Medicine Woman

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.

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