What's one piece of advice you wish you'd known sooner in your healing journey?
These are some of your responses from a recent newsletter:
To listen to my body and find how things feel instead of always bracing and ‘pushing through’. That working out is about honouring and feeling safe and strong in my body, not about looking a certain way, being tough or being something I ‘should’ do. Some of the many reasons I love RYC® and Lauren’s teaching style so much.
That a balance between strengthening and relaxing/resting is really important for pelvic health. Too tight isn't fun. And you can be too tight and weak. It's taken me many many months to find something close to this balance.
That small moves make big differences.
Be gentle with yourself and that at some point weight lifing is really important and helpful.
One must be proactive. Question and seek answers and solutions to our health problems. No one is coming to rescue you.
That my psoas does not release through massage. Infact massage is not the answer in most cases.
Literally......... having a healthy pelvic floor! (no I am not ass kissing).
Lauren comes at life and movement from a different perspective than my previous absolutist, black & white, results oriented thinking. Her encouragement to give grace and kindness to ourselves is wildly radical. That’s what has made movement accessible for me. It makes the rest of the good stuff possible. Thank you.
I wish I had known that there is a lot more that a woman can do for herself besides kegels.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Easy to say, hard to internalize, but patience and persistence are not optional and used harmoniously and simultaneously they work wonders.
I wish I knew that there’s more to postpartum than figuring out how to nurse and sleep. Birth is natural but physically affects your body, even if you’ve been doing yoga and Pilates the whole time. It’s worthwhile to get professional help sooner than later.
Just because you get off track on an exercise regimen, maybe even skip a month or two, just get back right on it. Also, any movement – walking, cleaning, gardening – is better than none. So keep moving. Eventually you will find you are making a habit of it.
I wish I would have known that I should have been taking care of my pelvic floor all along as I birthed seven amazing children, taken it easier after the five natural/ 2 C-sections, and known how constipation can harm your pelvic floor. Also, the importance of breath, etc.
I wish I knew that different parts of our bodies depend on each other and these parts are not singular but interconnected, but more importantly I wish doctors in my journey were more informative of this fact. From obgyn to GI..it baffles me that someone can go to medical school and go through all that training to only look through a single lense the doctors themselves dont seem to know other ports of information that could be helpful to living better instead I hear generic information have you tried cutting calories, do you exercise? Heres a rx for your anxiety? I had an endoscopy because I was having stomach pain turns out I'm the cause of the stomach pain (my own anxiety). I think too often we put doctors on a pedestal expecting them to think for us and know everything and have our best interest in mind but at the end of the day it can sometimes come down to billing and thats unfortunate. Ive learned I need to do my own research and be my own advocate.