Sacred Woman Holistic Healing: A Comprehensive Guide to Learning the Realms of Mindfulness, Meditation, and the Art of Healing for Women

By Susan Boje

Tammy Wynette once sang, "Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman." She could have stopped right there.

As a matter of fact, it's usually hard to be a woman in a society that often seems intent on ignoring our unique challenges as human

beings. Portrayed as "nurturing helpers," "mothers," or "shrews" and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Boje
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868914089

Book preview

Introduction

Tammy Wynette once sang, Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman. She could have stopped right there.

As a matter of fact, it’s usually hard to be a woman in a society that often seems intent on ignoring our unique challenges as human beings. Portrayed as nurturing helpers, mothers, or shrews and , women continue to struggle against a cluster of stereotypical roles attached to our sex.

While men have their own unique challenges and struggle under sex stereotypes of their own, many of the problems women face are rooted in our biological reality and our reproductive capacity. As young girls, we watch our bodies change and suddenly come under the male gaze. We begin to menstruate, experiencing the first indication of our otherness in the uncanny reality that we bleed every month yet don’t die.

What are these creatures who bleed yet don’t die?

Even in the 21st Century, we continue to be seen by some as both inferior and oddly (perhaps unfairly) magical.

Women – adult human females – are complex beings. Our womanhood isn’t expressed in the way we do our hair or the way we dress, or the fact that some of us paint our faces. Our womanhood is a deep well of wisdom, drawn from the same source as our struggles. In our femaleness, our womanhood is a font of human wisdom that few acknowledge – even women.

And that costs every living one of us human beings who are born women. While some women have found their way to a healthy way of being in the world while being who they are, unapologetically and enthusiastically, many continue to flounder under a miasma of sex-based disapproval.

We’re too this, not enough that, and certainly, nowhere near the human beings men are. We talk too much. We don’t talk enough. We’re too demanding. We’re too passive.

We’re mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. We’re leaders, followers, visionaries, and contemplatives. We’re priests and firefighters, schoolteachers, and politicians. We’re women, and only we know what we need in terms of healing from all that assails us.

In this book, Sacred Woman Holistic Healing, you’ll find a safe harbor from the storm that rages all around you. You’ll find the healing that brings you and your way of being into the center of the conversation. Not an afterthought, women’s healing is the subject of this book, and women’s struggles are what we’re all healing from. We’ll be naming some of those struggles and learning about what we can do to ease the pain and fatigue that too often comes with them.

Please join me for this crucial exploration of the art of healing for women and why we all need it.

Chapter 1

The M Word

"Nature intended women to be our slaves.

They are our property".

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821)

Most of you reading will know who Napoleon was. You will know that a male psychological complex (concerning the being of small stature) is named after him. You’ll also know that he got his rear end soundly kicked by the British at Waterloo.

You may or may not know that Napoleon Bonaparte was a misogynist, but then he lived in the 18th and early 19th Centuries – not known for their advanced understanding of human rights, to say the least.

History is rife with quotations like the one seen at the head of this chapter because misogyny has been around since Adam and Eve and that stupid apple, proffered by a mysterious snake in the Garden of Eden.

That apple was not only bitten by Eve but by Adam. But instead of accepting his own responsibility in the apple affair, Adam lets Eve take the Fall. (So much for men defending our honor!)

Misogyny – the M-word lurks around every corner to this day. It has gone nowhere, despite centuries of struggle. Sure, that struggle has rendered some important victories. Women can vote (in most countries). Women can open bank accounts and drive cars (in most countries). Women can study to be doctors, lawyers, and economists (in most countries).

But the struggle for full recognition as equal in humanity to men is ongoing. Even in countries that have legislated for full equality, women continue to be the targets of physical attacks motivated by hatred. For example, in the United States last year, homicide was the 4th leading cause of death for women aged 0 to 19. For women aged 20 to 44, it was the 5th leading cause (Centers for Disease Control). Every day in the USA, 3 women are murdered. In Mexico, the daily death toll is 10.

More than 60% of women murder victims are killed by an intimate partner or a man known to them.

And here’s the kicker: mass shooters (a grotesque social contagion in the USA) all share one shocking trait in common – they hate women. The New York Times explored this theme in a 2019 article (see Resources section at the end of this book), pointing out that mass shooters tended to have a common legacy of domestic violence and public expressions of misogyny on social media.

But where does all this blistering, homicidal hatred come from?

An Ancient Greek Tradition

The word misogyny is derived from the Ancient Greek misogunia (meaning the hatred of women) and is a direct translation into English. The hatred of women can be found in the writings of the Ancient Greeks going back to Hesiod (c. between 750 to 650 BCE), a contemporary of Homer and remembered by history as the originator of Western poetry.

While the tradition of misogyny has its roots in the culture of the Ancient Greeks, there was much debate about its nature in the days of the philosophers. In the same way, there was debate about the nature of misanthropy (the hatred of humanity in general) and misoinia (the hatred of wine). But while there was a lively debate among the Greeks, misogyny was most galvanized in later philosophical movements (namely, Christianity) via figures like Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 CE).

Augustine was a Manichean. This ancient Persian sect believed that the material world was evil. Later on, Augustine would turn to Neo-Platonism. Still later, Augustine was to take on the mantle of Father of the Early Christian Church. Leaving behind his Pagan roots, he also left his female partner and their 9-year-old son to fend for themselves. In his later writing, Augustine would refer to women in unflattering ways while writing in his capacity of a reborn Christian.

For example, in his Letter to Laetus, he writes, Watch out that she does not twist and turn you for the worse. What difference does it make whether it is in a wife or a mother, provided we nonetheless avoid Eve in any woman?

Of course, these sentiments were echoed by such notable Churchmen as Origen, Tertullian, and others. And those sentiments, while somewhat mediated in the modern age, still guide many sectors of the Church in its multifarious denominations. For example, the Roman Catholic Church does not ordain women. Many other denominations will not allow women any leadership role, confining their contributions to offering coffee after the service and running the potlucks and jumble sales.

The transmission of misogyny to the Early Church by Greek philosophy did not end at Christianity by any means. The common interpolation of Greek philosophical thought into both Judaism and Christianity was later established in Islam, bringing with it the same hatred and fear of women.

Misogyny Hurts

To this day, misogyny plagues the lives of billions of women all over the world. This is a difficult truth to absorb when one considers that women are still almost half of the population. Women form 49.6% of the global population, against men, at 50.4%

Yet, it was not so long ago that women were the dominant demographic. So, where did all the women go?

This trend of a declining population of women and girls globally has been viewed with distress for some time. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Anthropology (see Resources) cites both gender inequality and sex-selective abortion, among other causes to explain the phenomenon.

Please note that sex-selective abortion means that fetuses determined to be female via testing are aborted. These fetuses are deemed undesirable in countries in which males are the sex that economically participates due to cultural and/or religious traditions governing the social meaning of male and female. This exclusion renders live female births of reduced importance. In nations where sex-selective abortion is practiced, the birth of a girl is often viewed as a burden to the family.

But behind the diminishing numbers of women in the world are other shadows. Moving behind the disconcerting numbers are the specters of mayhem and murder, abuse, and incarceration to the needs of others under compulsion (also known as enslavement). Femicide is an