If you regularly read my shares you know that I am an advocate for embodied sexual wellness, pleasure, and reproductive health within the pelvic space. All of which probably drew you here to some capacity!

You also then know that I love sharing why pelvic care is an essential (yet overall missing) part of our health care as women, one that stands to be crucial at all stages of our journey.

Well, this share serves to express the same, but from the lens of my lived experience in Nursing, an experience which has molded and impacted the way I work and show up for women in my life and community.

Pelvic Care Specialist — Heart to heart, womb to womb.

My Experience in Nursing

When working as a Nurse on the Women’s Specialty Unit my patient load would most often be a combination of postpartum care (mother and baby), and tending to women who would be undergoing, or had just undergone a hysterectomy, oophorectomy, or a combination removal of reproductive organs.

These women and the imprints they left upon my heart, along with my own healing journey will forever fuel my inner fountain of passion to radically reform women’s health.

For today, I would like to share about the postpartum women whom I sat with through the night and into the wee hours of the morning, and how this experience impacts my work. For reference, these women were my patients after delivery and until discharge.

My Postpartum Patients

The majority of my postpartum patients had a second-fourth degree tear. Being already uneasy, I would far too frequently receive report that my patient had an episiotomy.

Thinking back to this my heart still feels grief, because these things were spoken casually, passed off in report to me as if there was normalcy or expectedness attached to them, as if it was usual, and well, it was.

I felt paralytic confusion when presented with the knowing that this degree of tearing was so common, and that these women had little to no follow up care.

The rates of tearing and episiotomies in the United States is astronomical with some hospitals ranging >90% of birthing women experiencing vaginal tearing. This percent feels very real to my lived experience. The rare woman who didn’t tear, I’d meet her once every three weeks, maybe.

I would sit with these women, hold their hands as tears trickled down their face, a time to be so happy with their baby, yet a time of enduring unsupported trauma and pain in their bodies.

I would support them walking to the bathroom as they would yell out in pain, ask for another pain pill, and nothing would be available for another two hours, so we would place ice in their underwear and they would lay on their side to take the pressure off.

I remember the churning of my own body as it grasped for answers, for ways to create safety and healing for them. I could feel my energy body thirsty for them, for nourishment that didn’t exist within this space, and I was haunted by a deep inner voice saying “this can’t really be it, can it?”.

The Need to Revive Pelvic Care

For the multiplicity of factors which impact a woman’s birth and these rates of tearing, which is a trauma and is traumatic, I am here to highlight a few of which are directly related to the need to revive pelvic care. My intention is to illuminate pieces of a much larger entity which is Women’s Care in the Western Setting, and the overall lack of support, education, or means of safety for the female body in this paradigm.

1. Pelvic Care at large is missing from women’s health and yet is instrumental for sexual, reproductive, and hormonal wellness, amongst a lot of other things such as fostering trust and connection between a woman and her body

2. Prenatal Pelvic Massage drastically decreases the risk of tearing (I mean drastically, like, it should be rare)

3. Episiotomies are traumatic and inhumane

4. Unhealed sexual trauma or wounding increases the risk of tearing during birth. These wounds can be addressed and reclaimed through pelvic care, supporting women in finding safety and trust in their body and sexuality. (Yes, birth is sexual)

5. The multiple societal and religious narratives which make women feel unsafe in their bodies and womanhood perpetuates traumatic births. These suppressive narratives can be grieved and processed through pelvic care allowing women to find safety in their body, sexuality, and birth.

6. With proper care and support a woman will feel safe to open her body during birth, following its cues and signals. (Yes, orgasmic birth is available to every woman with the right care) In a setting where she does not feel empowered or safe, where she feels pressured to push, or to be in a position that does not feel natural to her body the risk of tearing becomes exponential.

7. Without pelvic care postpartum tearing will develop into scar tissue which may cause excruciating pelvic pain. This pain has the risk to shut a woman down sexually.

A New Paradigm of Women’s Wellness

I will continue to share the medicine of pelvic care as to reform women’s health and care, and to fuel my prayer that less and less women endure tearing within the birthing realms, and the side effects of lack of pelvic care postpartum.

There is so much nourishment for our bodies that has been written out of the system.

It is my firm belief that it be essential for us to write it back in, birthing a new paradigm of women’s wellness, together.

🌹For carrying mothers, or mothers to be who are ready for this deeper work and greater care, you can find support here whether it be a Conscious Conception Journey, receiving ORIGIN Pelvic Care for fertility and sexual wellness, receiving a Prenatal Pelvic Massage to prepare your body for birth and root you into inner safety, or to ensure you receive adequate pelvic care postpartum for full healing and core nourishment.

🌹Whether prenatal or postpartum, orgasmic and sexual wellness &/or birth remains your birthright and it is available for your body with support, as is essential pelvic nourishment.

🌹If you have endured tearing during birth and/or are experiencing pelvic pain, it is never to late to begin healing your pelvic space.

For the women whom I sat with during my days as a Nurse, I pray the compassion and presence I was able to offer at the time, with what I knew as a young woman in the field straight out of nursing school, provided comfort...though you deserved so much more.

Heart to heart, womb to womb.

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