by Victoria Lister, Brisbane, Australia
In Part 1 I outlined how the uneasy relationship I had with my frequently lumpy breasts was a pretty good reflection of the bumpy ride life was turning out to be… or should I say, it was an excellent reflection of the very uneven choices I was making in terms of how I was choosing to live my life. By my early 40s, I had reached the point of recognising I was headed for a miserable second innings if I didn’t change… so change it was. With the help of my Esoteric Healing practitioner, I found I was able to begin to turn things around: in this Part 2, I describe how the next step, Esoteric Breast Massage (EBM), deepened the process considerably.
After about two or so years of consistent sessions with my regular Esoteric Healing practitioner (and other Universal Medicine accredited practitioners) – and courses and workshops with Universal Medicine (or UniMed for short) itself – I began to sense there was more to learn about another aspect of my life, namely what it was to be a woman.
The thing is, I didn’t know what a woman really was. I knew myself as a woman primarily by virtue of my gender, by my physicality alone. I didn’t have any sense of what it was to be a woman, or what a woman could or was supposed to be… not ‘be’ by identification (mother, daughter, wife, nurse, teacher, secretary, whatever), but by a feeling inside. There were men and there were women; I was born a woman, and that was about it – at least as far as the rest of world was concerned. Neither had I gelled with the plethora of spiritual, new age concepts of womanhood I’d come across in my previous searches for some sort of truth – such as the archetypes of maiden, mother and hag. That last one was enough to tell me there was nothing there I wanted to take on board (whoever invented the concept of the hag clearly did not love or appreciate women!).
Then along happened Esoteric Breast Massage, and as it turned out, my lovely practitioner was one of a few women who had successfully trained in and was accredited to offer this most sensitive of modalities (all EBM practitioners are women, trained by other women). So thank goodness, my questions would be answered – not straightaway mind, but over time, definitely.
Always willing to give most things a go, I took a deep breath and plunged in. I was a bit nervous – I knew it meant nuding-up my top half and having a woman touch my breasts… what if I hated it, or conversely, liked it a bit too much? Or my boobs were embarrassingly cold, or worse, floppy? All the things that could have run through my mind did.
But nothing like that happened or mattered – it was exquisite. As my friend said during that first session, it was like being touched with more love than I’d ever been touched with before. Actually, it wasn’t like it, it was being touched with more love than I’d ever been touched with before. In experiencing the deep tenderness of this very delicate massage, I felt for the first time something very different: that I perhaps had something to do with this amazing gentleness, and that it had something to do with me. Now that was new.
Intrigued by the experience, I started to attend regular sessions, commencing what has become a two-plus year (and forever onwards) commitment to my on-going development as a woman. Not just a woman by gender, but a woman in the felt sense.
A lot has happened. During this time, the lumps and pains in my breasts disappeared – not because of the treatment itself, but because the EBM allowed me to connect with a feeling that was far truer than anything I have ever known before: my natural loveliness as a woman.
To explain: once I began to feel myself as naturally lovely, it became increasingly impossible to continue to operate in ways that were not naturally loving; and it became clear to me that it was the way I’d been living – which was extremely hard on my body and my ‘me-ness’ – that led to the creation of the hardness, the lumps in my breasts, in the first place. In other words, my poor, dear breasts were simply flagging to me that the way I was going through life – perhaps more so at some times than others – was way out of sync with my natural way of being as a woman. And my natural way of being is to be a woman first before anything else… be that partner, daughter, businesswoman, friend or colleague.
Now – and I want to be very clear here – I need to state strongly that Esoteric Breast Massage did not ‘cure’ me of my breast lumps or anything else. The Esoteric Breast Massage modality and its practitioners have never, ever claimed to ‘cure cancer’ – or anything else for that matter – as a number of journalists have erroneously reported. It was me healing me. The EBMs and its practitioners (I have had EBMs with two other practitioners in addition to my friend) merely showed me the way.
Indeed, this is how all the Esoteric treatments I have undertaken have worked: I simply come to each session with as much openness as I can muster, and allow my body and my natural, felt intelligence to work together to firstly discern what is going on in my body, to feel what emotions might be present, and just go with that. Sometimes I will verbalise what I’m feeling, or bring some honesty to the table around a certain issue, or a combination of the two.
If, by the end of the session, I’ve been able to connect and surrender and feel something deep and beautiful in my body, I will have a new marker for how I can feel, or be, when I walk out the door. That is, if I come away from an EBM sessions feeling super-delicious in my own body, I can choose to take that wonderful feeling away with me and out into the world and into everything I do… or I can choose not to hold onto that. My preference is to stay with the super-delicious feeling as much as possible!
So in this way, it seems to me that the process of allowing myself to deeply be with myself in each and every session is what enables, over time, transformation to take place. Esoteric Breast Massages simply create the means for me to connect to me as a woman and feel that, then live that feeling to the best of my ability. This then creates a new way to make choices in life. For example, if I come away from a session feeling amazing, tender and precious, and hang on to that, I’m less likely to make a poor choice in whatever I do next. Feeling super-yummy, I’m less likely to over-work, or over-eat, or do anything that might take me away from feeling great.
And the good news is, my breasts have changed. They’re no longer lumpy or particularly grainy. They’re softer and fuller, and often I can feel a different quality in them – a gentle, nurturing quality I can feel inside and, increasingly, emanating outside of me. And again: it wasn’t Esoteric Breast Massage that ‘cured my lumpy breasts’, it was me… me connecting to the physical and sensed feelings generated by the technique, and the loving, gentle touch of the practitioners, and choosing to live differently because of this.
As a result, I also no longer live with the fear of breast cancer, because I know the way I live now supports (to the best of my ability) my body, rather than pushes against it. The reason I felt like a cancer patient waiting to happen was because I knew deep down that the way I was living was doing everything to make cancer a strong possibility. Having said that, if I ever do end up with a condition that requires medical intervention, I know I will have done everything possible to present a body that is as healthy and well-supported as it can be, rather than racing off to the doctor to insist they fix a body that’s well below par. In other words, I now take responsibility for my own health and well-being and absolutely seek medical help when needed; the main difference today is I bring a body that’s been taken care of to the best of my ability.
I also learned that whilst it was truly wonderful to have the medical support to diagnose my status when needed, conventional medicine did not have all the answers. Lumpy breasts are not natural or normal, but because the medical world does not yet have all the answers, they have become normalised. Indeed it seems we have accepted as normal many conditions that are perhaps not – things like period pain, cysts and fibroids. That’s where I find the Esoteric modalities useful: they teach me that my body is in fact an exquisite barometer that tells me when I’m out of whack.
Now before you rush away to book the Esoteric Breast Massage that will change your life, be aware it does take time, commitment and patience. There has been a lot to re-learn, and even after two to three years of having put myself on an EBM ‘program’, learning to live in gentleness as a woman is very much a work in progress. It has required a willingness and dedication to be consistent in my monitoring of myself in each and every moment, each and every day, and it has taken a while to learn how to do this. But I can state how very worthwhile this loving commitment to myself has been: it has been life changing.
The marvellous thing is there are now other tools to support our development as women – as true women, rather than a conglomerate of society’s, and our own, beliefs and ideals: the Esoteric Ovary Massage, and the Esoteric Women’s Presentations and Esoteric Women’s Groups are examples. I attend the two group presentations as often as possible, and am now undertaking a regular program of Ovary Massages as well as my regular EBMs. These offer another way to reconnect with the true me, gently revealing the many notions I’ve taken on over the years around how and what a woman is ‘supposed to be’. They also allow me to feel beyond my natural gentleness to reconnect with my (also very natural) preciousness, fragility and beauty as a woman, and honour that.
So a big thanks to Universal Medicine and its practitioners for bringing forth the tools that have allowed so many of us to understand ourselves and our bodies, and live with more harmony than we would have ever believed possible.
But it’s an even bigger thanks to my ‘bosom buddies’, the two parts of my body I once regarded as a source of frustration and discomfort; as two merely decorative, gender-defining or sexual objects. Their annoying lumps were simply flagging how hard I was being on myself, and my body, in the way I was living; how far away I was from living as the woman I now naturally feel myself to be.
Part 1 – My Bosom Buddies: an Esoteric Breast Massage Journey – Part 1