Sierra Bender - Goddess to the Core: An Inspired Workout to Maximize Your Fitness, Beauty & Power

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Goddess to the Core: An Inspired Workout to Maximize Your Fitness, Beauty & Power 2009 by Sierra Bender with Jeff Migdow, M.D.

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First e-book edition 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738722924

Book design by Rebecca Zins

Cover design by Lisa Novak

Cover photos by Felipe Riquelme

Illustrations by Llewellyn Art Department

Interior photos by Felipe Riquelme and Wendy McCrane Strang

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Contents

One of our biggest problems with modern healing is that it only treats one body at a time. The medical doctor specializes in the physical body, and often in only one part of the body. Psychiatrists and psychologists treat only the mental and emotional bodies. Priests and rabbis work only on the spiritual body. In ancient times, healers worked with all dimensions of our lives with a wide array of tools:

• Prayer, fasting, ceremony, dancing, and vision quests to open up a dialog with Spirit.
• Meditation, mantra, and mindfulness to train the mental body.
• Breathing exercises, singing, chanting, dancing, drumming, and ceremony to work with the emotions.
• Movement, herbs, massage, body work, and nutrition to heal the physical body.

The root of this separation is that we have lost the feminine essence of Spirit in our society, religion, and healing. In ancient times, the healers and leaders of healing ceremonies were often medicine women, female shamans, oracles, and priestesses. But this female presence began to shift about 2,200 years ago as the patriarchal paradigm began to take over.

Fortunately, today we are experiencing a resurgence of feminine energy in healing, as seen in the rise in popularity of modalities such as acupuncture, homeopathy, Reiki, qigong, yoga, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, and homeopathy. These approaches actively utilize compassion, openness, and an awareness of the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical components of our lives, as well as the healing energy force known as chi, ki, qi, shakti, or kundaliniall names for the feminine aspect of Spirit. I have travelled to India, Japan, Brazil, and Colombia, and have been involved with healing sessions with Ayurvedic doctors, Japanese priests, Native American medicine men, and South American shamans. Ive seen firsthand people healed with all of the tools I just mentionedtheir physical symptoms released, emotional pain healed, mental confusion clarified, and spiritual disconnection resolved.

The Root of Disease

In modern American culture, weve lost contact with our bodys intelligence and given our power away to the authority: the doctor. As a holistic physician, my patients ask me questions they dont ask their conventional doctor. They tell me that they dont speak with their doctors about these issues because the doctors dont have enough time or they think the doctors will think its not important. My patients also tell me that they feel like a disease and not a whole person when dealing with the traditional Western medical system. Many insurance companies force doctors to spend less and less time with their patients; some contracts allow only ten minutes per patient! No wonder we feel that we cant share important information with the doctor.

Despite these discouraging facts, it is important not to put all the blame on the medical system or even insurance companies, for they are just a small part of the problem. We have disempowered ourselves in a larger way in our day-to-day livesceding all our power to the government, the scientific community, religion, and medicine. We have given up the deep feeling of connection, power, and joy related to experiencing God within ourselves and in nature for the promise of finding God somewhere outside ourselves. We have ceded control over our own well-being to elected officials, priests, and physicians. We have also lost the connection toand thus the power ofour intuition, which gives us much better advice about our life than any outside person ever could. This overall disempowered state can lead to conditions such as:

• Physical tension and diseasehigh blood pressure, back pain, headache, arthritis, irritable bowel, indigestion, etc.
• Emotional imbalancesfeelings of loss of control, fear, depression, panic, anger, resentment, and grief at all we have lost by not taking charge.
• Mental disharmonypoor memory, fuzzy thinking, inability to learn from mistakes, and neurotic, obsessive, anxious thinking.
• Spiritual disconnectionloss of connection to Spirit, intuition, and insight.

Thus we end up with more disease and less effective ways to deal with our conditions. When I was in medical school in 1976, when the United States was supposedly on top of the world in terms of power and affluence, our infant mortality rate was twenty-first in the world and we had a higher percentage of chronic disease than most countries. This trend continues. For many diseases, we see that Americans are near the bottom of the list of the afflicted. The more we treat one body while ignoring the others, however, the worse our health becomes as a culture. Even our modern definition of our illsdisease rather than disharmonyimplies we cant get better, that our body has betrayed us and we need outside intervention. On the other hand, disharmony implies there is the possibility for our system to heal itself if harmony is regained.