The Empowerment of Women

A Conversation with  Dr. Christine Page

By Donna Strong

 

 

Christine Page, M.D., has been practicing the art of creative discovery all her life. Gifted with intuitive abilities since she was quite young, she has continued to delve deeply into the mysteries. Christine has been described as a metaphysical physician, an apt term for a woman who has finely dovetailed very different worlds of wisdom — that of medicine and mystical subtle realms. The prolific author of seven books, Christine’s work spans subjects from health and healing to our home in the universe. Her newest book, just launched this month, is The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman. As we open the door on a much-prophesied new era, Christine’s  insights are quite germane in these times of vast transformation. A spiritual seer of enormous acumen, she is living testament to the creative richness that we all can embody when we allow more soul-centered awareness to emerge. Awareness: I want to ask if you would talk about a woman’s purpose, not only to give birth physically, but to new levels of consciousness. I wanted to say how much I loved your description of us as transformational vessels! Christine: Good! One of the things I thought about was, okay, what is it that all women do? Barring a very few, every woman has a menstrual cycle on average for around 35 years. In that time we have about 420 cycles and the average number of live children is about 1.2 around the world. So I thought, well, if every woman is doing this for such a long period of time, what is its purpose? I felt that the Great Mother would not have created such a huge number of cycles just to create 1.2 children per woman on the planet. I came to the conclusion that we must be having these cycles for another reason than just having children and continuing our existence here on earth. What I realized is that outside of procreation, women are giving birth every month through their cycle, and this is not being explained to our young women. Even those of us who are post-menopausal, we are still cycling. What’s most important is to understand that every month we get the chance to release old energy just as you would clear a garden at the end of the year — you clear out what is no longer wanted, take from it the fruit of what’s been grown, and let go of the rest. We do this as a woman every month. We keep what is valuable and release what is no longer valuable.

There was a traditional way that a woman would gather together every emotion and belief and finished project and say, okay, what are we going to keep as family that is valuable and what are we going to release? Everything that the family was ready to let go of and give back to Mother Earth would be transformed with the blood of the menses at the moon time. Within that time, a woman would allow herself to be nurtured and she would receive new information and new consciousness for her tribe and her family.

For women, one of the most sacred purposes we have is to purify — a very important part of the transformative process; and then to inspire — to bring in inspiration and nurture whatever is brought in so it can be shared with others.

I would like to say that cycling is so important, and women need to recognize that it is not something to be gotten rid of, but there is actually something quite positive in our menses. I have some concerns because our young women are choosing to have implants and injections and pills to stop themselves from having any cycles at all, which I think is a problem for humanity.

Awareness: I’m so in agreement with you. It’s part of our innate nature to be cyclical in some regard, not just as women, but men as well.

Christine: Yes. Yes.

Awareness: One of the things I wanted to ask you is about a woman’s body, I love what you have written in your new book!

Christine: One of the things I realized from life is how disconnected we are from our true identity, and anything that was less than 4,000 years old has probably been very tainted by the patriarchal viewpoint.

When I looked beyond 4,000 years ago, that was when I got in touch with these wonderful figurines that had very voluptuous breasts and bottoms. I thought if I were going to find out any information, it would be by returning to the body to really look at it from different points of view.

I believe all temples, synagogues, and churches were built to be places where you could come to be in the oneness, to reconnect to the Great Mother, the divine, whatever one calls it. So when I started to look at the reproductive organs, they reminded me very much of being in a church where there are different doorways until you go into the very heart of the church, where you would become quieter and more respectful as you entered into the presence of a sacred place.

With the body, I looked at the outer part, the vulva, which is the entry point into the vagina. Of course the vulva has so much there that is all about sensual and sexual arousal. I realized that what is so important is that before anyone enters into a woman’s vagina, there needs to be sexual arousal in a romantic and respectful way in order to unlock the door.

This is like having the key to unlock the door and enter into a sacred temple, which is the womb. Illness around the vulva is often associated with someone who doesn’t feel that her body has been respected, or that she has been nurtured and romanced before someone enters her body.

The vagina is a very important hallway — it is the place that can lovingly push a baby out, and it can pull something in, such as the penis. So many women in the Western world are not taught that the rhythm of sexual intercourse should be set up by the woman, not by the man in order for her to pull him in, rather than him to push his way in. There can be illnesses where a woman does not feel she has been respected and has control of the situation.

Then we come to the inner doorkeeper — the cervix. Some associations that we have with cervical cancer is that it is much more common in women who have had early intercourse, or several partners. Often there is a history of abuse or feeling that they can’t make their own choices. I had early cervical cancer myself, and noticed I was allowing myself to be in relationships that were not respectful.

Finally, as you pass through the cervix, you move into the uterus — the womb of wisdom, the sacred temple where all the transformation takes place. If you think about it, it’s a miracle of transformation that a small group of cells can transform into this amazing baby; and a woman’s ability to take ideas, issues and beliefs and transform them and bleed them out at menstruation is an amazing transformation as well.

When we don’t experience our thoughts and feelings fully, things get stuck. We lose our ability to lock doors in our body for protection, or to fully grieve, and let things go so new things come in and grow.

One of the biggest problems I see in the womb is grief — the inability to let go of a story, or the inability to let go of pain, of unrequited love, of rejection. Around the new moon, I think the most important thing we can all do is to choose to release our pain around things we want and our expectations of the things that are never going to come to fruition. We need to stop blocking ourselves by holding onto what we wanted to happen. This causes us to be constantly looking back and not forward.

Awareness: This is so brilliant! Also in the journey of this amazing book, I wanted to make reference to a surprise that you had during its development, and on being true to your own heart.

Christine: I’d written already on the Great Mother in my previous book, but it felt like it was time to go deeper, so I started writing. I wrote a lot, and when I got to the section on breast cancer, I found myself being more disconnected and confused about the message of this disease.

I finished the book and sent it in, and two weeks later, I developed a breast lump. So the lump appears and I go through testing, and of course it comes back as cancerous. I knew that this was an invitation for me to go much deeper into my understanding of what breast cancer is about.

Before I went in for the surgery, I spent about two months really going deep inside myself. Things came to the surface about how I had become disconnected from my true self.

When you get sick, people will give you advice, and they kept saying, “Nurture yourself.” I thought... I don’t know who I am, and that is the problem. I don’t know the self that needs nurturing.

I have always been very intuitive. I learned very young, like I think a lot of women, to be a good girl, a kind individual, and think of others before myself. I had spent so much time thinking of others before myself that I had gotten lost. This wasn’t so much at work, but more in the acquaintances and friendships where I had a tendency to do whatever someone else wanted so as not to offend.

During the cancer, when I was going for treatments, I became stronger. Sometimes people would say, “I’m going to send you healing; I’m going to do something.” I learned to say, “Please don’t.”

I had six weeks of radiotherapy and rewrote huge sections of the book. On the last day of my radiotherapy, I sent in the new book, which was kind of a lovely completion. Since then I have been very well. Most importantly, I’m happy that I listened to the messages of the disease and used them.

Awareness: Awesome! Given the opportunity, you certainly rose up to the challenge of showing your soul’s journey through form, which I really think many people need to wake up to. This life is really about the soul and spirit.

Christine: Exactly. I’ve never ever felt that my body was punishing me or that I was being punished for getting ill. I was not a victim. From the moment I got the breast cancer, my first thought was, “Wow, my soul loves me so much it’s given me cancer.”

Awareness: To be able to accept the deeper understanding of the calling embedded in cancer is very insightful.

Christine: That was why I did not accept offers of healing. People were offering to help me get rid of something that I had actually developed on purpose. My agenda was to hear the message and to do something with it. I said, “Don’t shoot my messenger.”

I have hundreds of stories of people feeling exactly the same way — that nobody’s really addressing the deeper issues of why they got sick in the first place. We’re so focused on getting rid of what we perceive as a problem, rather than listening to the message of the soul that is really coming through.

Awareness: Well, I am with you 100 percent on that. It just takes so much courage of the heart though to be able to see it. On another subject, what would you like to tell us about the Great Mother?

Christine: If we look toward the creative force or our creative origins, I prefer to call it the Great Mother, rather than to see it as a male figure. I think the male figure for us is that which stimulates the creative energy into form.

Every culture that I looked at before 4,000 years ago talked about the primordial waters. It was seen as feminine and formless — the creative source, the potentiality; and as soon as we pay attention to any part of that potentiality, we create form. We are literally born from liquid in our mother’s womb, so water has always been a theme of the Great Mother.

The Great Mother provides a rich abundance of potential and it is our masculine aspect, the attention seeker that chooses where we’re going to focus.

Awareness: Why do we need to reconnect with the Great Mother at this time?

Christine: Because she is the source of our creative future, the source of our evolution; the source of the new consciousness. Humanity is at a tipping point and we’re going to evolve to a new level of consciousness. In that new world there will be unity through the acceptance of diversity.

In contrast, the world we’re living in at the moment is one where anything that is different from us, we feel challenged by. So I believe that the Great Mother’s energy is really trying to break down these old ways of being which perhaps are more hierarchical and polarized. Of course we’re seeing it even today where there is abuse of power or not accepting other people’s diversity, and these structures are being broken down.

It is moving towards respect and honor for everybody, whatever their religion, culture, or gender. That is really why we’re seeing the changes in politics, in religion, in banking and other industries. The Great Mother is the great balancer.

She has always been the one asking, “Are you playing fairly? Are you living in harmony with your surroundings or are you trying to control them?’ That’s really what she’s doing — bringing us back down to the same level so we can work in harmony.

Awareness: This is luscious. Are there some thoughts that you’d like to share about your new book, The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman.

Christine: 2013 is the year of woman. I think that we’re living in this place where we’re being given the chance to step forward. I’m going to say, particularly as women, we need to return to our sacred purpose.

I think women have become disconnected from who they are. Women have this potential, this wonderful gift of fertility, and a wonderful gift of transformation, of clearing out energies and moving things on. They are the true inspirers because it is much easier for women to get in touch with higher realms of consciousness.

Christine has more than 30 years of experience in the caring professions as a doctor and homeopath. Now focusing on education, she sees herself as a messenger and bridge builder between different worlds. For more information on Christine’s books and events, visit: www.christinepage.com

Donna Strong is a writer whose work can be seen on www.donnastrong.com. In the past year she has been developing a great affinity with bees. Her work with healing sounds of the bee can be accessed at www.harmonyofbees.com and http://www.facebook.com/harmony.bees