Womens Health Week


Womens Health Week – Know your body
Women’s Health Week is shining a spotlight in 2024 on some of the biggest issues in women’s health with Day 1 beginning with ‘know your body’. Our guest writer, Taryn Gaudin, Holistic Women’s Physiotherapist, takes an expansive view at what this actually means.
Know your body. Sounds simple right? Though, in a world full of messages reasoning why women should reject their bodies and natural processes, many of us are so accustomed to focusing on our body’s flaws, obsessed with fixing them, that we have forgotten how to know ourselves. Misguided, we believe that someone else holds the key to our problems and if we can buy the right solution we live happily ever after. Our dialogue with our body has become so ‘one-sided’ that we can’t hear our body speak.
For many women, the art of knowing our body is foreign. It isunspoken, unpracticed, and quite simply – scary! And, when a woman hears the call to truly get to know her body, confusion, overwhelm, and feeling stuck in the ‘how’, unsure of where to start, can halt her process and progress.
How do we know our bodies in Women’s Health Week?
What is the recipe? Short answer, there is no recipe. It is not about doing, but BEing. Frustrating? Yes, at first. The truth is there is NO linear process of knowing your body. Knowing your body, like any relationship, requires communication, commitment, and continued investment. For women, the practice of knowing your body is inherently fluid and dynamic, as we move through the cycles and seasons of our lives – menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopause. Day to day, year to year, our body’s needs and desires constantly shift. What energises her, what supports her and what nourishes her is everchanging.
Whilst I can not offer a recipe for cultivating a better relationship with your body, I do believe there are some essential foundations that can support you.
Safety
Cultivating safely means knowing what is a ‘safe stretch’ and honouring our ‘no’ when we don’t feel safe. Often, we misunderstand our body’s ‘no’ as an unwillingness to push ourselves to grow. When we are connected to our body, and honest with ourselves, we understand the subtle difference between a safe stretch and ‘too much’. Safety is the highest priority, always.
Curiosity
- Going deeper than moving well, eating well, sleeping well, and having regular health checks.
- Expanding our definition of wellness beyond the absence of illness.
- Questioning ourselves what thriving would look and feel like.
- Aquating ourselves with our body beyond the physical. Exploring her energetic, emotional and spiritual nature.
Courage
- Shedding light on the aspects of self we have avoided, dulled, or muted due to shame.
- Exploring aspects of our feminine body e.g. our pelvic bowl, vulva, vagina, and menstrual cycle. Knowing these parts ourselves intimately, revealing how our relationship with these aspects of our body affects our experience of life – our relationships, creative expression, sexuality, energy, enjoyment of pleasure, and unbound self-expression.
- Standing in our power, trusting ourselves and our body-wisdom and following our inner knowing, rather than handing over our power to others (e.g. the ‘experts’).
- Asking ourselves questions that reveal more about our relationship with our body, and to open ourselves to the possibility that this relationship could be different.
Practice
- Your practices will evolve as you evolve.
- There are many practices you can engage with that can deepen your level of self-awareness and body intimacy. Movement, meditation, intuitive-led practices, journalling, cycle awareness, self-massage, rituals and ceremony. There is no one way, it’s about finding your way.
- Practices that resonate with you, and feel like your next best step are right for this moment.
- Sitting in stillness and asking your body how she feels and what she needs (without expectation!) is a powerful place to start.
- Practising asking your body questions, and allowing answers to naturally arise, (in their own time), supports our body’s unique expression and allows our body’s intuition to speak.
Support
Women’s Health Week is all about ‘your voice, your choice’ and within that knowledge is key. Knowledge is power. Knowing our body doesn’t mean we need to do it all alone, and we aren’t expected to know everything! Calling in support WHILSTING standing in your power, knowing that YOU are the EXPERT in your body is key.
Knowing your body is a daily practice and a lifelong learning process. If you wish to explore your body more deeply and cultivate a practice of communicating with your body, I invite you to look at my book, Body Conscious Woman: Come Home to your Body, Discover your Feminine Wisdom, and Create an Aligned Life.
