The Whole Woman Blog

What You Didn't Know You Needed to Know

 

In Gratitude to the Whole Woman® Work

Uncategorized Jan 05, 2020

At sweet 16 I was taller than my first boyfriend and my feet were “number nine.” Madly in love and desperate not to lose my surfer boy, I began slouching and cramming my feet into smaller and smaller shoes, eventually fitting into size 7 1/2. Willing to suffer blisters, calluses, and painful “Haglund’s deformity” at the back of my heels, nothing mattered except how cool my diminutive feet looked.

That memory fades into another snapshot of me sunbathing on my back in my bikini, feeling a sense of satisfaction that my hip bones were jutting two inches above my sunken brown belly.

Fast-forward a few years to early motherhood, and every trace of my natural childhood posture had vanished. My belly was still as flat as when I was a teenager on the beach, but my shoulders were now rounded, my chest sunken, and my head hanging in front of my body.

Shoe styles are even more restrictive today, and “sucked and tucked” posture is as ubiquitous among...

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Whole Woman Breathing

Whole Woman breathing is at the foundation of the Whole Woman work. 

While breathing a certain way may seem simplistic, and perhaps even irrelevant to conditions such as pelvic organ prolapse, it is in fact true that natural breathing while under the forces of gravity is what creates and maintains the pelvic organ support system. 

Conventional culture teaches that the rib cage should expand out to the sides with each in-breath. However, the lower ribs can only expand laterally when the upper abdominal wall is held in. Western women like the look of a small waist, so they cultivate a small midriff by habitually holding in their upper abdominal wall. It is not surprising therefore, that the type of breathing that supports a small waist is generally considered ‘natural’ by yoga and physical therapy. Reversal of natural breathing is the single most important factor in loss of pelvic organ support.

All healthy babies and young children breathe naturally. The...

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A New Model of Female Urinary Incontinence

The functional anatomy and physiology of the female urinary continence system remains inaccurately modeled by urology and gynecology, the medical practices that treat the condition of urinary incontinence.

Urologists and gynecologists have looked at the problem of urinary incontinence through an exceedingly narrow lens, and onto a diamond-shaped set of muscles called the “pelvic floor.”

This field of vision arises when a woman is placed on her back in the lithotomy position, on either an exam or operating table, with knees bent and feet held in high stirrups.

From this perspective Dr. Arnold Kegel devised his theory of pelvic floor strengthening in the treatment of urinary incontinence, by way of simplistic and conceptually flawed exercises known as kegels. It is also the position women are placed in for incontinence surgeries, all of which are associated with negative long-term outcomes.

In reality, kegels have no bearing on the female urinary continence system,...

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The Hidden Truth About Cervical Cancer That Every Woman Needs to Know

cervical cancer Jan 23, 2017


Click the image above to view the whole article

This morning’s headline “CERVICAL CANCER KILLING WOMEN AT MUCH HIGHER RATE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT” made my blood boil. Not because the article had anything new to report, quite the contrary. The worldwide gynecologic industry has known for decades that cervical cancer is not only preventable, but the disease is highly reversible even in cases of severely dysplastic cellular transformation. I’m not referring to the extremely disfiguring chemical and surgical treatments for cervical dysplasia that remain the gold standard of medical care. Nor vaccinations that have never been proven safe or effective in the fight against the second most common female cancer worldwide.

You see, during the HIV epidemic of the 1980s a tremendous amount of research was directed at the human vagina. Researchers were astonished to find that female susceptibility to HIV seemed to be highly...

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Escala Medical Device – The Pink Gadget From Hell

gynecology Jan 05, 2017

Is it a nail polish dryer? The latest in hair removal? Or a sexy pink hot glue gun?

Unfortunately, this ridiculous looking device will soon be inserted deeply into the pelvic cavity of countless women to staple the vagina to the sacrospinous ligament, a new twist on an old operation fraught with risk and failure.

The device is being ushered to market using the Food and Drug Administration’s 510K process, whereby safety and efficacy studies are automatically waved based on established and equivalent procedures, in this case the sacrospinous ligament fixation (SSLF).

Developed by vaginal surgeons Nichols and Randall in 1971, until recently  SSLF has been an operation reserved exclusively for post-hysterectomy women. During SSLF a midline incision is made in the posterior vaginal wall. Blunt digital dissection is extended deeply behind the rectum and into the coccygeus muscle of the pelvic wall. Connective tissue overlying the coccygeus muscle is removed to completely...

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Structural Disintegration and Dysfunctional Patterns

Uncategorized Mar 25, 2016
 

Has the entire world of physical and movement therapy gone mad? Instead of people moving toward a more natural sense of body awareness, ease and comfort, they continue to be led down the Path of the Hard Body – a cultural contrivance that has replaced chopping wood and carrying water with the vanity of the asphalt jungle gym.

“Biomechanics is going by the wayside” exclaims Thomas Meyers, Structural Integration therapist and author of Anatomy Trains. According to Meyers, the New Biomechanics remains loosely defined. Yet, it seems to have at its foundation the perspective that instead of the body hanging on the skeleton like a suit on a coat hanger, the skeleton floats in a bag of soft tissue. While both views are equally incomplete, at least the Old Biomechanics is based on 500 years of anatomical study about how muscles and bones operate. The New Biomechanics being espoused by manual therapists, trainers, and yoga teachers is as amorphous and mystifying as...

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How do Women Get More in Touch With the Life-Death-Life Universal Cycle?

Uncategorized Aug 01, 2010

Dear Brave Souls,

A soul asks: How do women get more in touch with the life-death-life universal cycle?

I’d offer that what I’d coined as the Life/Death/Life cycle is a clear and accurate surveyor’s look to take useful measure of a woman’s life; where she is now, where she is going.

In Women Who Run with The Wolves, I outlined the Life/Death/Life cycle, finding this cycle is the central operative factor in women’s creative lives, in their healings, and in ‘life-life’ in general. That we make many stops along the way, some perilous, some endarkened, some quickening and joyous. That we go on.

That we all, though moving in different directions like the planets and stars whirling through the sky, that we all are traveling along together in cycles that hold. We are intent on this or that, but all we women are walking along together.

Women sometimes speak of our lives as being ‘blocked,” but that particular word can be a little too...

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Not safe enough for cows…but women?

pessary Apr 20, 2006

Readers of the Milex website (1) will still find a proclamation there that Milex is a quality driven “private company founded in 1937.” In reality, on February 3, 2004 the publicly traded corporation, Cooper Surgical, bought Milex for $26 million dollars in cash. With this purchase came a history of regulatory problems with one of Milex’s most widely distributed products, Trimo-San Vaginal Jelly.

Trimo-San is marketed as “A Unique Vaginal Product” and a 4-ounce tube sealed in plastic and distributed along with every Milex pessary to prolapsed women throughout the developed world. Trimo-San was reformulated in 1977 to include its primary active ingredient and has remained unchanged since that time.

That active ingredient, 8-hydroxyquinoline sulfate, is one of a family of coal tar derivatives first manufactured in 1899. The compounds from which 8-hydroxyquinoline sulfate is made are known as quinolines and isoquinolines, and are similar in chemical...

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