One of the biggest and most exposed areas of trust and timing centers around our daughter’s breasts. Although she may pretend it’s not an issue, breast development takes up lots of space in the preadolescent girl’s consciousness. How can we guide girls’ breast-consciousness in a positive direction? Plus, for those of us with a family history of breast cancer, how can we transform the fear—based on statistics--that at any moment, we may be next?
Honoring our breasts now—mothers and daughters alike--is best way we have of maintaining healthy breast tissue and feeling the sense of empowerment that actually leads to good health. It is the one form of “cancer prevention” that we as a community of women, we as a medical community, have not yet tried. Although churches have a system of honoring God that lasts through generations, these institutions don't teach us to honor our God-given bodies—least of all women’s breasts! If they did, we would have been doing this for generations and breast health might perhaps today be thriving. But in our current society, that which gives life—the physical form of woman--is not being honored. Churches aren’t honoring breasts as a spiritual symbol, as a connector of generations—but we (owners of breasts) can. We must.
It’s up to us.
We need a place where breasts can be healed. There is no western medical entity that I know of that is actually healing breasts. There are those who have uninspiring statistics for cutting into them, cutting them off, and addressing them with chemicals and radiation. Those us of us with a really strong will, or incredible grace, live through it, but do we ever really feel healed? Do we ever really know that our strong will or our incredible grace pulled us through? Or do we credit the medical industry? Can we strengthen our will to live, and nurture it in our daughters, without having to go through breast cancer to develop it?
(“Develop.” Get it?)
If we honored our breasts from the moment they developed—the minute girls become self-conscious about them--instead of when they are about to be medically altered, aren’t we instilling them into our daughters’ minds as sacred? Aren’t we teaching them that this body is a sacred place? Won’t the act of honoring be inherently healing? When a girl is worried that her breasts are not developing soon enough, or when she is self-conscious about them developing sooner than she wants, she is inherently not trusting Divine timing. And she is sending that sense of being out of sync directly to her breasts.
In my religious upbringing, not only were bodies not honored, but a sense of shame surrounded issues of bodies and sexuality. Breasts were certainly not honored—what does that even mean? Can you rise above, or burst out, of any early programming and imagine creating a sacred space for bodies, for breasts? Is there lingering shame or judgement in you that you don’t want to pass on to your daughter? Do you truly love your breasts? Can you see them as perfect, even if they are too big or too small or two different sizes? How can we create sacred space for breasts? What does that even look like?
That sacred place is within ourselves – that place where breasts can be healed. It is within us. Do I promise to love and honor and obey my sacred breasts? As long as they both shall live?
Breasts deliver life. They link the generations physically, intimately, like no other part of our bodies. We have lost awareness of that sacred link as a culture and our breasts are sending us the message—through lumps--that something needs to change. We have a choice: we can hear this message or not. We can heed this message or not. We can try something different—something pioneering—or not. I believe some day we WILL live in a world without breast cancer, or fear of breast cancer, and if we hear the message to open up the spiritual channel NOW, I envision us altering this reality in our lifetime.
We don’t need to have everyone in the world united in this new vision. We only need to tip the balance of beliefs, to change cultural reality. Only 51% of us need to unite in a desire to significantly reduce breast illness for it to happen. If we are holding the highest good of all concerned in mind, and honoring our breasts, we can change the world.
We get to choose. Only embrace this invitation if you wish to embrace it. This is an invitation to be specifically conscious of your breasts – not just conscious of, but honoring of them, reverent toward them…yours and everyone’s, as a sacred life-giving link between generations.
How many breasts are touched by surgeries in one year, both elective and illness-related, literally how many breasts are touched by a surgeon’s scalpel every year? The number is in the hundreds of thousands. How many have breasts been touched with loving, reverent, nonsexual hands? What if that number were in the hundreds of thousands? With conscious touch, we can change the world.
So much time and money have gone into a search to cure or prevent cancer. Because medicine has not found a cure or the prevention, I have been tempted to look outside the confines of medicine for solutions, and I have narrowed down that search, for the purposes of my mother-daughter groups, to breast cancer. What CAN we do?
Breasts are what link the generations. Breasts are what link the generations to their mothers. Repairing the tears in the fabric of mother-daughter relationships will have an effect on breast cancer. Daughters not pushing mothers away, mothers truly seeing their daughters as they are, and not as they wish them to be, will have a positive effect on breast cancer. Consciously honoring our breasts as the life-sustaining link that they are – more than just objects of arousal – will help to heal the epidemic that is breast cancer. Western medicine has searched, and has not made the level of impact one would expect from millions of dollars and the best medical minds. As conscious mothers we must empower ourselves, take back our own power to heal, and teach our daughters from minute one that their breast development is graced with Divine timing.