A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can come to fruition without light. Let us call upon woman's voice and woman's heart to guide us in this age of planetary transformation. -Diane Mariechild

From "Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom," by Christiane Northrup, M.D. :

Health practitioners and women alike view even normal bodily functions such as menstruation, menopause, and childbirth as medical conditions requiring treatment. The attitude that our bodies are accidents waiting to happen seems to get internalized at a young age and sets the stage for women's future relationships with their bodies. Given what we are taught, it is no wonder that most of us feel ill prepared to deal with and trust ourselves. Our bodies have been "medicalized" since before we were born!

Our culture fears all natural processes: birthing, dying, healing, living. Daily, we are taught to be afraid. When my older daughter was seven, she was out with her father chopping down some brush in our backyard. Suddenly she started to cry and came running into the house with a bleeding finger. She had cut herself on a blade of grass. As I calmly held her finger under some cold water and saw that it was only a tiny cut, she looked up at me and uttered what I consider a major healing principle: "It didn't hurt until I got scared."

My father used to say, "Feelings are facts. Pay attention to them." Yet in my scientific training I quickly learned that feelings, intuition, spirituality, and all experiences of life that cannot be explained by the logical, rational parts of our minds or measured by our five senses are ignored or discounted. The addictive system fears emotional responses and highly values the control of emotions because it is so out of touch with them. Female bodies, long associated with cycles and subject to the ebb and flow of natural rhythms, are seen as especially emotional and in need of management. Our entire society functions in ways that keep us out of touch with what we know and feel.