How I Healed my Womb... By Loving It

What pain teaches us, men and women alike

[trigger warning: discussion of childhood sexual abuse]

In this post, I’ll be talking about how I healed my various womb issues (which went on for 17 years) once and for all. Not with medication, or surgery, or any other material approach… but with Love.

Though this post deals with female anatomy, I encourage men to read as well. The ultimate message is not about femaleness, but about pain — which everyone encounters at some point on the Life journey.

Meditative Rose, by my late husband Salvador Dali ;)

I got my first period at 12 years old. It was rather unceremoniously discovered during a bathroom break while playing hide-and-seek in church with friends. (Talk about symbolic!) I knew what a period was, but — like most women in our sadly disconnected modern world — I had no clue that I’d just been initiated into womanhood.

As a chaos magician, now, I understand the importance of initiation, for how it incites conscious awareness of the initiant’s power, responsibility, and purpose.

Womanhood is indeed all of these things: power, responsibility, purpose.

But without a rite of passage to contextualize and guide me towards the Light of consciousness, this primordial feminine power was relegated to the land of Shadows: the unconscious, where darkness and confusion reign.

Thus, the pain began.

Every month, without fail, my menstrual cramps would destroy me.

The pain was like someone took a bunch of big knives and STABBED them all throughout my lower abdomen, then left them there at various angles.

Not only did I get excruciating cramps, but I also got slammed with insurmountable brain fog, overwhelming exhaustion, piercing sensitivity to light and sound, and just about every other negative period symptom that one could imagine.

Every, single, month—for years.

Oh, and on the worst months, the cramps would extend into my thighs and knees as well, shredding through my joints and muscles like cauterizing knives.

When you’re dealing with ongoing invisible pain, you learn real quick that people don’t give a fuck.

If it had been up to me, I would’ve dropped everything to curl up in the fetal position and just… suffer.

But I was a student, meaning I was at the mercy of my teachers. So during my grade school years, if I was lucky, my teacher would let me go to the nurse’s office where I’d lie on a cot as long as I could until they kicked me out. After a few months of this, they stopped believing me altogether and told me to just “stop eating salty food.”

Even after I started avoiding triggering foods like dairy, salt and caffeine, the pain continued.

Then, once I was no longer a grade-schooler at the mercy of teachers, the power shifted to my bosses. One day in college, during my first job as a cashier at a quick-service cafe, the cramps hit. I begged my manager to let me take a break, but we were in the middle of the lunch rush, and she thought I was just trying to get out of working hard.

I somehow managed to make it through that shift, though I was drowning in the sharp lights and noises: blender blades spinning smoothies, customers yelling about their food, cash registers pinging, all while hot knives incinerated my womb. I almost passed out.

Then—as soon as I was off the clock—I stumbled to the fancy apartment lobby next door, found a couch, and lied down for hours before finally mustering the strength to walk the few blocks back to my dorm.

“Nobody believes me” became the clear running theme of this pain journey.

Then, for some “mysterious reason” that I couldn’t figure out —

despite trying every OTC painkiller, every dietary change, heating pads, fancy stretches, etc. —

the pain got worse.

At some point 7 years ago, the monthly cysts began. So now I was dealing with pain during menstruation AND during ovulation.

I began experiencing a sharp stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen, so intense that I was afraid. So I took myself to urgent care, where the doctor said there were two possibilities: Either I had an ovarian cyst, or my appendix had ruptured. She had me transferred to an emergency room.

I had watched my brother go through appendicitis before, so it wasn’t lost on me how serious this pain was. But then the doctors confirmed that it was “just” ovarian pain, and referred me to an ultrasound technician.

The ultrasound technician (a woman, and a brown one like me — so forgive me if I assumed she would understand or care about me 🙄) went through the whole clinical process of slathering my abdomen and vulva with an uncomfortably cold gel, plunging a synthetic wand into my vagina, and coldly appraising the images on her screen. “It’s a cyst,” she confirmed curtly. Then she left me alone to clean myself up. It was all so mechanical. Inhumane. Violating, even.

I had so many questions. A cyst??? Why? What did it mean? Was it dangerous? Was it related to cancer?

After putting my clothes back on, I went to find her again. She was ensconced in some administrative activity at her computer. I tried to ask her more about the cyst, thinking she would be happy to tell me more.

But instead, she got angry at me.

The friend who came with me to that appointment can attest to this: She was irrationally mad at my questions and essentially refused to answer them. She wouldn’t tell me why I had a cyst, or whether it would go away, or what I should do about it. Instead, she stared fiercely at her computer screen and dismissed me, until I — feeling quite humiliated and powerless — left, even more confused and scared than before.

It was the most bizarre medical experience of my life, and that’s saying something. In general, I’d felt abused by the medical industrial complex. Alongside my “mysterious” womb issues, I was also dealing with a “mysterious” autoimmune diagnosis (first “lupus,” then “fibromyalgia”—though both doctors admitted that they didn’t actually know why I had chronic joint/muscle pain). And the doctors were shitty about that too. Nobody ever had answers — only expensive tests to run and useless medications to prescribe.

And I later found (during my first and only visit to a gynecologist) that monthly ovarian cysts are “just a thing that happens to women, nobody really knows why.” Huh???

Ultimately I stopped going to doctors altogether. Why? Because, once again, I had the growing sense that nobody believed me, or cared. And their “treatments” weren’t helping anyway! So what would be the point of paying them to gaslight me?

But my self-preserving choice to exit the medical industrial complex wasn’t enough to make the pain go away. Because now, instead of fighting external doctors, the fight continued… against myself.

See, the thing I didn’t understand about my “mysterious” womb/body pain was that it wasn’t mysterious at all.

Due to the lack of initiation around my period (and in life in general — thanks, modernity!), I didn’t know how to interpret symbols.

Symbols are the language of the subconscious mind, which is where we make most of our decisions from. This hidden, repressed part of ourselves tries to draw our attention to issues in the internal landscape by signaling (using signs). This signaling can be done through dreams or synchronicites. But if the messages of the subconscious continue to be ignored, the signals get louder and louder, turning into symbolic pain.

When I say “symbolic” pain, I don’t mean the pain is imaginary. I mean the location, quality and occurence of the pain is chosen by the subconscious mind for its symbolic significance.

So for example: knee pain might occur in a person who over-extends themselves in service to others and therefore “can’t support themselves.” Or, migraine headaches may occur in people who over-think to avoid feeling, thus burdening their mind with unnecessary psychic tension.

These are overgeneralized examples, but you get the point. Pain is symbolically orchestrated by the Shadowy part of the Self, only dissipating once the symbolic message is successfully interpreted and integrated. This is the basis of all ancient medicine traditions, which associate each body part with a specific spiritual function in addition to its physical function.

The seed of this understanding was first planted in my mind when my best friend

Mickey Z.

relayed that at least 75% of women diagnosed with fibromyalgia are also survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

When he told me this, I recognized that it was true. I did have PTSD — “diagnosed 4 times!” I would practically brag to people who tried to dismiss my emotional turmoil as a mere bid for attention.

But it wasn’t just the PTSD part that disturbed me. It was the issue of where the PTSD had come from.

I had been sexually abused.

Problem was, I wasn’t confident enough to admit this to anyone, least of all myself.

Why? Because I didn’t have any memories of it happening.

What I had, instead of clear memories of being molested, was anomalies.

I had chronic urinary tract infections as a toddler, that the doctor condescendingly told my mom were a result of me “wiping the wrong way” — which was not true, but they laughed at me anyway, so I sheepishly went along with their patronizing explanation. Nobody ever considered the fact that this is often a sign of molestation.

I had the haunting, creepy feeling of having been invaded and violated. I was extremely uncomfortable around men, all my life. I couldn’t tell you “why.”

I had recurring nightmares about being hunted down by men I vaguely recognized. The nightmares were intense, frightening. The fear was visceral and unmistakably real. I woke up in a cold sweat every time. I also had a night terror about a childhood caretaker, similarly violating and creepy.

And that childhood caretaker? I have no memories of her, other than the night terror. In fact, as an adult when my mom told me that this person had lived with us for 1 year, I was in shock. How could someone have lived in our home, taking care of me, without me even remembering her? There is no other part of my childhood that I’ve straight-up forgotten like that. I’ve always had vibrant memory recall.

Between hearing that my fibromyalgia may actually be sexual PTSD, and hearing that I’d erased an entire person and 1-year period from my life, I knew I had repressed something. A whole year of something.

But what I learned from sexual assaults later in my life (which I, unfortunately, can recall in full detail) is that when you try to speak about what happened to you, this sick thing happens: People violate your story of being violated.

They take your brave words, “I was raped,” and rape you again.

“No you weren’t.”

“Stop looking for attention.”

“They would never do that, liar.”

“You clearly loved it.”

In fact, many survivors agree that the lack of social support for their sexual trauma can feel even more violating than the trauma itself, because it’s compounded by the feelings of betrayal and abandonment.

So if I couldn’t even tell people about the violations I could remember, how on Earth was I supposed to talk about the ones I couldn’t remember?

Why should anyone believe me?

Besides, the mental health establishment said that “repressed memories” were a dangerous hoax made up by hypnotherapists to make money. I was afraid to explore these anomalies further, lest I induce false memories in myself. I was also afraid to “talk over” anyone who had “real” trauma that they could actually remember — unlike me, who was obviously just seeking attention by pretending to have trauma.

I couldn’t see it at the time, but amidst all my whining about how “nobody believed me,” I had become the person who didn’t believe me.

That was where the pain was coming from. It had never been a mystery.

I had just been in denial.

My unexpressed despair and rage about being disbelieved — multiplied by the body-permeating creepiness of having been violated — manifested as a passionate devotion to radical feminism, and even as an award-winning play about vigilantes who castrate rapists.

But all the indulgently-expressive Art in the world couldn’t expel the sick, putrid trauma that lived inside my womanhood like a fetid, rotting corpse.

I was blind to how I had become the perpetrator against myself. I hated my period, I hated my body, I hated my uterus. I wanted to kill them, rip them up, annihilate them. I blamed my body for being raped. I blamed being a woman. “This wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t a girl,” I told myself, just to have something to make sense of the insensible. That senseless hatred became a code underpinning the very cells of my being.

It was the ultimate self-blame.

And now, like a sick feedback loop, as I perpetrated violation/hatred against myself, my body ramped up her pain signals — which I then sickly translated as evidence that she deserved to be hated.

But she wasn’t trying to hurt me.

She was trying to tell me something.

And just like me — who longed and longed and longed for someone to believe me —

all my body wanted was for me to believe her.

Every cramp, ever wave of nausea, every bout of fatigue… it was all a message. A desperate cry.

Please.

Please believe me.

So it wasn’t until September 30th of last year, that I finally listened.

Until this point, I had been in the habit of trying to downplay or ignore my body’s requests during menstruation. I denied myself indulgent foods. I pushed myself to go to work even with cramps. I hated the feeling of being unable to do things I love — like work on my music, or hang out with friends — all because I was a woman.

Paradoxically, the more I tried not to have these womanly needs by trying to dominate the pain, the more the pain dominated me.

It all culminated on September 30th, when I had a massive breakthrough.

I laid on the floor.

I closed my eyes.

I lovingly wrapped my arms around myself.

And I said out loud — to my womb, to my Inner Child, to my Self —

“I believe you.

Even if you don’t remember exactly what happened, I believe you.

You don’t need to prove that you were molested by extracting explicit memories from the subconscious.

You don’t need to convince me with loud pain signals.

You don’t have to relive anything to prove that it happened.

I know you are telling me the Truth.

I know that the abuse really happened.

And it’s over now. It’s not happening anymore and it won’t happen again. I recognize and respect your attempts to stay safe. I promise to protect you now. I honor your innocence.

From now on, whenever you need something, simply ask me for it — and I promise I will do everything I can to fulfill that need.

I love you so much.”

As I said these things, I wept like I was releasing something I hadn’t known was stuck. I felt a lifetime of decrepit, putrid pain being flushed out of my body at the cellular level, like a spiritual baptism. The purest waters of Life flowed through every crevice of my being, purifying what could never be corrupted to begin with.

After this soul-cleansing, what remained was innocence.

The unadulterated innocence they tried to take away from me.

Innocence, and light.

The next time I had my period, and I felt the cramps coming on, I asked my uterus, gently, sincerely, “What do you need?”

The answer was clear: “Rest.”

Okay.

Instead of resenting it this time, I did it with my whole heart. (In general, “If you’re going to do something do it with your whole heart” is excellent life advice.)

I was working remotely at the time, so this was possible for me. I stayed in bed with my laptop all day. And the next day, too. I didn’t complain about how I was losing productivity on my creative projects. Nope. I simply rested, because that’s what my Empress asked for.

The next cycle, I did it again. I rested. I indulged in the foods I wanted (yes, even salt!!!). I pampered myself with no hesitation. I relished the cancellation of plans.

The cramps lightened up. So did my flow. Even the blood changed quality, from thick, dark and clotted to bright and barely perceptible.

After three cycles of this, I almost stopped having cramps altogether. There are times during my period now when I forget that I’m on it.

Compared to the God-awful pain I used to feel, this is all the evidence I need that a genuine shift of Consciousness has occured.

At long last, my subconscious’s signals have been Truthfully interpreted and integrated, rendering them entirely unnecessary.

There’s no need for symbolic, cryptic messages anymore when your body knows

that you’re listening

that you care

and that you believe her.

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As a conclusion to this post, I invite you, dear reader, to acknowledge whatever pain you’ve been ignoring or begun identifying with,

and ask it what it’s really telling you.

Then, listen for its answer. Listen in Truth and Love.

The answers will be revealed to you.

Ask and ye shall receive.