Common Ailments You Don’t Have To Live With After Baby

OK, so here’s the deal ladies, I don’t give myself permission to slow down enough and respect the process of growing, birthing and caring for a baby.  I live in a society that values consistent work in the work force and doesn’t value paid maternity leave.  Basically, my world wants be to behave like a man, even though I am a woman.  What I mean is, our bodies are made to run cyclical.  We have cycles of menses, cycles of childbearing if we so choose, the larger cycle the contains our womanhood until menopause, and I am over here like, I have bills to pay!  So I keep pushing off my exercise, I grab crappy food on the go, and I am NOT bouncing back from my pregnancy.

This has been a real hit to the ego for the past 20 months.  When I got pregnant with Dharma, I lost everything except 10 pounds and to be honest, I probably needed those 10.  They never went away and being a size 6 wasn’t a huge deal to me.  Actually, I preferred the more curvy hips of post birth.  After Macey, I literally lost everything in 4 weeks.  I had only gained 25 pounds, I think I only had like 7 pounds to lose after he was born, so when I got pregnant 17 months later, I thought I would have a very similar experience.  Boy, I was wrong! As in, I weigh more now than I did at the peak of any of my pregnancies and I have spent months, some are years, with symptoms created from pregnancy and birth that I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to experience on the daily.

In all fairness, pregnancy is hard on me.  I experienced depression with my first, I had a second trimester loss, and I experience the kind of “morning sickness” that makes you question your very sanity in ever thinking you wanted to have children.  So what do these things have in common?  They are related to hormones.  My endocrine system was acting a little crazy in there and I didn’t know that I could receive bodywork to increase the function of my glands, so that the hormones they created would be regulated.  As a matter of fact, I have been on anti-depressants for postpartum depression for almost a year.

Then I have the hemorrhoids that showed up during my pregnancy with Dharma, went away until pregnant with Macey, and then they have never left.  What the heck is my uterus doing in there?  Between the weight of my growing baby on my pelvis and then whatever crazy angle my uterus decided to settle back into, I have had chronic hemorrhoids that I was told I just had to live with and a rectocele for years.  Say it with me, Y E A R S.  No one told me, ok no one knew, that I didn’t have to deal with this, or the crazy irregular periods, or the brown spotting for days before and after my period, none of it.  Those stupid terms you here your primary girlie doctor tell you about “variations of normal” or how your cervix or uterus is tilted, that isn’t normal and I don’t actually have to live this way.

So I am 9 months into my year of taking my health and my body back.  I wrote a blog on my experience of learning my abdominal self care last February-ish and it was amazing work for awhile, but what I didn’t know at the time was that I had an incredible amount of sacral  and pelvis stuff going on in the back.  Most people learn their self care from an Arvigo® practitioner, while receiving the full body treatment.  When I took the level one training for the self care routine, there wasn’t a practitioner on the website for me to call.  I ended up having to stop my self care and wait until the level two training to find out what the heck was even going on back there and boy was I in for a ride.  Receiving this sacred work for 5 days straight can be a little intense, especially when you are learning for hours a day on top of receiving the bodywork, but I was surrounded by the most amazing teachers and classmates.  We held space for one another, wherever we were at in our learning as a practitioner or healing as a client.  I grieved the loss of my daughter Lily, I released the tension held in my pelvic bowl from her birth. I walked straighter, felt healthier and was PISSED that I had to take my anti-depressants.  I mention the later, because I am not anti-help when you are experiencing mental imbalances and I hadn’t experiences any negativity towards the meds until I started receiving this full body work.  Now I am still experiencing the benefits of the self care training, along with the benefits of the full body work and I am weaning off my meds slowly, my uterus is moving into it’s more optimal position, my sacrum and pelvis are leveling out and most importantly, I am starting to feel like me again.  I hope this back to the healthier me means that I will also have the willpower to eat better and exercise more and get this baby weight down just a little bit.  I am 38 years old, I don’t need to look like am 21 again, I would just like to feel better.

If you found yourself shaking your head in agreement at some or all of my experience, find an Arvigo® practitioner near you at www.arvigotherapy.com.  We have 3 of us here in the Charleston area.  I am discovering that I don’t have to live the rest of my life haunted with symptoms of growing tiny humans in my body and by taking the steps to be more aligned with my healthier self now, I may not have to experience even more serious symptoms when I get older.  I hope you decide to join me and take your body back.