As Doctor of Physical Therapy (PT) with a specialty practice in pelvic health I have found that embodiment practices (like yoga, dance, organic movement etc) and mindful physical therapy can heal and radically improve people’s lives. I can tell you with professional certainty that the vulva, vagina, and womb space is an important part of the Mind-Body-Spirit equation and that the health of your Root is imperative to whole system health.  Read on below for 5 reasons you (and your vagina) will love indulging in a pelvic health related retreat. 

Today’s post is one of my very favorite basic sequences for facilitating pelvic floor awareness and pelvic mobility. These motions may seem simple, but are often not easy! The cues for connection to the breath with fine tuned pelvic movement combined with pelvic floor dropping (relaxation) and activation often challenge patients. This is as much as a coordination exercise as it is therapeutic mobility and gentle core activation. You can use these exercises for strengthening the transverse abdominus and pelvic floor with extra attention on the exhales or you can use these movements to facilitate more sensory awareness by just noticing and breathing and feeling what the movement feels like in your body.  Enjoy whichever way you choose to approach this exercise and as always… if you’re not sure this is for you check in with your doc or pelvic floor PT.

I spend a lot of time creating home exercise programs for my pelvic floor physical therapy patients. Lately we have been creating custom videos for my patients as I have found it increases their compliance if they have something that’s been made just for them. While certainly not every exercise is appropriate for every body or diagnosis I’ve decided to share some basic instructions on common exercises in a Home Exercise Program Series. Today’s series is a basic foam roller series for a patient who has been experiencing pelvic pain associated with endometriosis and a coccyx injury. As always please consult with your doctor or physical therapist to see if these exercises might be appropriate for you.

Self-care can look a lot of ways and given that it’s a HUGE component of what I preach to my patients, I’m always looking for new ways to practice it.  November was a month of embracing the cold in an effort to heal my heart, improve my health, and go deeper into connection with my intuition... you know... so I can consistently become a better human and physical therapist. A few Saturdays ago I dove (well gracefully stepped into) the cold when a patient asked me to join him for a workshop hosted by Wim Hof, aka the Iceman. The Wim Hof Method uses a combination of breath-work, cold-exposure, and mindset training in an effort to maximize health, happiness, and connection with Presence and Love. My patient asked me to join him because he has had years of chronic pain management in traditional settings and is now starting to embrace that there’s a lot more to feeling well than what we might have been told by western medicine.

I’m on the last leg of 18 hours of travel. My booty is sore, but my heart is excited to land in Africa to get to my first international yoga retreat which I’m co-leading with the great Brianne Grogan of Femfusion in Morocco! As I sit here stuck in the back row of a packed airplane I’m thinking about the classes I’ll be sharing with women who will assemble tomorrow. There’s woman and her baby spilling half way into my seat on my left and a little boy vomiting into paper bags on my right. Needless to say I am dreaming of these poses right now!

The first half of 2018 has been full of travel as I continue to spread the good word about the pelvic floor across the US… and the world! (cue creepy laughter).  Long flights, cramped train rides, and the occasional gnarly Los Angeles commute has had me looking to yoga for the pain, stiffness, and lack of energy that travel sometime leaves me with. Like many of my patients prolonged hours of sitting can flare my pelvic, back, or hip pain and yoga always does the trick to calm things back down.  

I’m was initially inspired to write this blog while adventuring in Bali researching yoga retreat centers for my next Retreat to Your Root (I know…. it’s a rough job, but someone has to do it).  24 hours on a plane had me and my travel bud/ yoga teacher/health coach extraordinaire, Michele Wilkerson, RYT of Yoga7even (pictured below) feeling tight, stiff, and generally unhappy in our pelvises!

Michele and I decided to each share our favorite yoga pose for travel and pelvic health as of a series of blogs since we both love adventuring the globe and hope that maybe you’ll join us in the near future…. like on Retreat to Your Root: Midwest this fall (or perhaps a more exotic location in 2019)!

I'd like to share a piece from a guest blogger, Julia Soffa. She was a recent teacher trainee in a group I lead through a modified yoga teacher version of my Retreat to Your Root in Nicaragua. I love her thoughtful reflections after our immersion into the multifaceted-ness of pelvic health.  Enjoy!

Welcome to my first video blog! This post was inspired by my previous blog posted in February 2017 about the sexual abuse cases involving Dr. Larry Nassar and and what is now known to be over a 150 young female athletes. In light of the recent sentencing of Nassar I have been contacted by multiple organizations and individuals asking me for clarification about what pelvic floor PT actually is. After responding to several of these inquiries it dawned on me that this information will be useful for me to share in a broader format for a wider audience... so here’s my response discussing the standards of care in PT and what a pelvic floor PT visit should look at and entail.

I walked into the lecture hall at the well-renowned Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, MA last week and I paused to soak in and feel what was about to take place. I found out about “A Chronic Pain-Management Conference for Healthcare Professionals: Shifting the Paradigm” randomly through a colleague's facebook posting and as soon as I read the program I knew I had to be there. I’d been wanting to visit Kripalu for quite some time and the content of this conference was EXACTLY what Enlighten PT is all about! The week was a passion project for Denise Barack, Director of Programming at Kripalu and it was the perfect integration of western research meets ancient holistic practices-- with a nod towards a retreat style experience addressing the self-care needs and burnout problem in health care professionals like myself. 

"What the heck is my "root" and why exactly might I want to retreat to it?" is a pretty common question I've been asked as I've shared about my offerings to my patients, my family, my friends, and random strangers at the coffee shop.  

When I named "Retreat to Your Root (RTR): A Yoga for Pelvic Health Retreat" I felt it important that the title spoke to what the experience itself would entail (the retreat) and the multiple levels of healing that could take place (in the root).  I chose the word "root" for it's complex and multifaceted nature and it's ability to describe all at once the physical, energetic, and emotional components we would touch on.