Healing For Women

Biohacking is a relatively new term that refers to things we can do on a day-to-day basis to maintain and heal our bodies.

Biohacking, in large part, was invented by men and it really is for men. But in our ever-morphing and strange landscape, we’ve moved the dial on what it means to be both masculine and feminine.

I can only speak to the changes that have swept the female landscape, as a female, so I’ll stick to that lane.

Let’s start with the biohacking craze. For men, these have worked quite magically.

Cold plunging, fasting and high intensity interval training or “HIIT” all work well with a male body. But not so much for female bodies.

We have very different nervous systems from men. Women literally ‘feel’ more than men. Both physically and emotionally. Even the connections between our brain hemispheres function quite differently from men.

So while a man can take the ‘hits’ of cold plunging, food deprivation (such as fasting) and a higher intensity training regimen, women cannot. Men can do these things and this will put a positive stress on their bodies.

When women do these things it winds up putting a negative stress on our bodies. So while men seem to benefit from cold plunging, women are much better adapted to heat. So, saunas, hot tubs, hot epsom salts baths will be a much better biohack for women.

If you’ve ever sat in a sauna with both men and women, you’ll notice that the men will run out of the sauna much quicker than women do!

We’re different beings.

Probably the most disturbing trend for women in the last century has been the repeated and driving narrative that women can live, work and sex just like men. That not only is this not a problem for women, but it is good for us.

We should want this.

This narrative has seen women working longer and longer hours but still maintaining the same level of childcare than before we worked in longer and more stressful environments. So while we’ve been told that this has been the ‘ultimate liberation’ for women, we’ve been lied to.

Imagine getting up in the morning, getting yourself ready, getting your children ready, going to work all day, than coming home to then care for your children, make dinner and clean the house. I’d love to know how this liberated women.

Of course, we can choose what we’d like. This is the undeniable liberating part of feminism and progression.

But we can’t do it all. That’s the lie.

The overworked, overstimulated woman is not a happier woman. She is stressed. She has thyroid issues; body aches; insomnia; autoimmune issues.

She’s angry.

The culture keeps telling her how liberated she is now! But she doesn’t feel this way. It doesn’t land this way in her body. So she dupes herself. She starts to feel guilty that she doesn’t love this power and liberation.

What’s wrong with me? She utters at 3 o’clock in the morning when she’s tired but wired and can’t get back to sleep.

And then there’s the brazen messaging about what we’re now encouraged to do with our bodies.

Women can have sex just like men!

This, after all, is the sexual revolution. We can have casual sex, rough sex…it doesn’t need to mean anything.

Get over yourself.

But it turns out that we can’t. Women have a biological imperative that declares loudly within our endocrine systems that to have casual sex with random men can result in several outcomes…

Namely, sexual assault and/or pregnancy.

We know that 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lifetime. And those are just the ones who report it. And most of these sexual assaults come in the form of ‘date rape.’ A woman with a man she doesn’t know well or at all that takes it too far.

As far as pregnancy, our biological systems - which do not work separately from our mental and emotional systems - are wired for this possibility. A woman who, from casual sex, gets pregnant now has to contend with figuring out how to rear this child and keep both herself and her baby safe, protected and fed.

Female evolution has not yet caught up with abortion. So while we can choose this route, our bodies behave as if we can’t. All of our systems will go into extreme survival mode (because now it is not only our own survival but the survival of a potential baby) and it will change the way in which we function and survive.

This has not been a good deal for women.

More than anything, women are wired for safety. If we circle back again to our nervous systems, this is the baseline wiring for women. Safety.

And the world continues to double dog dare us to not be safe.

It’s so strange.

Healing for women looks nothing like the bargain that our current and so-called progressive landscape has tried to sell us. If it was, indeed, a great bargain for women, we wouldn’t have so many sick and unhappy women.

Rampant autoimmune disease (particularly in the thyroid and nervous system), cancer, gut disorders, depression and anxiety have swept the feminine landscape.

Something is not working.

So like a bird is meant to fly, nest and eat worms and bugs…like a fish is meant for water…like tree is meant to drop its leaves in the fall and bud new ones in the spring…so too are we meant to live and move about our lives in a particular way.

And for women, this means embodying our feminine energy as deeply as possible.

The Divine Feminine is soft, receptive, nurturing, slower moving, and yes…I’m going to bravely go there…vulnerable.

Feminine vulnerability is not a weakness.

It is our superpower.

The word ‘vulnerable’ has its roots in the Latin word, “Vulnerabilis.” Meaning, capable of being wounded. Which is simply the truth. And at one point, society rallied around this truth.

Men had to get their shit together in order to be made worthy of a marriage to a woman. He had to be an upstanding citizen. And while we certainly needed to update our previous held beliefs and practices around the sovereignty of women, we all but threw out the baby with the bathwater.

So the vulnerable woman - who was recognized as such - forced a sort of civility in society. It forced men to step up. And when the culture brazenly declared: Women can do it all!! Girl Boss! We don’t need you (men, that is)!!…men stopped stepping up in the same ways in which they used to. And that has changed the fabric of our social structure.

So a woman honouring her vulnerability has culture-wide and systemic repercussions. It sets the tone for a healthy society.

If we are to truly honour “The Divine Feminine” we are going to need a rewrite. We can’t do this if we are erasing femininity.

Healing As The Feminine

As a woman, in order to heal (body, mind, soul) we’re going to have to recapture what it means to be feminine. Of course, how that unfolds will look different for every woman. But there are certain ingredients that must be present.

As women, we’re going to have to find ways to reinhabit our femaleness apart from what society is telling us we should want.

An overworked, underslept woman, for example, is not going to heal.

A woman who has donned a masculine hat, is not going to heal.

A woman who is careless with her body and her sexuality is not going to heal.

A woman who is cold-plunging, running marathons and fasting, is not going to heal.

But here is what may begin to move the dial…

To come back to a state of receptivity. Women were made to be receptive vessels. Even our bodies reflect this.

Something as seemingly simple as allowing the men or boys around you to carry your groceries into the house does something incredible on a hormonal level (for both women AND men). It increases estrogen levels in women and increases testosterone levels in men.

How’s that for a biohack?

Slow down. Dance a little. Women do much better on a biological, emotional level to move their bodies in feminine ways. You want to work out? Wonderful!

If you go to the gym, pound the weights and run your ass off on a treadmill, you will build muscle, yes, but you will also increase testosterone. Unhealthy levels of testosterone. Your thyroid will not like this very much. Neither will your ovaries.

But if you walk or dance, you will increase estrogen. Dancing for women is like swimming for fish. We are moving in ways that our bodies were meant to move.

Speak honestly. This is a huge one for women. We take on a great deal in our modern culture and we do so at our own detriment. Be honest about what’s not working for you. And find out what does work.

The culture doesn’t always get it right. In fact, the culture often gets it wrong.

A woman’s intuition is her greatest ally. If we pay attention to it rather than listening to what we’re being told we should want, or what would allegedly benefit us, we would fair much better.

We can’t swim upstream before we eventually run out of steam.

A woman arrives here with a blueprint. And its up to us to honour that in the best way that we can.

While society, under the guise of feminism, is actually trying to rewrite what it means to be a women, we need a return to baseline. That baseline exists somewhere deep within every woman.

It is up to her to access it and express it.

Her inner feminine just might be what saves her sanity and her health.