Are You There God? It's Me, Felice

The date of my last period was in early April. At first I didn't notice its nonappearance. Then I started to worry. I waited, but no angels appeared to me telling me I was giving birth to a saint.

When I was younger, if I had missed a period for several months I wouldn't have cared--time off, right? I was never like Margaret, in Judy Bloom's classic book, who couldn't wait to get her period for the first time. Oh brother.

Now that I am a woman, however, and I see my period as a normal, monthly process of renewal and cleansing, I really missed it. Also, having a period is sort of essential if you want to get pregnant. Some of you who are still waiting for yours to come back after having a baby are keenly aware of this. While pregnancy is not in my foreseeable future unless I find a new man, I still didn't like the thought that I might not be physically able. This may be one of the reasons my DNA started telling me to donate my eggs.

By late May I decided to take matters into my own hands. I used a hypnotic NLP technique called "reframing" that works if an illness is indeed all in your mind, as I was sure it was. Still no blood. I did some ideomotor questioning of my subconscious mind to figure out what was wrong and what I needed to do. I kept getting vague answers. I finally decided that I was too skinny and needed to gain weight, so I ate like a woman carrying twins. My metabolism just adjusted.

Finally, at the end of June, I went to my midwife for my yearly well visit and told her what was up. She did some muscle testing and said, in that tone of voice that always gets me, "Your adrenals are blown out."

The adrenal glands are what go to work when you need your fight/flight response. They release adrenaline. Basically, any kind of low grade anxiety can keep them working a little at a time all the time. Cumulatively, this will cause adrenal exhaustion--not good, but sadly, not that uncommon in this world we live in.

My midwife said that getting more sleep and rest wouldn't help at this point. I needed to go to acupuncture and re-balance the meridians in the body. After four treatments she said I'd be good as new. I still took this news rather badly.

I like acupuncture, but for some reason I didn't make the appointment right away. Even after I got a priesthood blessing that promised me that my body would heal itself, I was still depressed. Then it seemed that everyone I ran into wanted to give me advice. One friend told me that I should try fasting. I laughed in her face. "I'm not healthy enough to fast right now," I said. "That would be stupid." Then I ran into a friend and acupuncturist at Love Feast and she told me I should eat red meat and take Chinese herbs. Her friend told me to sleep more and cut out dairy. Guh. I did start taking the herbs, because I had them, but I wasn't about to start eating red meat.

Then on Thursday, for a totally different reason, I decided to read all the scriptures in the Topical Guide on Abundance and Abundant Life. (In hypnotherapy, when women come in for fertility issues, we talk to them of abundance, because infertility is often linked to deep primal scripting about famine and war--or in other words, lack of abundance.) What I found when looking up abundance, was not one, but many scriptures on fasting. In Isaiah 58 several of the promised blessings of fasting stood out to me:

"...thine health shall spring forth speedily..."


"...the Lord shall make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be as a watered garden..."

and this one:

"And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations..."

I humbled myself and decided I could use health, fat on my bones, and good posterity. So I started fasting then and there, with a joyful heart and a prayer--because otherwise it is just starvation. I had a fabulous day and a renewed testimony of the spiritual power of fasting.

I totally forgot about my missing period till the next day, when I started spotting. Hooray! Thanks God. Today--well let's just say that healthy red blood is springing forth from me speedily.

I do need mention that fasting from all food and water is not advisable for women who are pregnant or nursing, but participating in some sort of modified fast--that is actually a sacrifice for you--can have equal power. The Lord will recognize any sacrifice you make and give you the same blessings. For example, if you are usually a meat eater, you could give up meat and dairy for a day. Or if you are a TV/internet/radio junkie, you could go on a media fast for 24 hours. If you have sweet tooth, try a sugar fast.

If you want to know all the purposes and promised blessings of fasting, I highly recommend reading all the scriptures on fasting in the Topical Guide. And share with me. If you have had any cool experiences with fasting as it relates to conception, birth, nursing, and or raising children, I'd love to hear them.