Fighting for Our Tits: A Woman's Battle Cry

INTRODUCTION

Of Healers & Physicians

The art of healing is very important in medicine. There can be a difference between being a modern day physician and being a healer. All societies have healers — wise men and women, shamans, medicine men and people of other names. The old time practitioner was almost always a healer but many physicians today are not. It is an issue of interest, training, time and prioritization.

Stephen C. Schimpff, MD

I’m Lola Scarborough and you’ll meet me in Chapter 1, which is where I share parts of my life-story. For now, though, to sum up the essence of this book:

I passionately fight for my tits, and in doing so,

I fight for yours too.

I practice what I preach, albeit imperfectly at times. Why? Because these two lovely, round, juicy globes sitting atop my 58 year old chest are MINE, and I sure as shit plan to keep them right where they are, taking them with me when I go.

Claimer: What I am

I am a natural health and wellness consultant, a 500-hour certified yoga teacher, and a food wellness expert that has trained and cross-trained in multiple modalities that use food, herbs, supplements and lifestyle changes to effect positive physical, mental and emotional changes in people who are suffering in one way or another. I have certificates of training in Chinese Herbals and Qigong Food Healing as well as a degree in Ayurveda, the ancient health system of India. I am also a Life Coach.

I am an energy body worker. I was taught the art of energy healing by my grandmother, Lola Virginia, at the age of 12 and have been doing it ever since. I have spanned the globe to learn about different styles.

I am a world-traveler, having junketed to a number of international locations around the globe. I am endlessly curious about other cultures and all kinds of people, plants, animals and landscapes. I am also a perpetual student of life.

With a four-year degree in Political Science from the University of Houston, I worked in the business world for 25 years as a secretary, a technical writer and project manager.

I am a mother, grandmother, wife, and avid animal rights supporter. I currently own my own business, Yoga Lola Studios. I left the corporate world behind in 2007, purchased a commercial building with my husband, and our wellness practice was born. I manage Yoga Lola Studios full time with my husband Kevin by my side.

I am a Healer, a Medicine Woman and a Visionary.

Disclaimer –

What I am not

I am NOT a doctor licensed to practice medicine in the USA. I cannot treat or diagnose any disease or illness; nor do I. I can and do make suggestions that are based on the information and education I have from different modalities that I have trained in and from those that come from my life experiences. Any suggestions offered in this book are recommendations only, and should not be construed as medical advice. Always consult with your doctor, psychiatrist, or other licensed medical professional for conditions that warrant medical treatment. Discuss any new practice you decide to pursue related to your health with your medical expert prior to engaging in any complementary modality. I am not a physician of any kind.

Chapter 1

Birth of a Wounded Healer

Healers are Spiritual Warriors who have found the courage to defeat the darkness of their souls. Awakening and rising from the depths of their deepest fears, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. Reborn with a wisdom and strength that creates a light that shines bright enough to help, encourage, and inspire others out of their own darkness. Melanie Koulouris

Famous psychotherapist Carl Jung identified a number of personality archetypes that operate in the unconscious of all human beings. In Jungian psychology, an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic image embedded in our psyche from the past collective experience of humanity that is present in the unconscious of the individual person. It’s kind of like how the seed of an apple just knows how to grow into an apple tree without anyone telling it how to do it. There is an instinctual programming that lets it know what to be so that it doesn’t turn into a lemon tree. An archetype is like that. It’s an instinctual pattern that is universal to humans and most of us fit a particular archetype.

One of Jung’s better known archetypes is the wounded healer. A wounded healer is a person who helps others because ultimately helping others helps them heal themselves. Wounded healers almost always come from difficult life circumstances; for many the suffering has been intense in some way. They want to save the world. You know … like Joan of Arc or Harriett Tubman or the unsinkable Molly Brown or Wonder Woman ... one of those kinds of gals.

So … that’s me. Your local neighborhood poster child of a wounded healer. Currently planted here on planet Earth, I’ve avowed to save the world and my own ass all at one and the same time. As I ready myself to defend and protect, however, a familiar question arises: Where did I put my red velvet cape and ample cleavage, without which I cannot fly about to wage my war of love to save humanity?

Sigh. It’s really hard to be a wounded healer sometimes.

The Wounding Begins

I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me. Joshua Graham

I was born December 21, 1959 in Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami to a just barely 17-year-old mother. In 1959, an anesthesia known as Twilight Sleep was administered to a woman in labor. This medication promised a painless labor and a complete erasure of the mother’s memory of the trauma of giving birth. Like everyone else, my mother was given this cocktail prior to my entry into the world. When the drug eventually wore off, the nurses presented me to my mother. She promptly became hysterical, screaming at them that she had not had a baby; I wasn’t hers, and she kept insisting that they take me away. She had no memory of my birth, of course, because of the drugs. (Twilight Sleep was a crime against women and their unborn children … check the link under the Works Cited pages in the back of this book if you are unfamiliar with the practice.) What a horror show. The practice was discontinued in the USA in 1970.

Anyhow, the staff must’ve eventually convinced my mother that I was, indeed, her offspring and she took me home. My mother was married to a man named Gene (not my biological father) who was in prison at the time, but he kindly lent me his surname and spared me the title of bastard which was a term still in use at the time. I didn’t see or meet my natural father until I was 28 years old. He never tried to contact me nor did he ever send a penny of support to help my mother.

My mother had returned to live with my grandparents and my bond to them was deep, especially the bond to my grandmother. I owe them all so much, of course, but to my grandmother, I owe the most. Without her, I surely would have died.

My mother tied baby booties on me once she got me home and left them on. For weeks. Soon, they couldn’t get me to stop crying, so my mother took me to a doctor. Turned out she tied the bootie so tight on the left leg she almost cut my foot off above the ankle. They weren’t certain they could save the foot, but fortunately they did. I gratefully bear a huge scar above the ankle on the left leg to this day.

The Early Years

A man’s true character comes out when they’re drunk.

Charlie Chaplin

My mother, Mary Jo, was a larger-than-life character, as so many violent alcoholics tend to be. My family life would put the HBO Series Shameless to shame, doing much better than matching it one-for-one. If you think people don’t really live like that, well, you’re wrong. They do and we did and it’s a lot worse than it looks on TV.

My mother had a second child, again while husband number 1 (Gene) was still in prison. Not the same man as my biological father. It didn’t work out between them, so the second daughter, just like the first, got the last name Scarborough. Not long after my sister’s birth, my mother divorced Gene. I was about three years old at the time. Prior to the divorce, she took me to the prison to visit him every now and again. According to my mother, Gene and the inmates loved me and I loved them back. As a result, I have had a life-long interest in criminal justice, prison reform, and in the causes of mental illness. Funny what shapes us.

After a string of fellows, and my sister and I getting bounced around to anyone who would take us - or to those she abandoned us to - Mary Jo remarried. Husband #2 was a man with a prison record whose claim to fame was killing his cheating wife and lover with a hatchet. At the time, juries were more sensitive to crimes of passion, and so husband #2 served a few years and was released. My mother married him not long after his freedom was returned. Turns out he didn’t like kids. At least, not us.

After my mother separated from him, we were living in another string of welfare housing. It was in the afternoon and she was sleeping. I was about 5 or 6 at the time, I think. I pulled a chair over and climbed up on the kitchen cabinet and reached up and got the jar of baby aspirin out. I ate the equivalent of a cookie jar’s worth of orange-flavored Bayer baby aspirin. Finishing, I carefully put the ripped packets back into the jar and returned the jar back to its place. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital, asking my mother if I had had a baby and where was it? I almost died; I was comatose when she found me. After stomach pumping and a blood transfusion, I lived. I always think that my higher Self thought it would be a good idea to get the hell outta dodge, but the Universe said no. So, stay I did, whether I wanted to or not. I’ve come to believe that we are sent to complete a mission and there’s just no way out until we get the job done.

There was an enormous amount of physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse heaped upon me, and the majority of the other children in my family suffered as well, but to varying degrees. For me, it came not only from my mother and her husbands, I somehow also became a target for my peers and one of my step-siblings. Pretty, quiet, intelligent, and unassuming, I was a moving target. My mother married again a couple of times, and we moved constantly. Until I was 11 years old, I was never in a single school longer than maybe three-four months at a time. My mother worked in bars and restaurants and made very little. Another baby came, another drunk and abusive father left. None of them paid support or had contact with us. We were three little girls - poor, fatherless, welfare waifs.

My mother’s final marriage happened when I was 10 years old. He was yet another rageoholic and alcoholic and the violence which was already intense in our lives escalated to a whole new level. He had two children from another marriage. By the time Mother and husband #4 stopped breeding, there were eight of us. I left for good when I was sixteen, but remained active in my family until my mother died at the age of 51 from a ruptured jugular. I am still connected to some degree to my blood brothers and sisters and love them dearly, albeit sometimes from afar.

The Years Following

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.

Cheryl Strayed

Up and out I went. At 16, I left home to attend the Atlanta College of Medical, Dental & Business and trained as a legal secretary, graduating at the age of 17. I received federal funds to go and served as a nanny to a family in Atlanta during the course of my 12 month studies in return for room and board. I then returned to Oliver, Georgia and lived briefly with my grandparents for a bit waiting until I was 18 and old enough to marry the man I had been dating for the past few years.

Because I grew up in a rural area, I did a lot of field work as a teenager. Picking beans, watermelons, corn, tobacco, you name it. At the age of 15, I met a man eight years my senior while working in his daddy’s tobacco field. We began dating, then married soon after I turned 18. He was violent. We divorced a year later.

As soon as I graduated college and returned home to Oliver, I began working as a legal secretary. After my divorce that job dried up and I wasn’t cutting it in my new job as a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner saleswoman. I realized that Statesboro, Georgia didn’t have much to offer and I needed a new plan. I was desperate to find a way out, and there weren’t many options.

So I did what poor kids do -- I joined the Army. I was already 20 years old, so I was a bit riper than most of my peers who were mostly just barely 18. I spent a couple of years in the service, then moved to Houston with my lover. Not long after, I developed a myriad of female problems and was in and out of the hospital many times during my twenties. During that time, I had roughly five surgeries and four other hospitalizations over the course of about six years. I also had a couple of mental breakdowns, although I didn’t know what they were at the time. In my world, everybody was always crazy so I felt pretty normal. I drank a lot sometimes. And chain-smoked. And worked 80-hour weeks.

My relationship ended after 10+ years, and I met someone else. We eventually married and were partners for about 12 years and had two children together. It was not a good match and there was a great deal of suffering for a long time. We divorced. However, it was that very suffering that led me to Kundalini Yoga and ultimately, to an awakening that lit up my life path. I married again soon after and moved to League City, Texas and a year or so later Yoga Lola Studios was born.

I like to say that I am a serial monogamist. I am partner-oriented, and long-term relationships are my style. Some people aren’t meant to have a single life-time partner and I seem to be one of them. I thank all of my past partners for the gifts the relationships brought, for each has contributed to my growth in many ways.

Medical History

Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness

As mentioned, I had a series of surgeries and medical issues related to female problems. I was truly a gynecologist’s wet dream. I was in the stirrups more than I was out. I had a lot of bad doctors throughout those years and a few really good ones. The medical wisdom at the time was that the uterus had no feeling, so many procedures I had were done without anesthesia. (Where did that fucking wisdom come from, I wonder?) It didn’t matter when I told the doctor(s) about the pain he was inflicting as the lining was ripped from my uterus or cutting was done on bad spots on the cervix. I was told it was just my imagination – the uterus and cervix did not have feeling – every doctor knew that. The pain in my voice fell on deaf ears. It taught me a lot about being a female and it taught me a lot about the limits of the Western medical model.

From about 32-50, I enjoyed excellent health. No issues of any kind. After 50, I hit another downslope in my health. Since then, I have had occasion to experience some of the challenges associated with aging and correcting issues resulting from my deliciously misspent youth that have finally caught up with me.

It is vital to remember that health is not static; it is ever-changing, so by extension our strategies must evolve as well. What was yesterday is today no more. I have learned a whole lot about how to mount an anti-aging campaign in the last eight years. Good news is it works if you work it, bad news is we must change ingrained habits. My motto is that even though time forces us to age, we damn sure don’t have to get old while we’re doing it.

In Summary -

Why I Do What I Do

You can’t just hope for happy endings. You have to believe in them.

Then do the work, take the risks.

Nora Roberts

When I was about 12 years old, my grandmother grabbed my hands and declared you have the hot hands, whereupon she put me immediately to work doing hands-on healing. She was a healer, an intuitive, and a woman very much ahead of her time. I have been doing energy work ever since.

My mother, in her own way, was an herbalist. It was her interest in plants and natural healing that fuels my interest in herbs and food. Even as she smoked her 30th Raleigh cigarette of the day and was downing her fifth Old Milwaukee beer, she railed against packaged food and its evil effects, swearing it was killing us all. She believed in fresh foods only.