Darling,
This week’s Ask Mama is very special… I don’t normally do this, but today I’m asking the questions. I’m talking to the woman who inspired me and countless other women to take control of our health and our lives.
I brag.
I brag my friend, my pal, my compatriot, my inspiration, my teacher, my student: Sister Goddess Dr. Christiane Northrup!
I brag her courage, her creativity, and her stand for women, and now, girls.
I brag I recently had the chance to catch up with her about her new “baby,” her work with the School of Womanly Arts, and her own evolution as a creative force in the world. Check out the interview below, where she shares her hot brags, her secrets to owning her beauty, and the vaccine every woman needs…
Be inspired by Christiane to strike up the band keep and marching towards your own dreams!
Mama Gena: Christiane! Welcome! Give me a brag. What’s up, what’s new, what’s happening?
Dr. Northrup: You know, what’s happening right at this moment—it’s January right now—I have decided to do some body transformation work, so I’m doing a wonderful dietary thing, and what’s happening is—this is such a huge brag, I don’t even know what to say—for the first time in my life, and I’m not kidding, in my life, when I step on the scale, it doesn’t matter to me what it says because it’s not related to my inner sense of myself. And that’s only taken me about half a century… (laughs)
Mama Gena: That is an amazing, amazing, amazing brag. And a powerful brag, especially when you consider the title of your new book, Beautiful Girl. Being that you’re a Sister Goddess and Mastery grad, you’ve become well-versed in the Art of Owning Your Beauty. How do you encourage young girls to own their beauty, and what have you located now that’s allowed you to be thrilled with your gorgeous, incredible body at this time in your life?
Dr. Northrup: The thing I’ve realized is that once you understand that you are, in actuality, a Goddess—the divine, eternal being of light—the other stuff doesn’t matter. And the more you think of yourself this way, as a person, entity, a soul who recycles all the time, you are constantly reinventing yourself. The physical body replaces itself totally, every cell. Every seven years, you get a new body. But you only get a new body depending on what beliefs you feed to your DNA. And I’ve always believed that. So, it’s great to believe that when you’re twenty. It’s a whole other thing to do that after 50 because of the messages our culture gives us. One of the things I’ve learned at the School of Womanly Arts is, it’s never too late. It’s never too late to have a great love affair, it’s never too late to learn Argentine tango. It’s because of you—when you said to me, “Why don’t you dance the tango at Men’s Night?” Of course, that was the impetus for me to really learn it. And the last time I danced it, I really landed it. And I don’t want little girls to spend 50 years getting to the place I am now. I want them in that place when they enter middle school. And that’s why I wrote Beautiful Girl, so we could land that really early.
Mama Gena: What are you hoping to ignite inside each one of the little girls who gets her lucky hands on this precious, magnificent book?
Dr. Northrup: It’s an immunization (laughter), it’s a vaccine, against the cultural messages that something’s wrong with your body because you’re a girl. Let’s be clear—in medical literature, it’s the male body that’s the gold standard, and everything female is seen as an aberration. That’s what medical school taught me. Pregnancy is a disease, the menstrual cycle is a disease, menopause is a disease. So in Beautiful Girl, I liken the body to a garden. And every plant in the garden is different, and they all have their own timing. So what’s happened so far—the book’s only been out a little while—my mother read it. 87. She became almost teary. And you know, for a woman who went to Everest Base Camp at the age of 84 with her friend Anne, a former nun who’s turning 90, her getting almost teary is not usual. They said, “If we only had a book like this when we were little, because everything about being a girl was unfortunate back then.” But the little girls who are reading it now, as little as six, they’ve read it with their mothers and then they go to school. The messages are already there, at age six. It gives them an immunization, antibodies rush in, and they say, “Oh, yeah, I see that message, I see that germ, that has nothing to do with me.” You see? So they’re immunized as it were, in some basic way. Because our beliefs about our bodies get put there before the age of eleven. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to recover. I don’t want anyone to have to recover.
Mama Gena: Yes, I love that! In the book you say that each girl has magical gifts and powers. What are some of those magical gifts and powers that you know little girls have?
Dr. Northrup: First of all, their desire for beauty, for play, for fun, for dressing up like fairies. They understand their connection with nature and with the magical world of nature. Now we know that every blade of grass, every flower, every tree, has a spirit associated with it. Little girls are born knowing this. And their body is part of it, this sense of the body belonging to the earth and the earth belonging to them. Their whole objective is to bring beauty and pleasure to the world—something we’ve been talked out of for the last 5,000 years. But it’s all roaring back now. And of course your work has been a huge part of giving all of us permission to own the pleasure that this body produces, the creativity. Later on when they’re older, I would talk to them about their creative cycle with the moon. Which, of course, it comes through the body as the menstrual cycle, but it’s completely connected with the waxing and waning of the moon. So we have times when we’re feeling more creative and then times when we go inward, just as the sap goes into the roots of the trees in winter and then begins to rise with the spring—that all happens in our bodies, and when we know that, who can talk you out of that? It’s such magic.
Mama Gena: That is right. This book was the absolute perfect next step for you. I bought a stack of these, and I’m sending them out to everyone I know, everyone who has a daughter, everyone who might have a daughter—it’s the perfect Valentine for any girl, anywhere in the world. I’m so grateful to have had this time with you, and for the way you live, always blazing trails for women and now girls. So, thank you, Christiane! It was a pleasure.
Dr. Northrup: Thank you, it was indeed a pleasure.
***
Christiane Northrup, M.D., a board-certified ob/gyn, is a visionary pioneer, beloved authority in women’s health and wellness, and the author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause. She just released her first children’s book, Beautiful Girl, to share her wisdom with the youngest of girls so that they will grow into happy and healthy women. For more details and to order your copy, click here.
Christiane is also a graduate and past commencement speaker of the Womanly Arts Mastery Program. Watch this video for a dose of the wisdom she shared in the Mastery classroom.
And if you want to inspire another woman to own her beauty and set the example for all the little girls in her life, please share this post.
With so much love and pleasure,
Mama Gena
P.S. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all my Sister Goddesses who contributed to making Intro Day our biggest and best orientation extravaganza to date! My deepest gratitude to those of you who joined me last weekend and accepted my invitation to be irresistible, every day of your lives. Keep practicing those 6 steps we learned. And for those of you who signed up for Mastery, I cannot wait to see you in March!!
photo: lizlinder.com
