Women's Health

My journey has not only been one of internal pondering but one of education research as well.  One of the resources I’m pouring into right now is material by Christine Kent.   I first learned about her amazing work by listening to a podcast by Liz Koch.  The podcast was called “The Dynamic Female Pelvis”.   I would highly encourage you to listen…especially if you suffer from a prolapsed uterus.  I am a huge fan of Liz Koch and her work on the psoas.  So I’ve been working in tandem with Liz’s and Christine’s research and putting their knowledge into practice in my life.  (I’m also making sure I’m grounded in the Word of God because I don’t exactly agree with all their ideals.)The work is slow going but I am seeing results.

Here is an excerpt from one of Christine’s newsletters. “Part of the graceful curvature that makes us women is the pronounced curvature of our lumbar or lower back spine. It is this curvature that allows our organs to stay to the front. But with the comforts of our “civilized” society including chairs, car seats and sofas, by age thirty we tend to lose that curvature, and the organs start to pull back and the path is open for them to move down.

The solution fortunately is relatively simple. By assuming our natural female posture, (or the Whole Woman posture as we call it), you will almost certainly experience relief very quickly. The posture is easy to learn and although it takes a little getting used to, once you’ve mastered it, it will make any other posture feel unnatural.”

I would highly recommend you read Christine’s book “Saving the Whole Women”.   Great book for anyone who has pelvic floor issues or is considering a hysterectomy.

More on how these resources have been impacting my life later.

It seems that I’ve been in a long grieving process. Could this be the cause of my internal tightness?  (tight psoas, inner thighs, hips, neck, shoulders)  Have I been holding onto the loss of certain things with my body? I would say—YES.

This past year has been a year of loss.  Or what my husband refers to as a year of sacrifice.  A loss of the life I thought I would have but was altered by the birth of my twins.  The loss of many personal freedoms.  The loss of teaching different Holy Yoga classes so that I can be home with my children instead.  The loss of time with my husband.  The loss of an intimate authentic church family.  This was very painful to overcome—it took me months to get over the fact that people who I thought cared, really didn’t.  And lastly, the loss of several friendships.  I’ve been grieving over a particular loss of a friendship for several months now.  Today a close friend pointed out to me that this friendship I’m grieving over was more of a romantic love friendship to me—meaning I saw in this friendship more than what was really there.  And, that is true.  I so longed for an authentic Jesus follower friend—someone who understood Jesus and the Bible as I understand them.  I longed for someone to totally get Holy Yoga and I understand it.  My longing was for something that was only partially there.  So today I fully surrender this friendship—trusting that someday this authentic friendship will return.  I will emotionally walk away and no longer be hindered by the separation of this friendship and feel as though somehow I failed.  And just as I surrender this friendship, the Lord is rising up two new friendships with people who are living fully for the Lord.  Isn’t that just like Jesus!

Progress is being made on this journey…

How do you feel about your menstrual cycle?  Love it?  Hate it?  Dread it?  Embrace it?

I would venture to say 90% of women would respond with “hate it” or “dread it”.  Why do we feel that way?  Is  this pattern of thought destroying who we are as women?  Are there some people who really love their periods?  Yes!  I happen to be one of them—I didn’t used to feel that way but I do now.  My whole view on menstruation was that it was dirty, needed to be hidden, that you push through it and you suffer through it.  I now see how negative that view was and how that negative view was affecting me as a women, wife, lover, and mother.

God created menstruation–but for many it is not seen as anything God given nor blessed.

My hope is to help women embrace menstruation as God designed it, to not see it as something to endure but as something to honor and cherish.

We were created as bleeding women for a reason.  This is the whole reason why the Women with Issue Retreat has come about—to change our thoughts on this God given cycle of life.

This past week, I was hanging out with a teenager and I couldn’t’ believe the things she was saying. Everything she uttered was a put-down about herself.  Her very own mouth fed her thing but self hatred.  There was no love.  These negative words are impacting her posture as she slumps forward and closes herself off from the world.  It is impacting her choices which have led her into self-destructive behaviors.  Her words are literally killing her.

What is so sad is that many women feed their hearts and minds nothing but negativity.  There is something about the female mentality that accepting a compliment is wrong and that a “but” needs to be added to it or we dismiss the compliment all together.  Or, that giving ourselves verbal praise is gloating.

Could our own words be the very thing that is causing so many of our female issues these days?  Could they be the cause of so much infertility, reproductive issues, cancers, etc.?  Are we filling our minds and hearts with so much hatred that it is destroying our bodies?  Sadly…I would say yes.  We have traveled so far off track from Psalms 139.  My heart breaks for women who don’t see themselves as wonderfully and beautifully made.  So if my heart breaks…What does it do to God’s?  I’d love to see his face each time we put ourselves down—is it like a little prick of a needle to him?—there is a sting to what we say.  Each time we put ourselves down we are telling God, you didn’t make us right.  You made us flawed.  We are telling him he screwed up.  Ouch!

From what I know of myself, I’ve not been much of a negative self talker.  However, this has given me new eyes and I will be more conscience of what I feed my heart and mind.  And when I see myself gravitating towards the negative, I will remind myself that I am fearfully and wonderfully made—the End…no “buts” needed.

In writing out my sadness, I discovered that it all boils down to two things: FREEDOM and CONNECTEDNESS.  Isn’t that just what Jesus came to do for each of us–to give us freedom and to be in relationship with him so that we feel connected?  My list was supposed to be my pity party—but really it is the very lesson the Lord is trying to teach me.   Dang!  My idea of freedom was to be able to do what I want when I want, where I want, with whomever I want.  My idea of connectedness was to be near certain people, to feel and be a part of certain things.  Me. Me. Me.  Double dang!  Can the Lord truly just be enough?  Can His will for my life just be enough?  (For those who don’t know, my babies were unplanned—unplanned pregnancy and the double whammy was that we didn’t know we were having twins until the day baby number 2 turned up in my husband’s arms.)  Can He fill my inmost being?

This hill just turned into a mountain.

This morning was a rarity; I awoke before my kids, got out my yoga mat and grab my iPod to listen to a Holy Yoga podcast.  About 10 minutes into it, I heard my husband getting up which meant he had found enough energy to go fishing before he headed to work this morning.  So after 20 minutes, my yoga practice was over.  Ugh!  With four very young kids, I don’t blame my husband for wanting to go fishing.  Fishing for him is like yoga for me.  However, he did ask me a couple of days earlier what it was I wanted to do over the weekend and I said, “practice yoga.”  There is a podcast by Alisa Keeton that I have wanted to do for months now; however, my time on my mat is either zero or less than 15 minutes most days.

This whole episode made me think about so many other things I’m missing out on.  2011 was supposed to be a year free of babies and nursing babies—instead it is the exact opposite.  I thought I’ve been dealing with this shift in life pretty well but I now see there is sadness within me.  I’ve tried to not dwell on all the things I’ve had to let go of but now I think I need to go there—to feel that pain and sadness so that I can heal and move forward.  Just the other day, Brooke Boon asked me when I’d be able to serve at our Holy Yoga Retreats again and I started to cry.  It was so out of place that this simple question set off flood of emotions.  This year I could have been in Seattle, Arizona, and Virginia with my Holy Yoga family—instead I’m at home wiping snot, changing endless diapers, doing laundry, and NOT doing any yoga.  I know it is a privilege to be with my kids when they are young but I’m not going to lie to myself or anyone else and say I’m totally happy doing so.  I’m saddened—this wasn’t part of my plan.  This wasn’t how I wanted things to go.

Bottom line—this next leg of my journey means going to this place of sadness and feeling the loss of my freedom this year.

The journey has met a hill that I must willingly climb.

Today I listened to a podcast by Brooke Boon.  In it she said, “Breathe into your inmost space.”

As a Holy Yoga Instructor, I know the importance of breath, but as a human-doing (meaning a type A personal that always needs to be doing something); I do not breathe to my full capacity.  My breath is quick and shallow.  My heart is quick and shallow at times too.  I truly need the Lord—the very breath of the Almighty in my inmost being.  I need this transformation there.

Physically—my inmost being is tight and restricted.  For months now, I’ve been having terrible tightness in my hip flexors.  I struggle to sit in good posture instead of rounding due to the extreme tightness of my psoas.

Emotionally/Spiritually—I need to have the Lord work mightily on the inmost being of my heart–my ability to express love to others.  I desire for pure genuine love to ooze from my heart.  That the words “I love you” and “I miss you” cry out from my heart.  I want these feelings to be free and not forced.

Mentally—I’ve come a long way in surrendering my over-active mind and just letting each day come as the Lord directs but sometimes my mind runs 100 miles a minute all day long.  Taking time to just sit and play with my kids and be 100% present is torture to me.  Meditation is nothing more than a time for my mind to wonder to all the things in life that are not done.  Stillness is not easily practiced in my life.

Breathe into your inmost space….

I shared with another Holy Yoga Instructor about my experiment with Maya Abdominal Massage and something she said really struck home with me.  She said, “Well, we are created in God’s image too.”  We were just discussing things that no one openly discusses in our society.  The discussion was about everything that makes us physically female—our uterus, our reproductive system, our menstrual cycles, etc.  I find it odd that the only time we talk about such things is at a yearly physical or when we use the “excuse” that I have my period and that is why I am feeling and acting a certain way.  I’ve never heard anyone say, “I love my uterus” or “I love that God blessed us with a menstrual cycle so that I have the privilege to bring a baby into God’s creation.”

Something with births.  Rarely, do we hear good birth stories—one without fear, terrifying pain, medical intervention, etc.  Instead we hear all about the horrible aspects of birth.  I already know the Lord has placed it in my heart to share my birth stories and reclaim birthing into most beautiful and natural thing the Lord created.  Just as birth is not something to fear—neither is the discussion and love of our female body.

So my next step in my journey is to learn as much about the female anatomy as possible.  To dive into all the functions of the uterus, to understand where these organs should be in the body, to be able to point to my belly and say with certainty, “here are my ovaries” “here is my uterus” “here is my pancreas”.   Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t know exactly where their pancreas is—but I highly doubt it.  I just recently learned that the kidneys are connected to the uterus.

We are made in the image of God; therefore, I want to fully understand and know why God gave us the parts He did.

My journey continues.