2017 is shaping up to be an exciting year.
Last year, due to someone in my close community presenting with pelvic organ prolapse I began researching this subject. My interest was piqued and this year, when the opportunity came up to study I enrolled into a course which will lead me to becoming a practitioner in this kind of work. By the end of this course in August 2017 I will be a Whole Woman Practitioner. As a qualified practitioner I will be able to assist women of all ages with non-life-threatening pelvic issues such as pelvic organ prolapse, stress incontinence and overactive bladder syndrome and chronic hip pain as well as chronic UTI.
Once I started to study this aspect of women’s health, I began to realize how we ourselves can manage most of these kind of issues and bring them to a level where they are not a problem any more. Surgery in most of its forms (other than life-threatening) is not able to restore what was originally perfect – because nature doesn’t make mistakes. After any surgery there will always be scar tissue and always a change in the dynamics of how our body functions at various levels. Whatever procedure was done, it is always permanent and many times leaving us off worse than before.
This journey is as much my own as it is every woman’s journey. It is learning about aspects I either hadn’t known or paid attention to…. a learning that is all about restoring my natural posture and working on relaxing my lower belly. A relaxed lower belly allows my breath to do its job which is helping the pelvic organs rest in their natural orientation. The positioning of these organs is compromised when we lose our natural posture and breath. It is astonishing how much we let life distract us from our natural state of being- in perfect balance with our breath, posture and movement.
Natural breathing is where it starts and ends. Full human extension and natural breathing apply to women’s and men’s health. in addition to that most men have some woman in their life they care about- be it mother, wife or daughter.
Most of us have lost the art of breathing naturally and easily. With the stresses of life like battling constant deadlines, pushing to achieve more and doing many things at once our breathing has gotten distorted to the point of creating illness in our body.
How important is it to breathe naturally, into the right place? Very much so according to Patrick McKeown who wrote the book “The Oxygen Advantage”. His book is based on the ‘Buteyko’ method of breathing which explains that many of our common ailments can be traced back to breathing too much. This means we breathe too shallow and/or too often or possibly too much in and not enough out. Taking that back to the premise that our breath shaped our body by full and proper use of the diaphragm, it starts to become clear that there is an interdependence between our posture and breath, and therefore health.
Just imagine, sitting hunched forward over computer screens, personal devices or at the end of the day in lounge chairs, how our diaphragm becomes squashed and can’t do it’s job. We become good at what we practice most. In this case it is shallow breathing with a constricted or dysfunctional diaphragm.
It follows that Whole Woman work, which focuses on restoring natural breathing and posture becomes ‘whole person’ work in terms of relevance for all people who spend a lot of their time in hunched over postures.