Medicine Woman is the eagerly-awaited sister book to Nautilus Silver-Award-Winning Burning Woman from Amazon bestselling author, Lucy H. Pearce.
This audacious questioning of the current medical system’s ability to deal with the modern epidemic of chronic illness, combines a raw personal memoir of sickness and healing, woven through with voices of dozens of other long-term sick women of the world and a feminine cultural critique that digs deep into the roots of patriarchal medicine. Pearce takes us from its ancient Greek roots, through the influences of the Enlightenment and Christianity, the wholesale destruction of the wise woman tradition and Western colonial destruction of native medicines to the current technocratic, capitalist model of medicine.
Medicine Woman asks the uncomfortable questions that our culture refuses to face:
- Why chronic illness, mental health issues, medical prescriptions and costs are rising exponentially.
- Why women are the major sufferers of the modern epidemic of auto-immune conditions.
- Why women are twice as likely to be medicated for depression.
- Why women tend to be taken less seriously by medical professionals.
Medicine Woman voices a deep yearning for a broader vision of what it means to be human than our current paradigm allows for, calling on an ancient archetype of healing, Medicine Woman, to re-vision how we can navigate sickness and harness its transformational powers in order to heal.
Packed with dozens of healing arts exercises and hundreds of medicine questions to help integrate body and mind in the healing process. Like Burning Woman, this book promises initiation by transmission, reconnecting us directly with the soul of healing.
Innehållsförteckning
Acknowledgements xiii
A Practical Note to the Reader xv
Opening
Collapse on the World Stage 5
Collapse on the Home Front 6
Breaking Silence 8
Speaking for the Feminine 10
To Healing 12
Symptoms: What’s Wrong?
What’s Wrong with Me? 13
What’s Wrong with Us? 26
The Rise and Rise of Autoimmune Conditions 29
What’s Making Us Sick? 34
What’s Wrong with Women? 38
The End of Busy/iness as Usual 40
Reclaiming the Healing Arts 43
Medicine Questions 45
Diagnosis
The Journey to Knowledge 51
Women and Diagnosis 54
Diagnosis: A Cultural Framework 56
Prognosis 57
The Making Real of Sickness 60
What’s Wrong with Western Medicine?
Sickness and the Patriarchy 68
Ancient Roots 70
Church as Foundation 73
A Tangled System of Control 74
Doctor/Priest 79
A Loss of Soul 81
The Medicalisation of Body and Mind 84
A New God: The Rise and Rise of Technology 86
The Death of Care
Sickness – the Last Growth Industry in Patriarchy 89
The Magic Bullet 91
The Death of Care 94
Pain/Killing 96
Mad, Bad, Sad
Hushing the Hysterical Woman 105
A Depressing State of Affairs 108
Witches and Midwives 110
Breakdown
We are the Canaries 114
Why are We Working Ourselves to Death? 118
The System is Broken 119
Crisis Point 122
Releasing the Negative Feminine Archetypes of Heroic Medicine
Someone Save Me 130
I Deserve to Suffer 131
The Victim and The Crazy Woman 134
Another Way
The Missing Link 139
Turf War 140
No Man’s Land 143
Scattered Pieces 144
Paradigm Shift 145
What Comes Next? 146
Initiation
Invitation 152
Medicine Woman – A Lost Feminine Archetype of Healing 156
The Art of Healing
The Soul of Healing 166
Decolonising Soul 169
Learning to Listen 172
Healing is Feeling 175
Re-Membering Safety 180
Letting Go 181
The First Step to Healing 184
Healing the Feminine
Woman Healing 199
Caring for Ourselves 202
Cycle Wisdom 207
Midlife/Crisis 215
The Gift of Darkness 217
Getting Stuck 221
Reclaiming
This is the Time of Reclaiming 232
The Power of Belief 233
Reclaiming Rest 238
Reclaiming Strength 239
Reclaiming Healing Community 241
Changing the Story 244
Renaissance
A New Normal 257
Between Two Worlds 259
Writing New Narratives 262
Brave Work 265
Embodying Our Healing 266
A Flourishing of the Feminine 268
The Rise of the New Healers 269
The Healing Revolution 275
Epilogue 278
Appendices
A Note on Terms 280
Contextualising The System 284
References 287
Resources 293
Index 308
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