wellness / Health
Advocate for Your Pelvic Health Youngs. Connective tissues that line every part of our body — bones, muscles, organs, etc. — can store those stress hormones and become tight and tense. “Beyond musculoskeletal consideration, energetically our pelvic bowls house the sacral chakra, where inspiration, creativity, pleasure and sensuality emerge. Feeling stuck in any of those areas is just as valid a reason to get curious or seek out a practitioner as having something we traditionally consider ‘wrong,’” says Youngs.
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nless we experience “something wrong down there” or receive postpartum care, we often don’t learn about the very core region of our human bodies — our pelvic bowl. “Pelvic health is so often out of the normal repertoire of health care and our vernacular of how we’ve learned to take care of ourselves,” says Jessa Youngs, a licensed acupuncturist and fertility awareness educator, who holds a master’s in oriental medicine. She owns Embodied Wholeness, which provides holistic cycle and pelvic care in Fort Collins. In this article, Youngs and Rachel Ohene, a licensed occupational therapist (OT) and owner of Liberate Pelvic Health in Denver, share their experience of why pelvic health education is important, how dysfunction can present itself in all bodies and what interventions are available.
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WHY PELVIC EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT “We're conditioned to be tight in our pelvic bowl, partially because of a toxic sexual culture and a medical system that doesn’t inquire or empower people with their pelvic health,” Ohene believes. She values marketing her practice across all genders, stages of life and backgrounds, especially with marginalized populations, to acknowledge how those factors may play a role in seeking and receiving appropriate health care. Specialists believe everything is connected into this region, including our spine and nervous system, and the way we behaviorally hold our bodies throughout the day plays hugely into our pelvic health. “We're not taught to move through our emotions in a healthy way, and when we go through our day stuffing down stress, trauma and emotions, they get held in the pelvic bowl,” adds
DYSFUNCTION CONSIDERATIONS “There is a huge emphasis on postpartum care, which our society needs, but there’s a lot more to be acknowledged and addressed,” stresses Ohene. “In our traditional medical system, diseases get labeled into one category, such as digestive or reproductive, but they’re systemic immune and endocrine disorders resulting in inflammation and hormonal imbalance. And our mental and emotional well being also plays largely into our cellular and hormonal response,” adds Youngs. She noticed one common thread among her varied clients is that every single one of them experiences some level of anxiety and tight gripping on to life. “Think about what we call someone that is anxious — a tightass,” adds Ohene. “Well, that’s the pelvic floor muscles being tight, and it’s tied into an embodied experience of anxiety, control and hypervigilance.” In Youngs’ practice, she has only ever seen about 5% of clients having a hypotonic, or weak, pelvic floor. Ohene reports similarly that hypertonicity, or tight pelvic floor, is more prevalent, but, “They go handin-hand, and sometimes, the hypotonicity is because of the hypertonicity. The ability to recruit and hold the muscles is impaired when they are always tight and don't have the full range of function.” Thinking from the pelvic congestion perspective, Ohene considers that when “10% of tension in the pelvic floor muscles can create up to 50% constriction in its vascular and lymphatic systems; what is that going to
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