is really brilliant, and I’d sit there at night, same with iTunes. It’s addictive. I see Mama Gina’s Owner’s and Operators Guide to Men and Mama Gina’s School of Womanly Arts 101.
Dr. Lisa: Which Gen and I’ve both read thanks to you.
Dr. Northrup: Good. So I saw her ..
Dr. Lisa: You’re out there making lots of money for these people apparently.
Dr. Northrup: Good because I think that’s the abundant model. Right about then I read her book and realized from a scientific perspective her books were derivative books of the Bodansky’s books. They were talking about sensory experience in the body that you could extend and feel more and more and more by being present and relaxing. That made complete sense to me. Regina was taking that concept and making it macrocosmic in your life. Something that happens in a minute area of the body, the clitoris, you can then take out into the world in this more massive way. This was the chapter that really got me. It was called Turn it on for a Dork. Did I mention this earlier?
Genevieve: You did, and it’s great. It’s actually a great exercise.
Dr. Northrup: It’s a great exercise in enjoying your life. I then went on to teach at The School of Womanly Arts.
Dr. Lisa: Did you actually try this exercise yourself in your own life?
Dr. Northrup: Oh absolutely. Here’s my goal. Ready? Here’s the goal. Everything that I learn out there, in a book or at Mama Gina’s or whatever, just bring back to Yarmouth. If this stuff is real it’s going to work here.
Dr. Lisa: Well no wonder we’re such a rocking, energetic locus.
Dr. Northrup: That’s right. It’s going to work in Maine. If it isn’t scientifically accurate, it won’t work. Plus it was not okay for me. I watched many women. They come from all over the world to New York City. They go to Mama Gina’s School of Womanly Arts or go study with the Bodansky’s and do their sensual whatever. It’s not enough to think that your source is that person’s work or that person’s work. Your source is here and you want to bring it home and make it work here in our own back yard.. I go and I teach at Mama Gina’s and the key for me, the sort of turning point, that one-quarter turn was at men’s night. A guy getting up in his 70’s and saying ever since his wife started to do this course of Mama Gina’s School of Womanly Arts, he no longer needs Viagra. What’s the science there? It’s nitric oxide. Viagra, Cialis, the erection enhancing drugs all work by increasing nitric oxide at the level of the cell. Nitric oxide is produced by the endothelial lining of every blood vessel in your body and it is a gas that goes throughout the body instantaneously. It cannot be stored. It’s not like vitamin D. It increases circulation instantly which is why a man gets an erection, but it increases circulation throughout the body and exercise will do it. Eating dark green leafy vegetables increases nitric oxide. Any pleasurable activity will increase nitric oxide and it is the uber neurotransmitter. High levels of nitric oxide, and by the way, it will stay high for about 12 hours after an aerobic workout which is why people feel so much better after they exercise because it changes the levels of serotonin, dopamine, beta endorphin and so on. There’s no pill for this. Pleasure is the pill, a pleasurable activity. What I say is, if you don’t go for pleasure deliberately, you’re going to go for it by default, and that would be alcohol and sugar are the usual things and not moving.
You know you talked about fear earlier. How do you get through? People don’t like to change. How do we get through the fear? I think, you know the old Anais Nin quote which is, “When the fear of the bud staying closed is greater than the fear of moving forward.” You just have to change. I knew that there had to be more and I also knew that there was no way I was going to buy the cultural prescription. I had a woman on my radio show yesterday. She’s 50 having the best sex of her life, younger boyfriend, it’s all good except that she had her first kid at the age of 21 so now she’s about to be a grandmother. The new guy goes, “I don’t think I’m ready for this part of the program” meaning being with a grandmother. So I said, “So what part of the program would that be, staying home and knitting afghans, being the default setting for the grandchild, going to live in a trailer in Florida, what?” What is the part of the program because hanging around little kids primes you for youth. Don’t do it in the old Grammy way. Don’t do it that way. Teach your kids yoga, Qigong. Do fun things with them and don’t be the default setting when they need a baby sitter. My brother, when his 3rd grandchild was about to be born, I said, “So what do you think having 3 granddaughters?” He goes, “That’s their problem.” I had to laugh because he and his wife are in a whole new …. they’re both private pilots. They fly all over the place.
Female: You’re not a grandmother at this point?
Dr. Northrup: No, and I really am not interested in being a grandmother at this point. I actually, I have to tell you, I don’t understand the women who start pressuring their daughters into, “Can’t you have a grandchild for us?” To me, that means that they’re not living their own dream. They’re not living their own dream. Anytime, and let’s talk about this because one of the things that happens at menopause is you’re tempted. For many of us our kids are in college then and I’ve noticed there’s this whole new trend that I think is ridiculous where parents are going to every sporting event that their kids have in college.
Dr. Lisa: This is helicopter parenting.
Dr. Northrup: Are you kidding me? When are you going to let go and get a life?
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Dr. Lisa: Do you think that you have gotten better at doing things like setting up boundaries?
Dr. Northrup: Do you think?
Dr. Lisa: It seems to me you have.
Dr. Northrup: It’s so much better. Before I had no idea because I am actually in my soul, a healer. I have a Pisces moon so that means I’m actually …
Dr. Lisa: So you want to be a caregiver? You want to take care of people.
Dr. Northrup: I’m like Mother Teresa. There’s nothing like … I remember the rush. I don’t know if you remember this from your training, when I would have 2 people in the emergency room, 4 people in labor and delivery, an emergency here, there. I felt like Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp. There’s a high that comes with that. It’s addictive. What happens with that is, if you don’t notice that, then you’re always going from one emergency to the next. You need the emergency to feel alive. This is really important.
I talked to a guy yesterday, a doctor out in California, and he told me the story of one of his patients whose husband was an alcoholic and then the woman found out that he’d been having an affair with the neighbor for 12 years. She had a blood condition of really thickened blood so she was in a hypercoagulable state, some kind of thing with platelets too many, whatever. We would call that pre-Leukemia. She kept using the phrase, “I’m the glue that keeps the family together.” Blood is family. Blood conditions are always related to first chakra family. As soon as she heard herself say it, and as soon as she pointed it out to her and she forgave her husband and got a divorce and all of that, and stopped being the glue. All of her blood levels went back to normal.
Dr. Lisa: Right, because when you’re hypercoagulable your blood is gluey.
Dr. Northrup: That’s it.
Dr. Lisa: Going back to you and your boundaries.
Dr. Northrup: The first thing that happens is you feel guilty. You feel tremendously guilty. We need help. We need people to watch us doing what we do so naturally. They need to tell us … One of the first for me, I’m sitting over in the office at Women to Women, and I call up Caroline Mace, the medical intuitive, to get a reading. I didn’t know her at the time and I wanted to see if she was any good. It was 1987. She says to me, “You are a rescue addict. Do you hear me? A rescue addict and your heartbeat has changed in the past two years so watch it.” She’s a triple Sagittarius. She’s not known for putting cotton around the message, and I got it because all of us at that time had closed the office on several occasions to go do treatment for our co-dependents. We were sure that when we started Women to Women all our problems in the conventional medical system would go away because we were creating a special place for women. We noticed in two years we were more burnt out than we’d been in the old system. There weren’t any of the old system people around. The old system lived within us. We said we’d met the enemy and she is us. I at least understood recovery, and I understood the 12-step program. I used to go to Al-Anon to admit I was powerless over my patients’ behavior.
Dr. Lisa: Your patients were your addiction then?
Dr. Northrup: Yes, rescuing was my addiction. Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: Do you still feel yourself drawn to rescue people?
Dr. Northrup: No, It’s interesting. It’s almost like I’ve been immunized. When I have a person who is not rescuable, whatever the word is … when I have that happen, I know it because it’s almost like the antibody titer rises. In the past I was drawn to these people, any doctor or nurse or mother who’s listening will understand this, where they have a jewel-encrusted hook in which they want you to impale yourself, “Help me, help me, help me. You’re the only one who can help me. Thank God I found you. You’re the only on who can help me.” If you so desperately need to be wanted, and you desperately want to be valuable, holistic medicine gives you hundreds more tools to do that than conventional medicine. There’s a real trap there. What I know now is, every single one of us has inner wisdom and has the ability to attract to us the resources, the people, the thought, the books, that will make us whole. Every one of us has an inner guidance system, and I had to learn I’m not anyone else’s higher power. As clever as I am, I’m not.
Genevieve: Well, and you practice a lot.
Dr. Northrup: Oh yeah. It’s a daily practice, and I don’t have the kind of family. We don’t do guilt around the holidays. I don’t have any social gathering that I go to out of obligation, not one. That’s one of the things I love about Maine. It’s like in general, we don’t seem to do that. I remember once I had a patient. She said to me, “I don’t understand it. I moved here from Connecticut and I had a dinner party and no one came.” She thought that you have these kill-off parties where you’re obligated because they gave you … Well, no one does that here. They’ll be with you if you need firewood or a generator, but no one is just going to come to a party out of obligation. Well, if they are I don’t know who they are and I don’t want to be around them. We expect others to see what our need is and meet it.
I remember sitting around labor and delivery. Sometimes I’d be in there 72 hours and I’d watch the shift of nurses come, “Have you had your break? Have you had your break?” I’m thinking no one is asking me if I’ve had my break. You get into the martyr thing. No one is helping me out here. What you have to do is resist the urge to have that righteous indignation which is a major health risk. Resentment and chronic anger is associated with cancer, depression, heart disease. It’s an independent risk factor, and depression as you know, is anger turned inward. I’d much rather have a woman flailing around as long as I’m not in the crosshairs than going around depressed. You need to tell your story, let’s say your divorce story or whatever is the story, but listen for your needs. If you go on the Internet, the center for non-violent communication, cnvc.org, Marshall Rosenberg site, he’s got a list of emotions and a list of the needs that those signify. One of the most powerful things you can do is tell your story to a person who’s sitting there listening to you and have them ask you, “Do you need acknowledgment? Do you need to grieve? Do you need social support.” What is the need that that anger is signifying?
Dr. Lisa: Did you have this when you were going through your transition?
Dr. Northrup: No. I did not What I do … in retrospect as a doctor as a healer I always look for, “Wow, if I had had this, wouldn’t that have been great?”
Genevieve: That’s a good point, Lisa. What if you are going through some of these changes or you’re noticing some of these things happening to yourself, but you’re in a situation you aren’t … where you were which was feeling very alone, but you have a husband or a partner whose really not ready for you to go off and follow your pleasure, or you’ve got something …
Dr. Northrup: Now this is really interesting. This thing about a husband is so common because we’re not the same people we were when we got married. I was married at 25. Now, what I will tell you about women, is women set the tone for health in every family. What we women do is, our knee jerk reaction is to blame the guy if our life isn’t working out. We expect him … this is why, for men, I think the most terrifying day of the year would be Valentine’s Day because you have to come up with something and you have to get the right gift, except that women don’t know what they want and they don’t know what they need, they haven’t told him. “If you loved me, you would know.” I want to repeat that. “If you loved me, you would know.” If anyone ever says that to you, run the other way as fast as you can because the only person who can know is you.
Now I’m not saying … I know that in my case, and let me state this clearly because it’s so politically incorrect to do it, so I must. I know that if I had stayed married, I would be dead of breast cancer now. I know it in every cell of my body. The yearning, the longing for things to be different, and the resentment because they weren’t. What each woman has to do is figure out what is her pleasure and how is she going to for her pleasure. What I’ve seen happen, so many times I can’t even begin to tell you , is that when a woman does that, the people in her life either leave or they come around and get on the pleasure train with her.
Genevieve: I have one last question for my part to ask you, Dr. Northrup. It’s been so nice to hear everything. I feel like you’re speaking directly to me and I just turned 45 so I’m right there. I’ve read all of your work and I’ve followed you for a long time and so much of what is going on right now in wellness is what you’ve been saying for the past, I don’t know let’s say, 3 decades.
Dr. Northrup: That’s about right.
Genevieve: I’m wondering. It’s January 2012 and looking forward what do you see ahead of you and what do you see ahead in the field of wellness, if anything?
Dr. Northrup: Well, what is going to have to happen … We have an unsustainable disease care system. It’s just not sustainable. Maine is one of those homes of sustainable living so I like to say, “As Maine goes, so goes the planet.’ I also read in the paper we have a 30% higher energy here expenditure for businesses than anywhere else in the country. At the same time I read in Rob Brezsny’s astrology, that there’s a little town in Germany that now makes $321 million a year or something by … They’ve become energy self-sufficient so they sell their energy back to the main grid. I know that that’s what will happen in Maine, that we will become a national leader in energy self-sufficiency because we have to. This is the heroes journey. Joseph Campbell points out that “we don’t change until we have to do battle with the forces of darkness within us.” Right now in our political system, in our health care system, we’re doing that. It’s no surprise to my audience that big pharma, big chemical, big everything has been running things, like GMO’s with Monsanto and all of that stuff. Increasingly that is going to fall away. Organic farming, sustainable living, but with beauty, like the way you do Maine Magazine, it’s beautiful. I want high production values. I think wellness is finally coming out of where it was when I started which is Birkenstock’s and moths flying out of the grain bins at the Good Day Market. To be in the wellness, it had to be ugly.
I’ve talked to Maria Rodale. She started Rodale Press. She was bringing the pleasure back into natural foods and that sort of things. I see that happening more and more. I am so proud of the fact that Portland, Maine is the #1 small food city. I really just can’t get enough of it. When my daughters come back from New York City, they say, “Wow, this is like a really romantic town.” Yeah! I see that happening. For myself personally, I have 3 weeks planned in Buenos Aries with Emma Holder who has her radio show, Shaken and Stirred, on WMPG. She’s the whole reason I’m doing tango. I watched her go across the window of Maine Ballroom Dance and I said, “Oh, that’s what I want to do.” I see everyone understanding that bringing their own light into their life is the #1 way you save the planet. You don’t do it through getting exhausted, through getting burned out. How you do it is what you get.
Dr. Lisa: That’s a perfect way to end the conversation we’ve been having. It’s a great way to start the new year. We know you are every where all the time. We really appreciate you taking the time to come in to our relatively new radio show and spend some quality minutes.
Dr. Northrup: Thank you. You know I’m always a big supporter of whatever starts right here in Maine.
Dr. Lisa: The theme of this show is wisdom and the Bountiful Blog is all about wisdom, the wisdom that we find in our own selves and in our own lives, specifically wisdom that enables us to have our own voice. This Bountiful Blog post is from October 30, 2011. It is entitled Own Voice Resonance. Many things can get in the way of us hearing our own song. Static in this world abounds. Hearing our own voice and truly listening to the song that comprises our heart and soul are again two different things. The listening, and perhaps modulating how and what we choose to sing, can be a challenging task. Not only are we prevented from hearing by virtue of the static around us; we are also prevented from believing in what our words might represent. There is a constant course of other voices around and within us calling us like sirens to potential shipwreck. Not that we should ever stop listening to the voices of others. We cannot, however, allow these voices to be more persuasive than our own. We cannot rely exclusively or even primarily on the voices of others. When it comes to determining our actions, thoughts, or emotions we must, instead, listen to ourself. This is a skill, like all skills, we must practice regularly. We must learn to resonate with a song that we ourselves are creating. We must learn to love the sound of our own song. For more posts like this, go to bountiful-blog.com.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our feature after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Pierce Atwood has been a part of Portland’s legal community for 120 years. Informed decision makers turn to Pierce Atwood for help with important deals or critical disputes. For creative solutions and for sound advice about legal or business strategy. For more information on Pierce Atwood, go to www.pierceatwood.com, and by Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, makers of Dr. John’s Brain-ola Cereal. Find them on the web at orthopedicspecialistsme.com
Dr. Lisa: On today’s give back segment, I’m very pleased to have in the studio with me, representatives from Opportunity Farm and Community School. You call yourselves, The Community School or Community Schools?
Martha: The Community Schools at Opportunity Farm in Camden.
Dr. Lisa: Okay, very good. The reason that we have you here is because a very dear friend of mine who is sitting in the studio, but she is not on mic, Emma, she has just recently joined your organization so I figured if Emma’s involved, it must be a good organization to be a part of. Formerly of the Portland Museum of Art which is also a good organization, but we’re going to talk about you guys today. Martha is sitting right next to me. She’s going to lean in and tell me a little bit … Who are you Martha, tell me.
Martha: I’m Martha Kempe. I’m the director of the Passages Program which is our home based teen parent program at the schools. I got involved through actually living through the difficulty of my own child going through high school and feeling the need to support all students no matter what their background and what their needs to finish high school.
Dr. Lisa: We also have Dottie across the way, across the microphone. Hi, Dottie.
Dottie: Hi. I came to the Community School four years ago having taught adolescent psychology for UMaine for a number of years and really realized I wanted to give back directly into the work of working with adolescents. Our at-risk youth are key components to our communities in Maine and they need a high school diploma and what we can do at the Community School is actually provide an individualized high school diploma to these students. My background actually was banking, developing adolescent programs, doing social justice work with adolescents, and now coming back into running two schools with pretty incredible colleagues.
Dr. Lisa: I think there’s another incredible colleague sitting next to you. Joseph, tell me who you are.
Joseph: My name is Joseph Hufnagel. I’m the director of residential programs at The Community Schools and I got involved four years ago around the same time as Dottie. The reason I’m involved is because I have a real genuine passion for working with alternative education, but in particular helping teenagers to discover their strengths and to feel inspired about life in the future. Previously, I’ve worked in education as a teacher in public schools, as an administrator, and as an outdoor adventure guide. All those things come into play when I’m working with my residential team and the students at The Community Schools.
Dr. Lisa: You’re doing incredible work. I’m sure you could use some help. Dottie, tell me, how can we help. How can the community come together and help your organization, and how can we learn more about your organization?
Dottie: Thank, you. That’s a great question. We certainly have volunteer opportunities. Our students, again, have mentors, tutors, certainly individuals helping us with development is a great idea. Our students, oftentimes, as you can imagine, come from low age working families or poverty. This is a private alternative high school. I raise about 70% of the budget, Em and I, and it’s really important that theses students have access to a high quality education. We provide that. Donations, working on fund-raising projects, helping us with events, having dinner parties, that sort of thing is really helpful. Getting the word out that these are students that have amazing strengths. They oftentimes come from a place where they were treated as if they had deficits, sort of damaged based history. Our work is really about strength based work and positive youth development. We use restorative justice practices so there are a lot pieces of our curriculum, a very progressive curriculum, that our communities can learn from and other schools can learn from.
Dr. Lisa: How can we learn more about your organization?
Dottie: Listen to this radio show.
Dr. Lisa: Of course, we are assuming that. Do you have a website? Do you have a Facebook presence?
Dottie: Yes, we do have a website, thecommunityschool.org. That’s all being updated and revamped because of the merger so please keep an eye on it. Yes, Facebook.
Dr. Lisa: I think I’ve seen you on Facebook, well not you specifically, but I’ve seen your organization on Facebook so people can go there and like that page so they can learn more about you and we’ll link through on the Dr. Lisa website as well.
Dottie: Another piece of what we’re doing that is going to be fairly public is because we use restorative justice practices in our work, and I’m not sure if I should go into that whole conversation …
Dr. Lisa: Well, just briefly, tell me what a restorative justice practice is.
Dottie: Restorative justice actually helps individuals come back into relationship when they’ve engaged in a wrong-doing or harm; bringing victims and perpetrators together. That being said, we use it a very basic level and a foundational level and a hybrid model in the fact that we have a circle every week that brings conversation and dialog around challenging conversations and conflict every single week so that it doesn’t get to escalate to the point where it needs to be restored through sort of a punitive model, suspension, detention, expulsion. We are always pulling our students back into relationship and that’s what restorative practices do.
We actually will be having … We’re working on a restorative justice institute, The Community School not necessarily is working on it, but there’s a group of us that are working on having a restorative justice institute at the farm where we actually train other schools. We train administrators, teachers, guidance counselors in schools to use this model that has been so successful for us. We’ve had 100% graduation rate for the last 3 years now because of restorative practices. When you look at these students were at risk of non-completion; the common word is drop-outs. We’ve been able to pull them back in school which is another piece of wisdom. They were wise enough to come back to school and stay in school and finish with a high school diploma. It’s a great statement for other schools in terms of shifting their models from the punishment model to a model that is restorative.
Dr. Lisa: Information about this and how to help your organization is available on your website. We’ll link through to your website. Thank you very much for coming in, Dottie and Joseph and my friend Martha who’s sitting right so close to me next to the microphone. It’s been great to have you hear.
Joseph: Thank you so much.
Dottie: Thank you to our donors and to Maine Magazine and all who support us. Thank you very much.
Dr. Lisa: Today’s show was about wisdom. The wisdom that comes from within us should we choose to listen to our own song, should we choose to resonate with our own lives. Dr. Christiane Northrup is a woman/mother and physician who is resonating with her own life and listening to her own song. Our interview with her ranged far and wide and we know that people who are listening will be inspired one way or the other and will want to look further into her book, The Wisdom of Menopause or perhaps her book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. We encourage listeners to go to our website and we will refer them to her website.
We also encourage individuals who may be inspired by The Community School at Opportunity Farm to look more into this valuable resource and to perhaps lend some support in this area if you are so inspired. Every week we hope we bring a little wisdom into your life. There’s much wisdom to be had from many sources in this world. If we can be one of those sources, we are grateful and humbled. Thank you for letting us be a part of your life this week and every week. Learn more at doctorlisa.org. Like us at Doctor Lisa on Facebook. Send us an email through our website. Give our office a call 207-847-9393 or perhaps, best of all, become a podcast subscriber and have us delivered weekly into your inbox. Thank you for being a part of our world. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the generous support of the following sponsors: Maine Magazine, Tom Shepard of Hersey, Gardner, Shepard & Eaton; Robin Hodgskin at Morgan, Stanley, Smith, Barney; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine; Pierce Atwood, UNE, the University of New England; and Akari. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Original content produced by Chris Kast and Genevieve Morgan. Our assistant producer is Jane Pate. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at Doctorlisa.org. Tune in every Sunday at 11AM for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on WLOB, Portland Maine 1310 AM or streaming WLOBradio.com. Podcasts are available at Doctorlisa.org.