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mysterious than we realize. Patricia Reis, who worked with many of my patients’ dreams and body symptoms, put it this way: “The bigger meaning of healing is a ‘wholeing,’ a filling out of the missing pieces of a person’s life. Sometimes this may even mean facing death in a more fully realized way. Certainly it is an opportunity to come more deeply and fully into life.”
    Although our entire bodies are affected by our thoughts and emo tions and their various parts talk to one another, each individual’s body language is unique. No matter what has happened in her life, a woman has the power to change what that experience means to her and thus change her experience, both emotionally and physically. Therein lies her healing. There are no simple formulas for deciphering the message behind a symptom, and only the patient herself can ultimately know what the message is about. Sometimes a woman’s body, through chronic vaginitis, asks her to leave a relationship. Sometimes headaches that occur premenstrually are a sign that she needs to give up caffeine. In other women, these symptoms may be related to something entirely different. It is up to each woman to “sit with” her symptoms in a completely receptive, nonjudgmental way so that she can begin to appreciate the unique language of her body.
    We don’t yet understand completely why it is that one woman who has been abandoned by her husband, for example, will seem to deteriorate emotionally, mentally, and physically, blaming this particular trauma for a lifetime of woes, while another woman with a similar background will recover fully and live a productive life. Some people can name an initially painful and traumatic circumstance as the stimu lus from which major personal growth later arose. Childhood abuse, incest, loss of a parent, and other traumas are not absolutely linked in a cause-and-effect way with subsequent distress in adulthood. The effect of trauma on our physical, mental, and emotional bodies is determined largely by how we interpret the event and give it meaning .
    Emotional factors are usually involved in common gynecological problems, along with diet, behavior, and heredity. I have found that most women with persistent genital warts, herpes, or ovarian cysts have experienced or are continuing to experience emotional and psychological stress or unrest. In these cases, a history of sexual abuse, abortions that haven’t been resolved emotionally, or some conflict involving relationships or creativity is almost always present. These con flicts live in the body’s vibrational field until they’re resolved—they are healing opportunities simply waiting for our attention.
    One of my ob-gyn colleagues, Maude Guerin, M.D., illustrates this beautifully by using the example of a woman named Joan who had severe endometriosis and pelvic pain. Dr. Guerin “cured” Joan with a total abdominal hysterectomy and removal of both ovaries and fallopian tubes—a standard treatment for her problem. Following surgery, however, Joan developed back pain, depression, and incapacitating hot flashes, requiring many times the regular dose of hormones. Although her pelvic pain had been “cured,” in many ways she was no better off than she had been before. Instead of being healed, she had simply traded one group of symptoms for another. The surgical removal of her uterus and ovaries had not resolved the emotional conflicts in her body’s vibrational field that were the root cause of her problem.
    Dr. Guerin discovered that Joan had been sexually abused at the age of six, had lived through the death of her sister at the age of sixteen, and had turned to workaholism to avoid her feelings. Despite these major traumas in her life, she had never been able to cry. Dr. Guerin writes, “This patient has been a wonderful teacher for me. Although I never discounted the concept that thoughts and feelings in fluence physical health, I had always perceived that influence to be rel