The Vagina Whisperer | Tami Lynn Kent | TEDxPortland

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] 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 people give them to you and I pondered why had I been given this one the essence of it I think is that I learned the female bodies language in order to help women reconnect with their true power and for a woman to own her feminine potential it's life-changing Brene brown taught us about listening to shame in order to be more wholehearted what if I told you that understanding shame in the female body is essential to address some of the most undertreated physical and emotional burdens that women carry today I'd like to invite you on a journey from shame to honor in the female body I'll be talking about the female body but this is relevant to all of you men women however you gender identify because we were all came in through a female body it was our beginning place our first home so how we shame or honor that home has relevance for all of us for our first embodied experiences and for the world we're creating together now I'm a women's health physical therapist and I know a lot of you haven't thank you and that means I'm trained to work with the muscles and the organs of the pelvis to help women heal and we really don't talk about this but women often need healing publicly from birth injuries and chronic stress in the pelvic floor so let's get oriented here's the pelvic Bowl which is similar in both sexes isn't it gorgeous and then of course in women had contains the ovaries the vagina the uterus so 20 years ago when I began treating patients I saw my role primarily as a mechanic repairing the physical body and this is still important because physical physical medicine is a vital yet hardly known part of women's health and I love teaching women about their Anatomy because we take better care about better care of what we know but the thing is the more I worked with the female body something greater than physical pain kept appearing what I found in a woman after a woman was a deep emotional pain and a profound feeling of shame associated with their bodies and pelvic experiences now there are many layers to this shame but it's not an original feeling we don't come in as babies feeling it shame is something that happens it to 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 because of shame so wanting to solve this puzzle I took extensive notes from my sessions I started looking for patterns and words to describe what I was seeing I began focusing on the power and the beauty of this space in our bodies with words like wild feminine and I developed a holistic approach to pelvic care that worked with the mind body and spirit not just the physical symptoms I've now worked with more than 10,000 women listening to the body's wisdom and interpreting its silent language after putting enough pieces together I found that this shame was actually acting like a highlighter showing me exactly where healing was needed the thing is our instinct is to move away from shame but moving towards shame guides a pathway for healing so here are a few truths that I've learned from the female body the first one is pelvic shame is often related to trauma and women collectively have a lot of pelvic trauma now these are national statistics but they're typical of what I see in my office 80 percent of the women I treat report having experienced physical or sexual trauma or abuse and now if we had sexual harassment that number is closer to a hundred percent very quickly and that's true no matter how women identify racially sexually professionally although women of color often have more incidences one in five women will be raped in their lifetime take a minute to take in that statistic one in five an 81% of these women will then go on to have short-term or long-term consequences like PTSD so the hashtag me to movement is just bringing out into the open with those of us working on the pelvic frontlines have known all along this is an epidemic and it's not the end of the story so with me here's another truth the female body is resilient all the trauma I've seen and felt in women can't hold a candle to the strength and the resilience of the female body and this is important to say out loud because a part of the shame for a woman is that she can feel permanently broken more often it's a woman's connection to her body that's broken and this is what needs healing now healing the body is different than healing the mind we can't think our way there so most women come into my practice having had traumatic pelvic experiences and these experiences create what is called a trauma imprint this is like a body memory so you may have experienced this if you've had a car accident and afterwards your muscles are sore you feel more easily startled might even feel afraid to drive these trauma imprints for women can show up as physical pain and the pelvic muscles increased anxiety in her nervous system or even an outright rejection of her body all of these things disrupt a woman's basic sense of peace and pleasure in her Center now while we openly talk about and treat an injury from a car accident it's still taboo and uncomfortable to talk about injury from rape abuse or birth trauma women are often alone in these painful body based experiences and we need to fix that and by we I mean all of us men let's not leave our women alone and if you don't know how to help her just ask let me tell you what women bring into 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 own her full creative power because her body is a reminder of the child abuse she experienced a cyclist whose bike crash left her with pelvic pain in painful sex a woman who can't orgasm with her partner because a past rape is triggered during intimacy a corporate executive whose powerful role at work is no consolation for the string of miscarriages she quietly quietly grieves the thing is I could go on and on when these things go untreated there is a huge cost to each women woman and those who love her well we can't change that trauma and struggle happens we can change how we hold it in our bodies so we can feel good again in our bodies so for example when a woman comes to see me with miscarriage abortion or birth loss I help her to acknowledge the grief so it's not held in our body can you feel that with me she doesn't have to hold it when she's experienced a rape or abuse I help her feel safe able to be present in her body to reclaim her body as her own that's right and with birth trauma I help her release the shock and make a new imprint in my care I strive to honor the woman in front of me because honor is a healing antidote to shame now this process of dismantling the Schoen body structure can seem complicated but I want to show you how simple it can be with a story about my three sons and the way that language can create a culture of respect for the body my sons are older now but when they were little and following me around I was open with them about my menstruation when I was bleeding and they saw me pulling 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 pads because they figured out that they could adhere them to their forearms while they were fighting as armor smart boy in case you don't know brave boys sometimes need armor and menstrual pads are awesome for that but eventually one of them said yuck when they saw my bleeding so I explained the blood was not yucky but actually powerful it's the original layer in the uterus that fed all of us is babies before the placenta was made the blood is what gives us life but when a woman doesn't have a baby it sheds over the years I also said be gentle with the women in your lives when they're bleeding because it can be hard to get up and go to work or school when you're on your bleeding time then one time when one of my son's was 11 he had a sleepover during the night our old Portland house toilet stopped working and I bled into the toilet without being able to flush properly imagine my surprise the next morning when I heard a scream my son's friend yelled out someone must have bled to death in the bathroom my son came running to his friend saw him staring at the blood in the toilet and said casually oh that's just my mom's bleeding time yeah it's that simple so much was conveyed in that simple exchange the openness the love that lack of shame right let's talk to our sons so they become the brothers partners friends and fathers who can help build a culture that honors women with my sons this respect for the bleeding time is translated into conversations about respect not only for the female body but for their bodies sexuality consent and more that is rooted in a bodily context for a cultural perspective a talented Belizian healer named Donnelly heal Ponte who died at age 103 about 25 years ago told one of my teachers that his village 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 imagine listening to the dreams of menstruating women talk about honoring feminine wisdom respect for the female body is a North Star that we can track our actions to let's treat the women and girls in our lives with respect for the rhythms of their bodies so they learn to respect and care for themselves more fully in my treatment room I see this healing movement one by one as women make the shift from shame to honor in regards to their own bodies but this is a roadmap for a collective shift first we tell the truth about our pain shame in regards to the female body so we know where to do our work and that's where we are with hashtag me too next we heal our pain so we can honor our bodies our cycles in our wisdom I invite us all to lean into our shame and start listening to our bodies you could search for holistic pelvic care or women's health physical therapy on the web to find providers wherever you are and then how can we together create whole new ways of being in our bodies that aren't just reactions to pain but give expression to our fast and true potential remaking our world from a place of honor for the female body this is the wild feminine medicine for our time you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 152,884

Rating: 4.805151 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Decision making, Feminism, Hardship, Love, Medicine, Meditation, Personal growth, Public health, Purpose, Women

Id: rK_P0UmpYd8

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018