The Vagina Whisperer | Tami Lynn Kent | TEDxPortland

So People Call Me The Vagina Whisperer When I first heard this nickname, I laughed, but I also thought, wow, my own secret superhero identity. The thing about nicknames is that people give them to you and I wondered why they gave this one the essence of it. What I believe is that I learned the language of the female body to help women reconnect with the true power of her and for a woman to own her feminine potential is life-changing. Brene Brown taught us to listen to shame to be more unconditional. What if I told him? that understanding female body shame is essential to addressing some of the under-addressed physical and emotional burdens women endure today.

I would like to invite you on a journey from shame to honor in the female body. I will talk about female body, but this is relevant to all of you, men, women, no matter how you identify with your gender, because we all came through a female body, it was our starting place, our first home, so how we shame u honor that home has relevance for all of us for our first embodied experiences and for the world we are creating together now I am a women's health physical therapist and I know that many of you have not thanked me and that means that I am trained to work with the muscles and organs of the pelvis to help women heal and we don't really talk about this but women often need to publicly heal from birth injuries and chronic stress on the pelvic floor so let's get our bearings here is the pelvic bowl which is similar in both sexes, isn't it beautiful?

Then of course women contain the ovaries, the

vagina

and the uterus, so 20 years ago when I started treating patients I saw my role primarily as a mechanic who repairs the physical body and this is still important because physical medicine It is a vital but little known part. of women's health and I love teaching women about their Anatomy because we take better care of what we know, but the more I worked with the female body, something greater than physical pain continued to appear, which I found in a woman after a woman there was deep emotional pain and a deep sense of shame associated with their bodies and pelvic experiences.

Now there are many layers to this shame, but it is not an original feeling. We don't arrive as babies feeling that shame is something that happens to them. us through our experiences and as we all know shame is not a comfortable feeling if you have it associated with something or a part of your body you tend to distance yourself from that place the pelvic bowl houses our sexuality our creativity and yet every day I see women in my practice who are disconnecting from this powerful place due to shame, so wanting to solve this puzzle I took extensive notes of my sessions.

I started looking for patterns and words to describe what I was seeing. I began to focus on the power and beauty of this space in our bodies with words like wild feminine and developed a holistic approach to pelvic care that worked with the mind, body and spirit, not just the physical symptoms. I have worked with over 10,000 women listening to the body's wisdom and interpreting its silent language. After putting enough pieces together I discovered that this shame was actually acting as a marker showing me exactly where healing was needed. Our instinct is to move away from shame, but moving toward shame guides a path to healing, so here are a few. truths I have learned about the female body, the first is that pelvic shame is often related to trauma and women as a whole have a lot of pelvic trauma.

These are national statistics, but they are typical of what I see in my office, 80 percent women. The women I treat report experiencing physical or sexual trauma or abuse and now, if we had sexual harassment, that number approaches one hundred percent very quickly and that is true no matter how women identify racially and sexually professionally, although women color often have more incidences. out of every five women will be raped in their lifetime, take a minute to digest that statistic, one in five, 81% of these women will have short or long term consequences, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, hence the hashtag "me to the movement" is simply bringing to light that those of us who work on the front line have known all along that this is an epidemic and that it is not the end of the story, so here is another truth for me: The female body is resistant to all the traumas I have seen and felt. in women it cannot be compared to the strength and endurance of the female body and it is important to say it out loud because part of the shame for a woman is that she may feel permanently broken; more often it is the woman's connection to her. body that is broken and this is what needs healing now healing the body is different than healing the mind we can't think about how to get there that's why most women come to my practice after having had traumatic pelvic experiences and these experiences create what is called a traumatic imprint.

It's like a body memory, so you may have experienced this if she's been in a car accident and afterward her muscles hurt, she scares more easily, she may even be afraid to drive. These traumatic traces for women can manifest as physical and pelvic pain. muscles, increased anxiety in her nervous system or even a complete rejection of her body, all of these things disrupt a woman's basic sense of peace and pleasure at her core. Now, while we openly talk about and treat a car accident injury, it is still taboo and uncomfortable. to talk about rape abuse injuries or birth trauma, women are often alone in these painful body based experiences and we have to work through that and by we I mean all men, let's not leave our women alone and if They don't know how to do it. help her just ask let me tell you what women bring to my office a new mother whose traumatic birth made her feel like her first act of motherhood was a failure an artist who paints but can't possess all her creative power because her body is a reminder of the childhood abuse experienced by a cyclist whose cycling accident left her with pelvic pain during painful intercourse a woman who cannot orgasm with her partner because a past rape is triggered during intimacy a corporate executive whose powerful role at work It is no consolation for the series of miscarriages she silently laments, the thing is it could go on and on when these things are left untreated, there is a huge cost for every woman and for those who love her well, we cannot change that trauma and the fight that happens, we can change. how we retain it in our bodies so that we can feel good again in our bodies, for example, when a woman comes to see me with a miscarriage or birth loss, I help her recognize the pain so that it is not retained in our body, can you feel that?

With me she doesn't have to put up with it when she has experienced rape or abuse. I help her feel safe, able to be present in her body to claim her body as her own, that's right, and with the trauma of birth I help her release the shock and make a new mark in my care I strive to honor the woman that I have in front of me because honor is a healing antidote to shame now this process of dismantling the Schoen body structure may seem complicated but I want to show you how simple it can be with a story. about my three children and the way language can create a culture of respect for the body.

My children are older now, but when they were little and followed me, I spoke openly to them about my period when I was bleeding and they saw me coming out. menstrual pads and had questions. I told them about my bleeding time, of course they were more interested in the adhesive qualities of the sanitary pads because they discovered that they could stick them to their forearms while fighting like a smart guy in armor in case you didn't. I don't know that brave kids sometimes need armor and menstrual pads are amazing for that, but finally one of them said gross when he saw my bleeding, so I explained to him that blood wasn't gross but really powerful, it's the original layer in the womb that feeds us all. babies before the placenta was formed, blood is what gives us life, but when a woman does not have a baby, she sheds it over the years.

I also said to be nice to the women in your lives when they are bleeding because it can be hard to get up and go to work or school when you are in your bleeding time, so once when one of my sons was 11 he had a party pajamas overnight, the toilet in our old house in Portland stopped working and I bled into the toilet without being able to flush. rinse properly imagine my surprise the next morning when I heard a scream, my son's friend screamed, someone must have bled to death in the bathroom, my son came running to his friend, he saw him looking at the blood in the toilet and casually said, oh , that's just my Mom's bleeding moment, yes, it's that simple.

So much was conveyed in that simple exchange. The openness, the love, the lack of shame. Well, let's talk to our sons to become brothers, partners, friends and fathers who can help build a culture that honors women with my sons. This respect for bleeding time translates into conversations about respect not only for the female body but also for consenting to the sexuality of their bodies and more that is rooted in a bodily context for a cultural perspective. A talented Belizean healer named Donnelly cures Ponte, who died at age 103. About 25 years ago I told one of my teachers that his people listened around the fire in the morning to the dreams of menstruating women because it was understood that they had psychic and valuable information during that time as a Western woman that story oh my mind imagines hearing to the dreams of menstruating women we talk about honoring feminine wisdom respect for the female body is a north star that we can follow our actions to treat the women and girls in our lives with respect for the rhythms of their bodies so that learn to respect and care for yourselves more fully in my treatment room I see this healing movement one by one as women make the shift from shame to honor regarding their own bodies, but this is a roadmap for collective change , first we tell the truth about our pain, shame. regarding the female body so that we know where to do our work and that's where we are with the hashtag me too, next we heal our pain so that we can honor our bodies, our cycles in our wisdom.

I invite all of us to lean into our shame and get started. listening to our bodies, you could search for holistic pelvic care or physical therapy for women's health on the web to find providers wherever you are and then how can we together create completely new ways of being in our bodies that are not just reactions to pain but that provide Expression of our rapid and true potential that remakes our world from a place of honor for the female body. This is the wild feminine medicine for our time.