Your Sacred Pelvis
Welcome to Interview with The Collective, an interview series including our Featured Collective Members from past + current editions of Cycles Journal. Through these blog posts, we'll be sharing their wisdom and highlighting their field of focus.
What brought you to this path of healing work?
What brought me to this work was my own struggle with and healing from Interstitial Cystitis, a debilitating bladder condition. The techniques I now offer were everything in my path to full recovery from a condition that EVERY doctor told me was a life sentence.
Through my own healing journey and work with others, it became clear that many of these conditions are rooted in early trauma experiences. Traumatic experiences can range from the trauma of a car accident or a fall to the sacrum or tailbone at a young age to sexual or emotional abuse to invasive medical procedures that did not feel consensual at a young age.
All the phases and cycles inherent in being a woman or womb holder, from menstruation, to pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum, to menopause contain inherent joys and losses. In addition to the physical care I offer, I hold space for the spectrum of feelings that accompany them.
What helps you feel the most connected to your womb & cycles?
I turned 41 this year, and have started what I am realizing, viscerally, can be a very long journey of perimenopause. I feel vibrant and alive. AND aware that my cycles are changing, sometimes they are shorter and sometimes they are longer. Cycles Journal has helped me predict when I will bleed based on my emotional energy and sleep patterns.
After 12 years of practicing Maya Abdominal Massage, I still do self care abdominal massage on a regular basis. Taking some moments to tune into my womb and offer loving touch and listening to that part of me helps me feel attuned to myself amidst the busy life of parenting and maintaining a business.
What healing remedies, rituals and/or practices help you throughout certain phases of your cycle?
I offer my moonblood to a sacred tree, affectionately known as the “Yoni Tree” in my backyard. With the release of my blood, I offer what I would like to release from myself, and a prayer of nourishment for the earth.
I have a grief practice, personally, and have facilitated grief rituals in community. Grief can be a portal to pleasure. When we give conscious space to grief, we clear ourselves and make space for what is alive and wants to move through and be offered from us to the world.
I relish and delight in making and using plant medicines of all kinds, and weave them into self pleasure and healing rituals and practices. Making medicine is ritual. Everything is when we choose it.
I have a monthly self pleasure practice, usually about a week after I bleed, as my cycle is in its waxing mode. I use herbal infused oils that I make special, also in alignment with the moon, to offer self massage/foreplay to my whole body.
What does nature mean to you?
I keep skipping this one and coming back to it :) And every time, my first thought is, “Nature is everything and everything is Nature, Nature is Divine. We are divine. We are nature. Nature is us. May we find our nature more deeply every moment and every day. Life depends upon it.”
What are you currently offering & working on?
I currently offer bodywork, health and sexuality coaching in person in Northampton MA and virtually as needed.
I am working on virtual offerings to support healing and reconnection within the pelvic bowl for anyone who seeks support regarding menstrual difficulties, PMS, pelvic organ prolapse, diastasis recti, urinary incontinence, pain with sex, difficulty having orgasms and/or simply wants to enhance their capacity for sexual pleasure through deeper understanding and connection to our pelvic bowls.
Where can we find more from you online?
www.instagram.com/yoursacredpelvis
Do you have any words of wisdom for our audience?
One of the best things we can do for our pelvic bowls, and therefore overall health and creative expression in the world, is to learn and practice what it means to soften in the pelvic bowl muscles.
