Nada's Musings

Enter­ing the Red Tent

For the last decade, my daugh­ter and I have been going to the North­ern Cal­i­for­nia Herbal Sym­po­sium in Lay­tonville, Cal­i­for­nia. Every year we go and I leave with my “cup run­neth over.” My entire being vibrates with love and sup­port. Sim­ply being with 400 women that are con­nect­ing, teach­ing, heal­ing one another in a safe beau­ti­ful nur­tur­ing envi­ron­ment is Bliss. I got loved up so’s I can keep spread­ing it and always focused of pro­tect­ing & heal­ing Gaia.

The fol­low­ing text came to me via my grrl­friend Mandy, via Alli­son via Emma Schu­bert who I believe wrote it.

THE BODY-MIND CONNECTION…THEY TEACH IT AT STANFORD!!

” I just fin­ished tak­ing an evening class at Stan­ford. The last lec­ture was on the mind-body connection–the rela­tion­ship between stress and dis­ease. The speaker (head of psy­chi­a­try at Stan­ford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his healthis to be mar­ried to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nur­ture her rela­tion­ships with her girl­friends. At first every­one laughed, but he was serious.

Women con­nect with each other dif­fer­ently and pro­vide sup­port sys­tems that help each other to deal with stress and dif­fi­cult life expe­ri­ences. Phys­i­cally this qual­ity “girl­friend time” helps us to cre­ate more sero­tonin– a neu­ro­trans­mit­ter that helps com­bat depres­sion and can cre­ate a gen­eral feel­ing of well being. Women share feel­ings whereas men often form rela­tion­ships around activ­i­ties. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about cer­tain things or how their per­sonal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fish­ing, hunt­ing, golf? Yes. But their feel­ings?– rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sis­ters, and evi­dently that is very good for our health. He said that spend­ing time
With a friend is just as impor­tant to our gen­eral health as jog­ging or work­ing out at a gym.

There’s a ten­dency to think that when we are “exer­cis­ing” we are doing some­thing good for our bod­ies, but when we are hang­ing out with friends, we are wast­ing our time and should be more pro­duc­tively engaged– not true. In fact, he said that fail­ure to cre­ate and main­tain qual­ity per­sonal rela­tion­ships with other humans is as dan­ger­ous to our phys­i­cal health as smok­ing! So every time you hang out with a gal pal, just pat your­self on the back and con­grat­u­late your­self for doing some­thing good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Soooo let’s toast to our friend­ship with our girl­friends. Evi­dently it’s very good for our health.“
Emma Schubert

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