Hormone Creams, Anger and Apple Cider Vinegar

This is the more technical update.

Hot flashes.

I never expected those to show up in my life. No really. I never had any PMS, cramps, mood swings, or any of that "female" stuff, and I assumed that would mean I'd get to skip all the troubles with menopause too. Not so. Not that they are bad. I understand that I am suffering from pretty mild forms of them, and yet they are hitting me with a harsh suddenness and are uncomfortable enough to get my full attention.


I know some of you have been through them, right? I remember Carol tearing off her sweater with that distinct urgency I now understand, more than once.

But, really, what the heck are these????

Why do our bodies need to produce all this heat? What exactly is happening inside of us when that goes on? I want a diagram of the chemical reactions, please! Oh, I am sure I could look this up on the internet, but I have been too lazy. No, that is actually not the right word any longer. I have chosen to honor other priorities that were part of my physical healing.

At this point I have been on estrogen and progesterone creams for 25 days. The flashes started about 5 days prior to that. Not much of a difference, as far as I remember the beginning.

I am hearing from some people it can take up to six months until the bioidentical hormone mix has been adjusted to fit the exact needs of the body... then they do go away.

I am also hearing, from Beth at the center in Delmar, that it is not always a question of the hormones, that it is also a question of the emotions. Wow! Hadn't heard that before. Yes, especially emotions in the realm of anger. Ohhhhh - ANGER!

Well, that means something to me. It means something to me as the 9 personality type in the enneagram. We 9s are the ones who want to avoid feelings of anger at any cost. We can't help it, we have been wired that way, we'd rather swallow our pride, deny our truth, stay silent, or go comatose than cause anger in the people around us, let alone feel it ourselves. I have come a long way, I mean, a looooooong way in liberating myself from this fixation... but who knows what is still in there??? That was my immediate thought when Beth mentioned it.

She felt I might even be able to access the emotion that is hiding in a flash when it comes, just by welcoming it... and that sounded great, much like journeywork, yeah I would try that!!!... but, no, I couldn't find anything. Maybe I am not doing it quite right, but the flash is so strong and so immediate and so physical, if there is an emotion, it slips through my investigative fingers like a fish in the water, whoops, gone, ooops, gone again, impossible to hold on to anything.

Meditation Mantra. That sounded great too. Om na ma shivaya. I had been chanting that in Uwe's Yoga class for years. She feels it is the practicing of deliberate focusedness for the mind. If done regularly in the morning, it sets the tone for the entire day. And then reciting it when the flash comes, it could immediately link me back into that free expansiveness in which a hot flash no longer thrives. So, admittedly I have not been able to do THAT. I have been repeating the mantra whenever a flash comes, and at night that does seem to help to go back to sleep again a little faster. I recite it during the day too, whenever it comes to my mind and that is several times... I even repeat the mantra on most days when I first wake up in the morning, but do I sit and practice for at least 10 minutes? EVERY day? No. So maybe this doesn't count as not working... it gets a maybe.

Last week when I had three flashes in a row, still in bed, right in the morning, Jimmy said:"I am going to look this up now, on earthclinic!" and whipped out his i-phone. This has become one of his favorite morning activities; still in bed, the i-phone is launched within seconds from it's resting spot on the bedside table. Important e-mail messages, weather reports, hang gliding blogs, or medical research.. you name it... a constant source of joy when he can find all this information right there at his fingertips... literally.

And earthclinic is one of his favorite sites... and because it really IS a great site, I'll give you the link right here. http://earthclinic.com/ When you go to the "ailments" tab, you can look up anything you are suffering from, and you'll get a list of the most successful home remedies people have reported on. Complete with testimonials. Check it out. Now, what you'll find is that at the top of most conditions that can be bothersome in a human body, it will give you apple cider vinegar as the top ranking remedy. So Jimmy was joking when he said, now they will recommend apple cider vinegar to you too. And lo and behold that is exactly what he found. 16 "Yea" Reports, way more than anything else, some of them stunning. No "Nay"s at all.

So, I started on ACV too. Twice a day. And while we do know that it is great for almost every single function and system in the body, it didn't really make a difference in the hot flashes either. ( I guess I should send in a "Nay"...)

This last weekend at the Journey in NJ, I thought I'll use the the physical journey exchange to find the root of the flashes. It took me to my marriage with Constantin. All the arguments we ever had. All the feelings of not being understood in the core of my soul, of being seen as something I was not... all the pain of separateness as it was becoming more and more evident, and all the ways I myself had contributed to that. Cleared that up. Cried a lot of old tears. Forgave and have been forgiven. Ahhh, yes, it does feel good. Will it help with the flashes? We'll see.