Women, as we rise, so does our Health.
We are the daughters of Women, who carried silence in their bodies …
Women who perfected the art of swallowing words and folding themselves smaller.
Women who learned to transform rage into accommodation, boundaries into apologies, needs into afterthoughts.
We watched. We learned. And our bodies have paid the price.
The statistics are staggering: 80% of autoimmune patients are women. Our immune systems—those exquisite defenders designed to protect us—turning against our own tissues with a precision modern medicine can name but rarely explain. In the examination rooms and hospital wards, we're handed diagnoses like questionable gifts: lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto's, Sjögren's. Labels for the mystery, but seldom understanding of its roots.
Its here we can question what if our bodies aren't betraying us, but finally speaking the truths we've been taught to silence?
There's may be a moment, and perhaps you've felt it, when the tears you've held back for so long finally break free. The strange lightness afterward. The clarity. The sense that something long-imprisoned has finally found its voice.
For decades, our mothers and grandmothers before us carried the weight of words unspoken. They swallowed needs until their throats ached, buried hurts until their shoulders curved with the weight, smiled through exhaustion until their faces forgot other expressions.
Dr. DeLisa Fairweather's amazing research shows the female immune system responds with greater reactivity than male counterparts—helpful for fighting infections, complicated when that sensitivity turns inward. Women's nervous systems register pain with greater intensity and duration, not from weakness but from biological difference.
Dr. Gabor Maté incredible work watched patterns emerge across decades of medical practice. Those with chronic conditions often shared a constellation of traits: excessive niceness that bordered on self-erasure. Repression of healthy anger until it turned inward like a knife. Rigid devotion to responsibility that left no room for joy. The belief that one's needs matter less than others'—not as conscious thought but as bone-deep knowing
The rivers of our feeling run deeper, faster, wilder than we've been taught to admit. When dammed and diverted, they don't simply evaporate into nothing—they carve new channels underground, reshaping the very landscape of our physical being. The pressure builds. Something has to give.
Sometimes it's our joints that speak first. Sometimes our thyroid. Sometimes our skin erupts in mysterious patterns like ancient writing, symbols only our deeper selves can translate. The language of autoimmunity is the body turning its power inward when it's been forbidden from directing that power outward.
It makes me think of all the times I've said "I'm fine" when I was crumbling inside. All the boundaries I never set because I feared being called difficult. All the needs I dismissed as selfish, the anger I swallowed as unbecoming, the hurt I buried as inconvenient. The endless accommodations that felt like love but left me hollow, left me with hands that sometimes go numb for no reason doctors can name, with exhaustion that sleep doesn't touch, with inflammation that flares like warning lights on a dashboard I've been taught to ignore.
The path forward isn't abandoning our capacity for care—that profound gift—but extending it, finally, to ourselves. It means understanding anger as information, boundaries as protection, needs as navigational instruments pointing toward wholeness rather than obstacles to overcome.
The body keeps the score, yes. But it also keeps showing us the way home.
It harbors not just the wounds but the path forward. Each symptom a message we've yet to translate. Each flare a signal through the noise. Our bodies don't just document what's happened to us—they hold the wisdom of who we might become if we stopped fighting their truth.
For years, I mistook my body as the betrayer. The enemy that had turned against me without reason or warning. Now I understand it was the most loyal friend I had—the one voice in my life that refused to echo the lie that I could pour endlessly from an empty cup, that I could give what I didn't have, that I could survive on scraps of rest and acknowledgment while feeding everyone else a feast.
My body's rebellion wasn't the problem. It was the solution I wasn't ready to hear.
When we begin listening to its wisdom—honoring sensations, emotions, intuitions long dismissed as inconvenient or irrational—something remarkable happens. The body that seemed to be fighting us starts fighting for us instead. Inflammation becomes information. Pain becomes a teacher rather than an enemy. Even the autoimmune response—that mysterious civil war within our tissues—reveals itself as misguided protection rather than senseless attack.
My own healing began not with another prescription or elimination diet, but with the terrifying practice of telling the truth. Of saying no when I meant no. Of asking for help when I needed it. Of letting myself feel angry—actually, gloriously, righteously angry—at everything I'd been asked to accept, to bear, to deny. Of weeping without apology. Of recognizing that the very traits that had made me "good" were killing me by degrees.
This is the inheritance I want to pass forward, different from what was handed to me: not the perfect sacrifice, but the perfect permission. To feel deeply without drowning. To speak truthfully without apology. To claim space unapologetically in a world that profits from our smallness. To understand that worthiness requires no earning, and that love flourishes not in our diminishment but in our fierce, unapologetic expansion.
As we rise into this truth, so does our health—not always in ways medicine can measure, but in the profound reclamation of our wholeness. In the quiet revolution of remembering that we were never meant to be acceptable, only authentic. Never meant to be less, only fully, gloriously, uncompromisingly alive.
I'm honoured to begin sharing this wisdom with you.
Shalini
References
Temoshok (1987): Found that melanoma patients often displayed a "Type C" personality pattern of being overly nice, suppressing negative emotions, and putting others' needs first.
Maté (2011): Observed patterns linking chronic disease to emotional repression and demonstrated how unresolved stress creates the conditions for illness.
Maté (2022): Explored how our cultural norms encourage emotional disconnection and how this contributes to physical illness.
Gross (2015): Showed that different strategies for handling emotions have measurably different effects on the body, with suppression creating physical stress.
Cohen et al. (2007): Established that psychological stress directly affects immune system functioning and disease vulnerability.
Fairweather & Rose (2022): Confirmed that women make up approximately 80% of autoimmune disease patients and explained the biological mechanisms behind this gender disparity.
National Institutes of Health (2023): Reported that women are significantly more likely than men to develop autoimmune diseases, with a female-to-male ratio of about 4:1 overall.
Mogil (2020): Found that women experience pain more intensely than men due to differences in nervous system function and pain processing.
Schrepf et al. (2018): Demonstrated that emotional regulation strategies directly impact hormone levels and immune function, creating a physiological link between feelings and physical health.
Fernández-Sánchez et al. (2024): Established a clear connection between chronic psychological stress and the development of autoimmune conditions.