Jennifer Racioppi - Cosmic health : unlock your healing magic with astrology, positive psychology, and integrative wellness

U nable to stand, I crawled to the phone and dialed 911. Within minutes, my ninety-seven-pound body was strapped onto a stretcher, and ambulance sirens began echoing through the streets, broadcasting my race to the emergency room. The excruciating abdominal pain that had made me buckle over just minutes earlier had not yet let up. Equally torturous was the anxiety roiling within, consuming what little energy I had left.

It was a hot July day at the Jersey Shore, just six weeks after my eighteenth birthday. While my friends enjoyed the summer sun on the beach, I spent my days, which soon became months, in and out of hospital beds. Weak, depleted, and profoundly unprepared for the journey ahead of me, I drifted through a dark fog of agonizing pain, sleep that failed to relieve my crippling fatigue, and depression that only worsened with wakefulness.

My diagnosis, and its gravity, felt undeniable and terrifying. Aggressive ovarian cancer wreaked havoc on my young, small frame. Or so they told me.

In some ways the diagnosis made sense to me. After years of brutal cramps, chronic depression, and menstrual dysfunctionyears during which my doctor repeatedly told me I was a normal teenager with normal hormonal imbalancesI felt a small measure of relief from having my intuition validated. As Id long suspected, I wasnt just a normal teenager. Id taken some combination of antidepressants and the pill for years. Yet the extreme suffering caused by my menstrual cycle, which had sometimes forced me to stay home from school, skip the athletics that I loved, and forgo the social chaos of teen life, persisted. My symptoms were anything but typical. That had been clear to me, and now, at long last, it was clear to my doctors too.

And it was cancer, which is to say incredibly daunting. As I underwent an array of procedures and surgeries at various hospitals, I couldnt foresee how volatile, yet enlightening, my health challenges would become. I didnt yet know that after undergoing surgery to remove the bowling-ball-sized tumor from my left ovary, my initial diagnosis would be rescinded. Instead of ovarian cancer, a year later Id learn I had endometrial cancer.

The cancer was ultimately removed, and with it, my ovaries, uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes. Not yet twenty years old, I was forced to undergo a radical hysterectomy and face the fact that I would never have biological children. The morning after that surgery, the doctor handed me a yellow, football-shaped pill and told me Id have to take it every day for the next thirty years. That pill contained the estrogen my body could no longer produce. Despite the synthetic hormone supplementation, the absence of reproductive organs to supply my system with natural estrogen forced my body into menopauseliterally overnight.

Who at age twenty thinks about the symptoms and implications of menopause? I wasnt remotely prepared for what was to come. Terrified and distressed, I felt completely alone.

Looking back, I now see that I wasnt alone. Even at my lowest of low points, I never was. So many of the women I now work with have their own stories of trauma, disease, heartache, and depression. For yearswhich sometimes turned into decadesthey lived lives punctuated with that same deep soul ache and strong yet muted whispers from inside themselves Something is off This isnt working Listen to me; please listen.

Like me, so many women have also had their intuitive knowing repeatedly invalidated by external authority figures. So many of them, like me, have taken themselves and their health to the brink, only to realize that living the body-and-soul nourishing lives they yearn for means ending their reliance on the next quick fix, miracle pill, practice, plan, or belief system. They, too, have faced the fact that our individual and collective pursuits of the one big changethe spiritual practice, the diet change, and so onisnt taking us anywhere we want to go.

Instead, we must assume a radical level of responsibility for our healthnot just physical but emotional and spiritual too. We must find more authentic and comprehensive ways to heal. Only that kind of all-encompassing, holistic well-being can support the hopes and dreams were committed to realizing.

For me, the recognition that I needed to take charge of my whole health came after my hysterectomy. In the anxiety-ridden months that followed my final surgery, in the middle of my college years, I moved to the West Coast. There, in the late 1990s, while working as a waitress, I was introduced to a wide array of alternative health and spiritual practices. These mindbodyspirit practices became the foundation of the reclamation of my body, my health, and my life.